Another Day in the Country
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
When my mother was in her late 80s, she came to live near us in Ramona and often she would ask, "Is there anything I can do for you?" She wanted to be helpful.
She watched her girls buzzing around, their hands full with guests, city work, housework, yard work, and surely there was something she could do to lighten the load. "Don't you need some dusting done?" she'd ask. "I could do the dusting."
We explained to Mom that in our lives, dusting was not something we did much — especially since the roads were paved in Ramona. Before that? Well, every summer we would battle the clouds of white limestone dust which billowed off the street every time someone drove by. There always was a shading of dust on everything. We tried not to move things around on the end table too much.
But now? We had very little dust. Mother marveled at this in her own home — for sure she didn't have dust there. She rarely opened the doors and windows. She moved carefully through the house and she didn't raise any dust — if there was such. But surely, at our houses with the doors and windows flung wide open and cats running in and out the doors — surely, we needed some dusting done. We didn't.
"Would you do some ironing?" we asked Mom, "and maybe on especially busy weekends, could you wash sheets and iron pillow cases?" When you are running a guest house and the place is full, you really feel like an innkeeper when you have the lines full from six or eight beds of linen.
"I'd love to!" said Mother. She loved to iron. She was never quite so fanatical as my grandmother who ironed sheets if she couldn't dry them on the line, but she did iron her dish towels and my dad's underwear. In fact, that's how I learned to iron, first doing his boxer shorts — I hated them — and then graduating to work shirts and the final graduation experience of ironing white shirts with the starched collar and cuffs.
"Ironed." And then I realized that ironing is a thing of the past. Ironing is from another generation — my mom's. That generation was before polyester and de-wrinkling dryers. That group of women were ironers. My grandmother's generation learned to iron, heating those sad irons on the wood stove. My mother's generation were ironers with new inventions like gas-powered irons and finally electric irons. My generation learned to iron and then polyester came to town and little by little we succumbed to fluffing.
I do have an iron and an ironing board, but it's mo)re like a novelty. I use it once in awhile if I don't catch things coming out of the dryer in time or there's a particularly fussy outfit. Then, I pull out the ironing board and with nostalgia remember the days of good old irons that would honestly heat up and not just get warm. I remember the days of sprinkling clothes and rolling them in the laundry basket and if you didn't get to them at exactly the right time, you'd be in trouble — not only from your mother but because those silly things would mold if ignored long enough.
Living in Mom's house, I've inherited her ironing board. It's a big hulking thing with extra padding. I marvel that she was able to lug it around, but she did. She loved this ironing board because it was adjustable. She loved her handy-dandy little plug in on the side of the kitchen island where she could plug in her iron and having plenty of space. She loved ironing the aprons and tablecloths when we served tea. She loved using real cloth napkins for special occasions and setting her table days in advance for holidays.
Today, on another day in the country I got out Mom's ironing board. Company is coming, I've got pillow cases to press and aprons to iron. As the iron moves across the fabric I look down and I see my mother's hands smoothing the cloth in preparation for the iron. I see her hands folding the napkins — only, now, though it looks like her hands, those hands are mine!
