For many, ironing is an old skill, like churning butter or darning socks.

None of my sons, nieces or nephews own an iron or ironing board.

Why should they? Most of the clothes these days are permanent press or are supposed to look like we slept in them.

I usually don’t buy anything that needs ironing. If I can’t toss it in the dryer and hang it up wrinkle free, I don’t buy it.

Around the holidays, I needed two white pillowcases. I picked a package up at a home goods store, not looking closely at what kind of fabric the pillowcases were made from.

After I washed them, it was immediately obvious those pillowcases were 100 percent cotton. They came out of the dryer as wrinkled as raisins and would require ironing.

Maybe not, a little voice whispered. Who’d notice if the pillowcases were wrinkled? I could pass them off as vintage or “country chic.”

I held them up. It was obvious they were wrinkled, not something out of a fashion magazine.

I’d have to drag out the ironing board and the iron if I was going to put those on the guest bed. As I set up the ironing board, the loud squeaking sound brought me back to my childhood.

When I was a young girl, I often watched my grandmother Albedia ironing. She filled a glass Pepsi bottle with water and a watering attachment screwed on.

She’d sprinkle water over whatever she was ironing, add a bit of starch, and she transformed those wrinkled blobs into stiff-as-a-board shirts.

My mom would let me iron my dad’s linen handkerchiefs. Those were pretty easy, so we moved on to pillowcases. Once permanent press cases came on the market and my dad discovered Kleenex, we no longer had to iron.

Years later, my other grandmother offered to teach me how to iron more intricate items. She said I’d need to know how to iron if I was going to learn how to sew.

Since my mom had already showed me the basics, my grandmother started with shirts.  First the collar, she said, then the yoke, the sleeves and finally the body of the shirt.

As with most things I learned as a teenager, there were bumps along the road. One side of the sleeve would look smooth, but when I turned it over, there were wrinkles up and down the fabric.

She showed me the automatic water sprayer on the iron – what an improvement over that Pepsi bottle – and the wrinkles came right out.

When she taught me how to sew, I had to press open every seam. I didn’t understand why until I tried skipping that step. When the seam was puckered, I knew why she had me iron as I went.

A good lesson, she said. Take care of things as they happen because if you don’t, they show up anyway.

These days, I iron my husband’s flannel shirts. He takes care of clogged toilets, so I don’t mind ironing those shirts.

What I find is there’s a rhythm to ironing and satisfaction is watching the wrinkles disappear. Best of all, the end result is worth the effort.

Most of the chores we do require thought. I’ve yet to program the television’s remote control without paying strict attention. Ironing, on the other hand, allows my mind to wander.

Maybe the older generation was on to something. Perhaps the mindless chores give us time to think. I’ll never go so far as to churn my own butter, but ironing does give me time to ponder.

And that, like ironing, is an almost lost art.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.