Tuesday

The clothespin bag of my childhood was fat-bellied, rectangular in shape with a thick cloth strap fastened at the top to use to hook it over the forked sticks holding up the wire clothes line. Its color was tattletale gray. Each Monday it went out with the wash and came in with the dried clothes to be hung on the back porch, ready for the next Monday. During the week I took it down, dug through its contents, hunting for the two-legged pins to use as stick men in my play.

The good-smelling, air-fresh clothes, stiff with starch, were piled on the dining room chairs to wait the dampening Aunt Merica would give them after supper. She filled a flat glass bottle with warm water, stuck in the cork, itself stuck with the dented aluminum sprinkling cap, speckled with tiny, pin-size holes. Sometimes I got to roll the sprinkled pillowcases and tuck them down among the rolled sheets and towels, shirts and aprons. Once the last piece was dampened and rolled, the big cloth on which they had all been placed was folded over and all left to let the dampening penetrate evenly until the ironing began the next day.

Next morning when I came downstairs, well after the milking had been done, the pigs and chickens fed and all signs of breakfast cleared away, despite the fact that biscuits had been baked, meat and eggs fried, coffee perked, Daddy's lunch packed, I would find the kitchen warm and steamy. An array of irons sat, heating and re-heating, on the top of the cook stove. The kitchen table was covered with a quilt and then a sheet, scorched golden brown in the corners where Aunt Merica had too quickly turned the iron on its heel and missed the metal rack. Braced from the corner of the kitchen cabinet to the table was an ironing board where Mama ironed. Years later an ironing board was built into the wall near the dining room; it, in turn, was replaced by store-bought ironing boards. Electric irons replaced the ones that now took turns being lifted with pads of cloth folded over the hot handles. These pads only partially kept the palm of the hand protected from the heat; there was no protection from the heat radiating up onto the bent fingers.

I had a favorite iron. It was small and slim, its handle round and bent a bit forward. Mama must have had her favorites too, for some seemed to be used by her more than by Aunt Merica. These irons were heavy, their handles fatter than my hands could manage. It is one of these heavy ones that I now have; all the others disappeared. Another group was oval bottoms, the handle being separate. The handle attached to a hood that fitted over the iron bottom. The handle/hood and iron bottom were held together by turning a wing nut. These irons were small and often I was told to use them, which I disliked, for fastening the two together was not easy. Even after fastening the wing nut, the iron wiggled in its shiny aluminum cover, making it hard to do lace and ruffles, sleeves and corners. It was also hard to hold up this unsteady contraption while spitting on the tip of my left-hand finger and giving a quick touch to the bottom of the iron to judge its temperature. You soon learned to know the heat of the iron by the sound of the hiss. A too-hot iron left a scorch, or worse, a burn. A too-cold one stuck in the starch or left the cloth little better than when you first passed over it. A just-right iron flew over the cloth, turning even the most worn apron into an object so slick and glossy you wanted to put it on and go visiting.

In early spring and often during the summer there was a special ironing task: the bonnets had to be done up. Before washing, the hood was separated from the brim by pulling out the hand sewing that attached the two. Once washed, the brim was starched and re-starched in heavy, coldwater starch. The brim had been made by repeatedly stitching back and forth across a sandwich of cloth made by inserting several layers of heavy cotton material between two pieces of cloth that matched the bonnet hood. The hood, so puffy with its ruffle edge when attached to the brim, became a large flat circle on the ironing board. A cord inserted under the bias stitched about an inch from the circumference gathered up the circle, creating the hood with this ruffled edge. After all the ironing was done and after they lay down for awhile, Mama and Aunt Merica would put the brims and crowns together.
Anything that needed mending was laid aside after it was ironed. Wednesday it would be mended. Today, when the dresses and aprons, pillowcases and sheets, dishtowels and tablecloths, shirts and undershorts, overalls and pants had been ironed and folded, they were carried away to their proper places, the ironing bords disposed of and attention turned to getting dinner for Daddy would be home right on time, just after 12.

In summer, when the green beans were ready to eat, Mama would pick some right after breakfast, wash, string, break and get them on to cook in the three-legged iron pot, which she put down in the hole of the back burner on the stove. The hole's lid would sit back there behind the hot irons all morning, plumes of black soot peeking out from underneath. The cookstove was almost always fired by coal, with the bed of the fire kept near the front of the stove. Six round holes, which were called burners or eyes, pierced the top. Each burner was covered with an exact-fitting lid; each lid had a depression into which the stove lifter was inserted to lift the lid out of its hole. The back burners were less hot than the front; the pairs to the right of the fire box less and least hot. It was into the least hot of the most hot burners that Mama had put the pot, so the beans could cook steadily and slowly while the ironing was done. About eleven, new potatoes, which I scraped sitting outside on the steps, were put on top of the beans. By twelve, when Daddy came, we ate one of my favorite meals: onions, pulled from the patch no earlier than when Daddy was washing on the back porch and combing his hair before the mirror that was too high for me, green beans and new potatoes seasoned with a little piece of streaky meat and cooked in the iron pot on the back of the stove, milk and hot bread.

Wednesday -->