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Recently my husband, Bill, devised a wheelchair-accessible clothesline for me: seven parallel rows of nylon cording strung hook-to-hook across a portion of our side deck. In so doing, we unknowingly joined the right-to-dry movement.

That's the focus of Project Laundry List, a New Hampshire-based citizens' initiative seeking common ground between homeowners who want to dry clothes outdoors and neighborhood associations that consider clotheslines offensive eyesores to be banned outright.

"We're not asking to put clotheslines in people's front yards," says Zeke Bridges, a Cary real estate attorney who works behind the scenes as an advocate for Project Laundry List. A clothesline user himself, he says he is content to abide by the covenants of his neighborhood, Preston Village, which allow for retractable clotheslines in residents' backyards.

At first, it appeared that North Carolina would be leading the way in the right-to-dry movement. In March, state Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, co-sponsored H1187, which would have prohibited city ordinances or neighborhood covenants banning the installation of clotheslines, solar collectors and energy devices "based on the use of renewable resources." However, the state Senate eliminated any mention of clotheslines before passing a version dealing only with solar collectors.

Bridges predicts that getting specific protections for clotheslines will be an "uphill battle" in North Carolina. But he plans to continue working on the right to dry, representing pro bono in court homeowners who have "amicably tried but failed" to get their neighborhood associations to permit the use of discretely placed clotheslines, he said.

Using the sun to dry clothes can make a difference. According to the Consumer Energy Center, it costs 30 to 40 cents to dry one load of clothes in an electric dryer. For the average American household, that adds up to about $85 a year, making the clothes dryer the second biggest electricity-using appliance after the refrigerator. With 88 million dryers in the United States, that requires a significant output of electricity -- and fossil fuel emissions to supply it.

A just-under-the-wire baby boomer, I grew up in an era when clotheslines were the waning purview of my grandmothers' generation and gave rise to the distasteful idiom "to air one's dirty linen in public." I would have been appalled then to find my lingerie hanging from an outside line at home, even in our backyard.

My perspective began to change in 1993, when I visited the home of Robert and Geeta McGahey in Yancey County's Celo community. When I arrived, Bob was unapologetically stringing a load of wet clothes along a clothesline leading from his laundry room to a grove of trees beside the house. The rainbow of blue denims and pastel T-shirts struck me as lovely, something akin to a Tibetan prayer flag. I even snapped a picture.

Now a retired humanities professor who publishes an environmental blog, Bob considers electric clothes dryers a personal pet peeve. When his blog recently decried the American infatuation with the electric dryer, I asked my husband to design a clothesline I could use from my wheelchair.

We live in the country, our house hidden from the view of others, so I can line dry with abandon. Given the drought, I'm saving a bundle. I plan to continue the practice on dry winter days, thanks to sublimation, that ice-to-vapor process I learned about in high school.

I'm not a purist. The dryer remains a rainy day backup. But mostly we now enjoy the sound of sheets flapping in the wind and the stiff absorbency and sweet fragrance of line-dried towels and clothes.

And like a Tibetan prayer flag, something of beauty has come with the practice.

Community columnist Holly Stevens lives in Oak Ridge. E-mail: holly_stevens@mac.com.