As a child, I helped my mother hang laundry in our back yard in Tamaqua, Pa., a small coal mining town. My job was handing up the clothespins. When everything was dry, I helped her fold the sheets in a series of moves that resembled ballroom dancing.

The clothes and linens always smelled so fresh. Everything about the laundry was fun. My brother and I played hide-and-seek in the rows of billowing white sheets.

I remember this as I'm studying energy-saving tips from Al Gore, who says that when you have time, you should use a clothesline to dry your clothes instead of the dryer.

A clothesline. It strikes me that I haven't seen one since 1991, when I moved to Rolling Hills, Calif., a gated community about an hour south of Los Angeles. There are rolling hills, ranch houses, sweeping views of the ocean and rocky cliffs -- plenty of room -- but not a single visible clothesline.

I decide to rig a clothesline as an experiment. My mother died many years ago, and the idea of hanging laundry with my own daughter, Isabel, who is 13 and always busy at the computer, is oddly appealing. I'm also hoping to use less energy and to reduce our monthly electric bills, which hit the absurdly high level of $1,120 last summer.

That simple decision to hang a clothesline, however, catapults me into the laundry underground. Clotheslines are banned or restricted by many of the roughly 300,000 homeowners' associations that set rules for some 60 million people. When I called to ask, our Rolling Hills Community Association told me that my laundry had to be hidden in an enclosure approved by its board of directors.

I briefly considered hanging our laundry in the front yard, just to see what would happen, but my family vetoed this idea. Instead, I settled on stringing two lines in a corner of the backyard, a spot not visible to neighbors or officials. I'm supposed to submit a site plan of our property and a photograph of my laundry enclosure. But I don't have an enclosure, unless the hedge qualifies.

Looking for fellow clothesline fans, I came across the Web site of Alexander Lee, a lawyer and 32-year-old clothesline activist in Concord, N.H. In 1995 Lee founded Project Laundry List, a nonprofit organization, as a way to champion "the right to dry." His Web site, www.laundrylist.org, is an encyclopedia on the energy advantages of hanging laundry.

Inspired, I moved forward with my project without submitting the site plan and photograph for approval. My daughter agreed to help me hang the first load.

"It looks beautiful," she said when we stepped back. "It looks like we care about the Earth."

The experiment was off to a good start. The first load dried in less than three hours. The clothes smelled like fresh air and wind. As we took them down, the birds were chirping and the sun was shining.

But there was a downside. "The towels are like sandpaper," my husband, Dan, said after stepping out of the shower.

Not only that. Heading outside to the clothesline and hanging each load takes about seven minutes -- six minutes and 30 seconds longer than it takes to stuff everything into the dryer.

As the months rolled by, no one from the community association complained. Of course, because the clotheslines are in a lowered corner of the back yard surrounded by hedges, they cannot be seen from the street, the neighbors' houses or even our own house.

Of course, I still haven't asked our local board of directors for approval. If they object, I could be forced to take my laundry down or build an enclosure, an inconvenient confrontation I'm simply avoiding. In the meantime, our electric bill has dropped to $576 in March from its high last summer, reflecting a series of efforts to cut energy. (That's still too high, so we're about to try fluorescent bulbs.)

There were more than 88 million dryers in the country in 2005, the latest count, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. If all Americans line-dried for just half a year, it would save 3.3 percent of the country's total residential output of carbon dioxide, experts say.

"It's a huge waste of energy to tumble dry your clothes," said Tom Arnold, chief environmental officer of TerraPass, a San Francisco company that sells carbon offsets, which aim to reduce greenhouse gases to compensate for one's activities. "It's one of the simplest things to do to help with global warming."

The laundry underground is a mixed group. It includes the frugal, people without dryers, and people from countries where hanging laundry is part of the culture. Many people hang a few delicate items. Tim Eames, a British designer who lives in Los Angeles, does not own a dryer. "The thought of getting a machine to do something as simple as drying my laundry is totally inconceivable," he said.

In Hollywood movies, however, clotheslines often appear in scenes depicting dire poverty. Jennifer Williams, a set decorator, says she hung clotheslines to help convey that in the films "Angela's Ashes," "Children of Men" and "Pearl Harbor."

That image could limit the comeback of the clothesline. "People see laundry as an ugly flag of poverty," Lee said. "It's a reminder to some people of where they grew up."

For me, that was Tamaqua, where my father worked for a company that made explosives for the mines. Clotheslines are still popular in Tamaqua, where the average home price is $64,400.

Linda Yulanavage, head of the local Chamber of Commerce, says more than half the town's 11,000 residents use clotheslines because they like the smell of fresh air in their laundry and because it saves energy.

"People see it as a normal, everyday thing to see clothes hanging on the line," she said. "It gives a homey, close neighborhood feeling."

I completely agree, although I seem to have the only clothesline in Rolling Hills. Maybe others will join. Meanwhile, my carbon footprint is shrinking, and our clothes smell like the great outdoors.