Minneapolis ? For newlyweds Nona Haller and John Fineberg, there were a dozen good reasons to buy a townhome and one compelling reason they did not: Haller wanted a clothesline.

“I’ve always loved hanging my clothes to dry,” said Haller, a 49-year old career counselor. “It’s my favorite chore, really. It’s so pastoral.”

Haller and Fineberg decided to purchase a home in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul, Minn., where she’s free to string her clothes wherever she pleases.

That’s not the case in most townhomes, condominiums, or suburban single-family developments, where covenants or homeowners’ associations increasingly forbid clotheslines in an effort to keep the area looking upscale.

“I think it’s considered declasse,” Haller said. “It’s not like we don’t all have panties and towels.”

Once a neighborhood icon, the clothesline has all but disappeared from the landscape in some of the newest and fastest-growing communities. Fresh-smelling towels blowing in the summer breeze simply aren’t an option in developments across the nation, but many people are lamenting their loss and trying to hang onto an old and often-beloved tradition.

“The sight of bed sheets lined up neatly on a clothesline blowing gently in a summer breeze truly feeds my soul,” said Ann Sletten of New Prague, Minn.

Some groups are also promoting clotheslines and so-called “solar drying” as an environmentally enlightened way to do wash.

When people ask what they can do to slow global warming, J. Drake Hamilton, science policy director of the St. Paul-based nonprofit advocacy group Fresh Energy, has a simple answer: Dry your clothes naturally.

The covenants that restrict clotheslines – and many other things such as dog kennels, storage sheds or play equipment – are written to promote uniformity and to define community aesthetics, said Nancy Polomis, an attorney with Hellmuth and Johnson. The Eden Prairie, Minn.-based firm represents about 400 homeowners’ associations throughout the state.

“Developers have recognized that homeowners want some reassurance of what they’re buying into,” Polomis said. “You want to know that all the houses are going to be maintained at a similar standard. You’re relying on that when you’re investing that much money into a home.”

Clothesline concerns haven’t exactly created a hotbed of litigation in Minnesota, Polomis said. In her 15 years as an attorney, she can’t remember one Minnesota case. But that doesn’t mean people here and elsewhere don’t have strong feelings about them.

In Florida, a man who refused to take down his clothesline was sued by his homeowners’ association. He won a $23,475 decision after citing a 1980 state law that invalidated prohibitions on clotheslines and other renewable energy devices. Minnesota has no similar law.

But clotheslines fans such as Julia Curran, of Minneapolis, think it should.

“Energy companies seem eager to give a tax incentive for an energy-efficient dryer,” said Curran, 25, who works at a St. Paul nonprofit agency. “But they offer no such incentives for our solar- and wind-powered dryer of two lines stretched between our house and garage.”

Curran, who lives with her family in the Kenwood neighborhood of Minneapolis, methodically hangs her clothes by color.

“I like the way they look,” she said. “It automatically orders how I put things up.”

Qin Tang would love to hang clothes in the sun as she once did in her native China. She seldom does, though, because the upscale development where the 42-year old librarian now lives doesn’t allow it.

“People here talk about freedom, but I don’t have the freedom to air-dry my clothes on my deck, something that is good for the environment and saving energy,” Tang said. “This is absurd.”