A Return to Scented Laundry – aaaaaaah!

If you don’t know it by now, I am a bit of a green-laundry diva.  Yes, I admit it.  The past five years or so I’ve ditched the dryer, opting for complete air drying with an out door clothesline or indoor drying rack.  Since I no longer use the dryer, there is no need for dryer sheets, so I ditched those too.  To complete the green aspect, I’ve been washing with unscented, ‘natural’ detergents in cold water.

Recently though, I’ve realized that I may have gone a bit too far over to the stoic side of laundry.  I’m not quite at pounding the washing on rocks at the rivers edge, but I was headed in that direction – ha!   I realized that I was missing a key element in the laundry process: scent.   I love scent, I love perfume, I love all of nature’s aromas – why did I give that sensory delight up in the laundry?

Sure, if I hang my laundry outside, it does pick up an outdoorsy scent; but after a particularly long, cold winter of indoor drying, that was missed greatly.  My laundry was hung indoors, wet and scentless.  Something was missing.

So I decided to go back to scented detergent.  I washed a load this morning and half the laundry is drying outside, and half inside.  The aroma is amazing, it smells so clean!  The drying laundry inside freshens up the whole house.  The drying laundry outside mingles with the outdoor scent and combines to make an intoxicating smell that can’t be reproduced in the lab.

I will continue to do cold-water washing and air-drying, but I will take back some scent in the process.  I’ve decided that even green-laundry divas need their aromas!

“We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.”  –E.B. White

~Marilyn Huttunen