There is something incredibly stimulating about sun-dried laundry.
It's as if you're breathing in the energy of the sun, so that the very threads seem somehow taut and vibrant. I grew up on clothes and sheets that had been laundered without softener and associated cleanliness with that rough stiffness of sundried softener-less clothes. A friend once horrified me by remarking how he loved the softness of clean towels--only dirty towels were soft; limp and characterless, depressed and deprived of the sun! Softener is for softies.
Since we moved to a HDB I love doing laundry, hanging the clothes on the bamboo poles (there's a whole spectrum of knowledge on how best to hang the clothes; no one in my family agrees on one method. To hear us argue which one is best, you'd think we'd each gotten PHDs in the field.) The delicious danger of hanging the poles out. I've had my fair share of adventures at the laundry window--having had to claim a pair of pants from a neighbour downstairs, dropped an entire bamboo pole out of the window by mistake and for five minutes been too scared to look out in case I killed someone, and twice having to go retrieve a bed sheet, pole and all, which the wind had torn out and thrown disrespectfully on the road for a lorry to desecrate.
Someone threw a cigarette butt out of the stairway window next to mine, and it burnt a hole the size of a one dollar coin in my white sofa throw. I was so furious that I spent the next few hours considering how best to request the Town Council to ban smoking in HDB stairways. That was nothing, however, to the rage of the entire block when some inconsiderate person living on one of the top floors kept hanging their mop out of their window, right smack in the middle of the morning sun when everyone (below) had their clean laundry hanging out to dry. There were three tense days and then a sign appeared in the lift: 'TO THE PERSON ON ___FLOOR WHO HANGS YOUR MOP OUT: STOP DOING IT IT'S VERY INCONSIDERATE OF THE PEOPLE BELOW! WE KNOW WHICH UNIT YOU LIVE IN!' Or something to the effect.
The mop disappeared, to everyone's great satisfaction. Now peace and order has been restored, and sometimes when it rains a friendly person will shout loudly out of the window while taking in laundry, '下雨了!' or 'Aiya, it's raining!' for the benefit of the slower neighbours.