Nobody, it seems, irons clothes anymore.
There just isn’t time in our busy world. Instead, we send our clothing to the dry cleaner or tumble out the wrinkles in the dryer.
A friend of mine laughingly quipped that her daughter, seeing her ironing board in the basement, asked, “What’s that?”
My friend had never used the board in her daughter’s entire nine-year-old life.
I do like to iron, however, and I make time for it.
And that is because of my grandma.
Grandma started ironing when she was just a little girl. Sent to stay with various relatives off and on following her mother’s death, she learned to iron from her Aunt Lulie. While her cousin Drusilla sprawled languidly in armchairs reading novels, Grandma hefted an iron across the family’s wardrobe.
If every crease wasn’t perfect, Aunt Lulie made me iron the whole thing over again.
Grandma grew up in a world where wrinkle resistant and permanent press were not part of the common vocabulary. Irons were heated on the stove. Grandma made her own starch. It was easy to scorch a shirt and ruin it forever.
Grandma ironed sheets and socks and fancy, lacy dresses.
She also ironed her children’s underwear.
Grandma’s favorite saying, and one that I heard over and over as a child, was:
You can be poor, but you don’t have to be dirty.
She learned that from Aunt Lulie, too.
And so, Grandma’s children, having only one set of school clothes, would step out of their threadbare garments each evening and find them washed and pressed, ready to be worn again, the next morning when they awoke.
Grandma often stayed up all night washing and ironing so that her children, while poor, always appeared neat and clean.
When I was little, I had a tiny iron and ironing board. The miniaturized iron plugged in, got hot, and actually worked like a regular “adult” iron.
Don’t believe me? Look online for “vintage toy ironing board and iron”. There are tons of photos of these items from a time when girls’ toys were setting them up to be Suzy Homemaker. In fact, the term Suzy Homemaker came from a line of girls’ toys that were designed to teach girls how to take care of a future home.
I can’t imagine parents today allowing their children to “play” with a hot iron.
But I digress.
With my iron, Grandma showed me how to press white laundered handkerchiefs.
Even with those childhood ironing lessons, however, I was not able to press the white pleated skirt I wore for my high school graduation. Only Grandma had the skills for that.
As she grew older, Grandma stopped ironing. We sent our fancy clothes, the ones she had always smoothed free of wrinkles, to the dry cleaner.
Grandma not only ironed my elegant clothing, though. She also used to press my blue jeans, leaving a long straight crease in the material that ran down the length of my legs.
I find myself now, at my ironing board, doing the same thing with my comfy, old jeans.
The perfect crease reminds me of Grandma.
Standing at the ironing board is a form of meditation for me. The rote process is so embedded in the fabric of my body, learned by years of repetition, that I can allow my mind to wander and softly settle into gentle thoughts and memories.
One day, not long after Grandma died, I was laboriously pressing a shirt. Suddenly, I was engulfed by a lovely smell that reminded me of the scent that seemed to permeate from Grandma’s very pores. I felt Grandma was speaking to me, sending me a message.
When I lifted the warm, starched shirt to my face, the smell on the cloth was that of my own perfume.
I realized, iron in hand, how much I had in common with my grandma.
It is that link which causes me to always find time to iron.
