Portland Magazine
May 1, 2022
Story by Sallie Tisdale
ON THE COMMUNAL STEPS OF the Ganges River in Varanasi, India, people take care of all kinds of business. Certain days are for laundry. I watched three women wrestling with an eighteen-meter-long sari in a stiff breeze, the multicolored fabric flapping and dancing in billows. They were ironing with the wind, and laughing all the while.
Perhaps women have ironed as long as they’ve had clothes. My mother made me iron the sheets, towels and pillowcases for a family of five every Saturday afternoon. She did the laundry, sorting and shifting and folding, while I ironed. The linens dried on a clothesline and the room filled with the fresh, sunshine scent of cotton as I worked. A little girl with a big sheet is quite a project, and hours passed while we talked now and then, lapsing into silence. When I finally finished one, she would take an end and we would fold it much the way one folds a flag, and with that much care.
I realize now that the reason my mother made me do this chore had nothing much to do with smooth sheets. She was just keeping her most unpredictable child out of trouble for a few hours. I like to think that we were company for each other too—that she liked having me near while she did her mundane chores.
These days, I iron alone in the basement. I pay attention, and take my time, watching the pile of clothes move from a heap on one side to a line of straight hangers on the other. The scent of warm cotton rises with the whuff of steam and the gentle rustle of fabric. I still iron shirts the way my mother taught me: one sleeve, the other sleeve, the collar, the front, the back—a body memory almost as old as I am. My thoughts wander without a goal, each lasting as long as the length of a seam. Sometimes I think of my mother and the women along the Ganges and the community we form through space and time. Small tasks, noticed by few, but each making the world a little bit smoother.
SALLIE TISDALE ’83 is the author of ten books, most recently The Lie About the Truck. Her essays have appeared many times in Portland magazine.
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