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You just never know when it’s going to happen. Sometimes you work on it for days, weeks, to get it just right – and then, nothing.

Sometimes it happens when you least expect it.

Last week’s column on clotheslines generated more than two dozen responses from readers singing the praises of line-drying, so I’m sharing a few of the comments I got:

“I hang everything outside when I can,” said an older gentleman. Even his “personals” go outside to dry sometimes.

Then there’s the reader with the trucker husband who comes home with three weeks’ worth of laundry.

“I hang out all unmentionables,” she wrote in an e-mail, adding she’s the only one in her area with a line. “That from hubby alone is, like, 21 shorts and 21 pair of socks along with everything else.”

Some readers have lifelong memories of clotheslines.

“Growing up in an immigrant family (the Netherlands and Ukraine) we too dried our clothes on the line,” wrote one reader. “We always washed on Mondays, because that was the American tradition told to my mother when we came here in ‘47. Even now … my 84-year-old mother still uses her line in the backyard.”

And much to my surprise I found clotheslines outlawed in some places:

“I live in a neighborhood which ‘bans’ clotheslines, so I hang my clothes under our deck,” wrote one reader. “The most ridiculous ‘ban’ is from the neighborhood of our winter home in Tucson. I tried to ignore the rule but was soon told I had to take the clothes down. Next I’ll hang them in the garage.”

It’s about time someone fights for the liberation of clotheslines.

Now that we are in the reader mailbag, I also received a card telling me that “throwing away useable household goods … is not only wasteful and short-sighted, it’s downright mean-spirited.”

Ouch! What did I do now?

Reading my getting-organized column had left this gentle reader under the impression that I was throwing out all sorts of useable stuff instead of recycling it or donating it to charity.

Please, let me reassure you: I do dispose of paint and chemicals in a responsible manner and I would never throw out anything that can be donated.

Yet at the same time, I would never dream of treating a charity’s secondhand store as my own personal dump so I only donate things that are whole, clean and functional.

I’m sure Goodwill would much rather be without my old magazines and paint splattered newspapers.