I stand here ironing...
During my early twenties before we possessed a washing machine I made a weekly trek to the local laundromat lugging a heavy basket of dirty clothes.
The laundrette was a place of safety. There was something soothing about resting as those owl faced machines rolled over their endless supply of clothes. The tumble and spin of the washers, the buzz of the dryers, the clink of coins dropping into slots before the whirr of the device to get the process started.
Hours ticked by.
Sometimes I took a risk and left my washing on its journey to shop nearby or revisit home to finish another task. Saturday as housework day. It has ever been so for me, the day when I try to deal with the mess I have accumulated over the course of a week.
Even when a person visited my house on Fridays to perform basic cleaning tasks when my children were small and I worked full time, there were still plenty of day-to-day tasks, washing and ironing to be completed.
Ironing I preferred to reserve for Sunday afternoons, the lazy time of the week when thoughts turn to the coming days, the resumption of work on Mondays and school and a sense that whatever has been left incomplete during the week must now be tackled.
I set up the ironing board near a light fixture in our living area and took the load of shirts and dresses to one side then began the task of pulling each item apart, rectifying the inside out of socks, shorts, shirts, undies, one by one and followed the instructions my sister first gave me when I was ten years old.
We begin with collar and cuffs, move onto the arms, the sleeves, then one front side then the other. Finally, shoulders and back. I loved to smooth out creases, the hiss of steam removing wrinkles, the smell of fresh laundry, warm with the softened fabric, smooth to touch.
This was my thinking time, like Tilly Olsen’s:
‘I stand here ironing and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron…’
The way thoughts come in springs of energy and attention, one thought linking to the next, often connected in some way with the music I played first on tapes and then later from the CD machine we set up in our kitchen. Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and in later years music to which my husband introduced me, Warren Zevon, more Bob Dylan. We still have our CDS stacked in piles in a kitchen nook along with the countless DVDs I collected over the years.
All this anachronistic technology superseded by the digital world where everything can be held in your computer or in your phone. No need for material objects anymore.
It’s seemingly a good thing this upgrade but again I think of those artefacts from days gone by. Whatever happened to the gramophone one of my brothers brought home from a junk sale somewere. This in the days when we still listened to records on record players, the needle in the stylus on the vinyl circle that ran round. The music emerging in soulful ways as if a voice eked out of the hard plastic of the recording.
These days I drive past laundrettes. I have no need for them. Signs on windows suggest they offer laundry services, someone else to take on the task for you and I imagine they’re all now digitised, too. No need for multiple coins to feed into slots. No more the kerchunk of metal as it hits the inner sanctum where it tallies with other coins to offer a cup of soap power or time in a machine that does its thinking for you, washing and drying.
I’ve yet to do my weekend wash. Held up this week after a Saturday spent looking after my daughters’ children while she threw a surprise party for her husband who was reaching forty.
Only yesterday I turned forty. It was not a great time for me my fortieth birthday sitting still under the cloud of loss of my psychoanalytic training. Those years that might have been powerful for me only improved by the birth of my fourth daughter when her presence shifted my sights into new beginnings.
A birth can do this. And these days we’re waiting for another little one to come into the world. One we thought might never materialise; her life contrived through the technologies of IVF.
If ordinary pregnancy is a lottery as a doctor once told me when my ten-week-old foetus did not make it, pregnancy via IVF is even more so. And it’s so much more scrupulously watched. Every heartbeat monitored and more so for my daughter who has copped the gestational diabetes and hypertension that come with pregnancies and cause huge worry in the medical world, a worry that channels its way into her. But she wants her baby to be born and therefore will expose herself to all manner of intrusions to make this happen.
My pregnancies tended to be straightforward, and I come from a line of women for whom pregnancy seemed likewise, especially my mother. Though she neglects to include her last born who was still born. The placenta unable to continue feeding her as needed.
If my mother’s baby was on her way today, the doctors might have detected earlier and been able to save her. But even today babies die and sometimes for reasons we cannot understand. This then is our worry for my daughter and her baby. The life and death lottery of new lives.
Postscript:
This baby has arrived. Every bit the beautiful and healthy baby we had hoped for. Welcome to the world little one.