Iron Me a Fine Shirt

[What could you do less of?]

I’m already doing less of the things I could do less of.

Hanging back. Waiting. Wasting time. Second guessing. Ironing.

I could only do less ironing if I took my ironing board and my steam iron and threw them in the hard snow piled up at the side of my driveway. It would be like throwing away relics of another era.

I actually liked ironing an awful lot. Especially shirts. There is a system to properly ironing a shirt. I could recite it, if you wish, but that would be tedious. Suffice to say, one can quickly spot the experts in a shirt-ironing competition. They understand sequencing and attention to detail.

My mother ironed on Tuesdays, having done the wash on Mondays. I forget what happened the rest of the days of the week. She washed our clothes in a wringer washer, dried them on the line (either in the basement or outside on a rope between the house and the tree which also housed my beloved rope swing), sprinkled them with a coke bottle with a cork that was also a sprinkler, and then wound each garment into tight little balls to wait their turn under the iron.

She ironed and watched the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV. I know this, not because she told me years later, but because I was there. I was six, sitting on the living room carpet and watching a Senate hearing. I had to have been doing something else. Dressing my dolls up like Communists? I don’t know and she’s not around to tell me.

So, let me sum up by saying that I’m loathe to do even less ironing than I already do. There is my heritage to consider. Still, it’s a valid question to ask.

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Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash