A little more than a year ago my husband Mark and I bought a small 10 acre farm. I had always had a dream of operating an organic vegetable farm since I had studied botany as an undergraduate. It was my dream, but it was never Mark's. Mark was very much the corporate type and had a very successful career in pharmaceutical product development. He was a workaholic and had no interest if farming but was earning more than enough money to help me realize my dream and was supportive. I'm sure he would have been much happier in a loft condominium in the city but here we were in a ramshackle 1930's farm house that for the time being didn't even have air conditioning.
I saw very little of him these days. He insisted on being in the office no later than 6:00 am and by the time he worked out in the gym after work he was seldom home before 7:00 pm and often not until 9 or 10. On the weekends, Saturdays were almost always spent golfing with clients. Then he spent Sundays watching sports on TV with a lap top in front of him. It didn't bother me much though, because running a farm and a household gave me more than enough to keep me busy. Farming was hard work. Not so much backbreaking lifting but definitely steady physical labor that required lots of stamina. I was able to handle most of it fine on my own though and loved the way it made my body feel. I had been a gymnast in high school and was very competitive until I grew to 5'9 and was too tall to compete on a national level. It gave me a taught little body though, that Mark seemed to really enjoy...at least until he started his rise up the corporate ladder.
My goal was to make my farm as natural as possible and I did everything I could to reduce our carbon footprint, save electricity, recycle, and compost and make the best use of water resources.
It was in the dog days of August when it dawned on me that it made no sense to dry the laundry in our electric dryer (the biggest energy hog in our house), when the hot Carolina sun could be doing the job for free. It had been over 100 every day for 10 days straight when I decided to build myself an old fashioned clothes line and started hanging the wash outside.
That first day of hanging clothes, I hung a couple of bed sheets, a bunch of Mark's t shirts and then I got to my panties. I felt weird about hanging my intimates out there in public for all to see and I thought about drying them in the dryer. But then I thought how foolish that would be. After all people hung the family laundry on the line for years before electric dryers became so popular, even in the busiest cities. Besides that hardly anyone lived near enough to see. The back of our property beyond the fields was woods. There was an old couple in the farmhouse across the road but their house was on the other side of their property and even if they could see that far, our house blocked their view of my clothes line. The road circled around the south side of the property and passing motorists could get a glimpse, but there were never more than a dozen cars that passed our house in a day. The only other neighbor was Kevin on the west side of the property. Kevin was an organic farmer himself.
Kevin had bought his 40 acre farm about ten years ago. He had been a computer programmer and was working for an open source software company when it went public and had made quite a bit of cash in stock options. When the dot com bubble burst and he got laid off, he took the opportunity to realize his dream. He didn't have millions or anything but he had enough to buy the land, some commercial greenhouses and some nice farm equipment and took the chance that he could turn it into a decent lively hood for himself. His wife Sharon was a university professor and was spending 2 years in Eastern Europe on a teaching/research assignment. She had just left about a month after we met them when they came over to welcome us into the neighborhood.
Kevin was a very successful farmer, he had it all down to a science and I learned a lot from him about setting up my little farm. Mark was always busy and I couldn't imagine him stopping long enough to look at my panties on the clothesline.
So I hung them up with the rest of the basket, but I have to admit it still felt a little naughty seeing my tiny little underwear hanging out there in "public." I got used to it though and it became part of my routine on laundry days. I liked hanging the clothes out in the fresh air. It was kind of a Zen experience. It was hot though. It was usually after ten by the time I got my morning house chores done on laundry days and the sun was already hot by that time.
My normal sleep wear was a t-shirt and panties and nothing else and that's what I wore until it was time to go outside. (Farming has taught me to take my shower at night instead of in the morning) One morning it was so hot and humid that I thought about putting on a swim suit before I went out then realized that taking off my panties to put on a bikini bottom just long enough to hang the clothes was a pretty silly extra step. Panties hide just as much, so that morning I just wore my panties and T-shirt to hang out the clothes. For some reason I felt more exposed that way but I knew it was just my imagination. That morning Kevin was out picking tomatoes in a far field but he didn't seem to be paying attention to me so from then on that's the way I dressed to hang laundry. It was a lot cooler.
One day after I had done the laundry and all the house work I headed out to the garden. I was standing there staring at my weed infested plot looking at the summer-weary dried up plants when Kevin came walking up to the fence. (I had put on a pair of shorts and my crocs at this point. I felt too naked all the way out there without them)
Kevin asked me what was on my mind and I told him I wanted to till under the spring crops and start a fall garden but was dreading the thought of spending 8 hours in the 103 degree heat wrestling with my rototiller. He said it would only take an hour or two with his tractor. I resisted but he said farmers have to stick together otherwise it is too much work for one person, so I agreed to let him help. He said "the only thing I'm not sure of is whether I can get my tractor with the disk on it through your gate up there by the house."
I invited him over to take a look and walked him up to the end of the fence line that was in front of the house. As we rounded the barn and passed between it and the house I became a little mortified that I had clothes hanging on the lines and of course all the panties and bras were hanging right up front (they would have been behind the sheets when viewed from Kevin's place.)