Published: July 21, 2008 11:44 pm            

Cathy Shaffer: Press of family chores

The greatest invention in the world is permanent press fabric. At the risk of betraying my age, let me confess that we didn’t have such a thing when I was a kid. We did have ironing boards and electric irons — not the steam kind — and mothers who knew the social value of wrinkle-free garments.

I hated ironing. It’s genetic, I believe, because my mother hates to iron. Both my sisters hate to iron.

Yet with three adults and three children in our family, we were eternally faced with a mountain of clothes awaiting the presser’s touch.

Occasionally, on extremely hot days, I would volunteer to iron. Mother would set the board up in the basement — the cool, albeit musky-smelling basement — and dampen the clothes for me.

The instrument for dampening was a pop bottle with a special nozzle stuck on. A rubber washer held the two together as my mother shook short bursts of water against the fabric, rolled the items together and put them in an oval wicker basket.

The iron’s plug went into an overhead socket with a two-prong plug, and when the iron reached the right temperature, Mother would nod and leave me to my work.

I was competent, if not enthusiastic. A quick learner, I knew how to press down a button placket, to create nicely creased shirt sleeves and pant legs and how to put in a perfect pleat.

Frankly, though, I didn’t much care. My offer of help was to allow me to wallow in the dampness below ground, not to fashion a garment that would dazzle my mother’s fellow Women’s Auxiliary members. If an occasional crease was ironed into one of Daddy’s work shirts, or the back of a collar never felt the touch or the iron’s tip, I could live with that.

Then came the day that the centipede crawled across my barefoot. I let out a shriek the neighbors could hear over a tractor’s roar, jumped and sought sanctuary.

My father, hurrying to my aid, found me hunkered down on top of the washing machine, the iron burning a deep brown hole into my sister’s Sunday blouse, and stopped dead in his tracks.

He unplugged the iron, grabbed the smoldering iron and raised a questioning eyebrow as I climbed down from my perch.

“Bug,” I said in a one-word explanation.

Daddy just sighed.

And kept me on lawn mowing duty the whole rest of the summer.

CATHIE SHAFFER can be reached at 473-9851.

        

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