IRONING ATTITUDE

 

OK Ladies, how many of you remember having a toy ironing board when you were four or five?  If you are may age, from the time before plastic, it might have been a nice wooden one, or perhaps a  little red or blue metal one.  I don't know about you, but I thought that setting it up alongside my mom or our maid, and ironing along with them, was just about the best thing in the world!  

I loved everything about it: getting to dampen the clothes first, using one of the soda bottle sprinklers that my sister's Girl Scout troop had decorated; the steamy fragrance the iron gave off as it glided over the damp linens; the way all the wrinkles just disappeared in its wake, as if by magic.  Why, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, the day Mom finally let me iron a few napkins and pillowcases for real!

Gradually, however, my attitude changed.  The more things that got piled on my plate, the less I enjoyed domestic rituals such as these.  By the time I had a couple of pre-teens who needed chauffering, a job, aging parents, and was back in school myself, I would have done just about anything to avoid ironing.  I wouldn't dare put a load of laundry in the dryer unless I was absolutely positive I could be there to grab it and shake it all out, the second the buzzer went off, and linen was a forbidden fiber in our house!

When I moved up here full-time, and John had to do his own laundry during the week, he became the neighborhood dry cleaner's most devoted fan, and several linen shirts worked their way back into his wardrobe.  The other day I brought a load of clean stuff in from the garage utility room, and sorted it out on our bed.  When John came in and saw what a crumpled mess his linen shirts were, he said "Wow.  Guess I'd better go back to taking those to the cleaners!"  I'm not sure what came over me, but before I could stop myself, I was saying "Don't bother.  I'll iron them for you."  He gave me a dubious look.  "Are you sure?"  I thought about it for a sec, then nodded my head.  I was sure.

You see, over the past several years I have gradually learned to slow down to the Hill Country pace, and as I did that, my attitude began to shift back.  I was finally learning how to look at things with childlike wonder again.  I was even learning how to say "No!"  Which is exactly what I did when I was being pressured to be on our property owners' association board.  I told them politely, "I'm already on another board, and one is enough."  Then I nudged my hubby under the table, and his hand went up!  Soooo, now that I have time to breathe in and appreciate that steamy fragrance, and take delight in seeing the wrinkles disappear before my eyes, I really don't mind ironing anymore.

John walked back into the room as I was stacking up a pile of freshly ironed napkins, and before I could stop myself, I admitted that ironing the napkins and his shirt had actually been "kinda fun."  That was probably a big mistake, wasn't it?