My aunt
gave me this housekeeping tip many years ago: if you don’t have time to iron
immediately after doing the laundry, you can wrap up the damp clothes, put them
in a plastic bag, and keep in the freezer until you do have time. Of course,
she was thinking the next day, perhaps, or by the end of the week. She
definitely did not mean months and months and months.
I hate to
iron. When I was a teen, my mother enlisted me to help her with
the ironing, which included sheets and pillow cases, and my father’s dress
shirts and boxer shorts. Everything was white, boringly white. Boxer shorts had
hard-to-figure-out geometry, but at least they were small.
The dress
shirts, on the other hand, were interminable. But I never forgot the
approach: first iron the collar, both sides; next, the sleeves, wrists first,
then the whole sleeve, both sides; third, the yoke, which you had to fold along
the seam line so it would lie flat; lastly, the large right front with buttons,
back, left front with buttonholes. Even in the summertime, he wore long-sleeved
shirts to work, and it seemed to take forever to iron just one. Even though my
mother’s ironing board was adjustable and I could sit, it was so much work. I
vowed I would do as little of this chore as possible when I grew up.
Fortunately,
jersey fabrics and polyester in the 1960s and ’70s made this vow easy to keep.
When I bought silk blouses, they’d go to the dry cleaners. And when Jack and I
married, I made it clear I would never iron his shirts. He didn’t care; he took
them to the laundry, and eventually he found a place to work where he could
wear T-shirts. (My father didn’t like starch in his shirts, which is why his
didn’t go to a laundry.)
Then my
aunt’s tip. By this time I had accumulated a few rayon blouses and washable
silk. Ironing sometimes was required. So into the freezer they went, and a few
months later, maybe when something was on TV (I was ironing when the U.S.
invaded Iraq), out would coming the adjustable ironing board and iron.
But some
time ago, I washed a summer dress I had made and a blouse I bought in Montreal
in 1985, packed them into the freezer, and there they stayed. For years. It’s
possible they’ve been there for 10 years.
Today, I’m
packing for a trip and needed to touch up a shirt I want to wear. Why not iron
those clothes in the freezer? That turned out to be harder than I thought.
The blouse
seemed frozen solid. It took at least half an hour to thaw, with the iron, and
unroll it, bit by bit. The fabric doesn’t seem to have been damaged, even when
I had to pull it apart—I wonder if there is liquid built into the rayon cloth.
I should
have taken a photo of it all rolled up, but you can see (1) part of it
partially undone, (2) ice crystals; and (3) ironed product. I do love this
shirt. Why did I leave it in the cold for so long?
(1)
(2)
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Our
little plane had maybe 12 people (and there was another plane with the rest of our group) and everyone had a window seat. Here is a
shadow of our plane as we took off from Grand Canyon Airport (“since 1927” and
they offer helicopter flights as well). 
