Fresh Linens

My mother was practical and prudent. She didn’t iron sheets—“It’s a waste of time,” she said— but she didn’t need to. She was exacting about making up the beds when she changed linens. 

“Don’t yank on the corners,” she would remind me, “unless you want to use your allowance to buy new sheets when they tear. Watch me.” She would line up a corner seam of the fitted bottom sheet with a corner of the mattress and ease it into place. Then the other corners, gently, never tugging hard, not even on the last, stubborn one. The result was taut and smooth, not a wrinkle to be seen. Then the top sheet, hospital corners folded and tucked with military precision. 

She took special pride in her method of putting on pillowcases. She’d turn the case inside out, all but the very end, then reach in and grasp the tips of the corners at the closed end. With these she’d grab one end of the pillow, pinching the corners into the ends of the pillowcase she was holding and shake the pillowcase over the pillow. Faultless: none of the lumps and bumps you get from cramming a puffy pillow into a barely-big-enough case. She’d hold it up, as if demonstrating a magic trick: “See?”

"See?"

Forty years after her death I still bask in her presence when I change the sheets. And I still do it her way.  “Don’t yank on the corners,” I remind my husband. 

- Alice Lowe reads and writes about food and family, Virginia Woolf, and life. Her personal essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Permafrost, 1966, Upstreet, Hippocampus, Tinge, Switchback, and Lunch Ticket. She was the 2013 national award winner at City Works Journal and winner of a 2011 essay contest at Writing It Real. Two monographs on Virginia Woolf have been published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London. Alice lives in San Diego, California and blogs at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.  

How to Fold Fitted Sheets Alone

My husband learned another trick of folding, this time for fitted sheets, that I’ve never forgotten. It is harder to do alone than the towel folding but it is designed for one person, too.

(ghost hand)

Take two corners of the sheet and put your hands inside. Make ghost hands, wide spread, to smooth the wrinkles in the corners. Then point your index fingers into the very corner of these corners, and bring them together. Now, flip one of the corners over the other so they nest.

Here is the part that is hard to do alone: Straighten the whole, and fold into a square as closely as you can. Fold the rounded corners inward until they do not show. Fold vertically and then--as with the towels--horizontally once, then thrice until your result is a neat, smooth, trifolded packet. It’s hard to describe how satisfying it is to do this right. My husband would fold & refold until he perfected it.

One of his last full acts on earth was folding laundry. He was listening to the game in our bedroom, vague and spacey on a toxic brew of Valium and Oxycontin, barely able to stand as his hipbone now crumbled with cancer, but folding, folding, folding with care.

- Lisa Schamess is a Founding Editor of Dead Housekeeping. The companion piece to this essay is "How to Fold with Only Two Hands: Honoring the Integrity of Towels," which was the first piece we ran when we started this site three months ago. 

Dress Like a Lady

Carry yourself like a lady. Dress like a lady. Don’t take foolishness from anyone.

I learned those things from my paternal grandmother, a tiny woman who was always well-dressed and –coiffed, and whose tolerance for the antics of others was miniscule.

I carelessly put on a poorly ironed (perhaps un-ironed) shirt once during a summer visit to her spotless home.  Because I was a teenager, and therefore a young lady, this was simply unacceptable.  She pulled out her ironing board and iron, and gave me a thorough lesson in proper pressing.

"My grandmother is dabbing her eyes at my parents' wedding and looks perfectly put-together. She may as well have been crying about my future lack of ironing skills."

1.     Start with the collar. Use plenty of elbow grease. She didn’t have starch when she learned to iron, so I didn’t need it, either.

2.     Iron the collar flat, then fold it down on its crease and iron that.

3.     Next the back.

4.     Then the sleeves.

5.     Finally, the front. This is what people will see first. Saving it for last makes it less likely to get wrinkled before you hang it up or put it on.

I put my freshly pressed shirt back on. She told me I had done a good job. My arm was stiffening up from all of that elbow grease.

Then she added a final step.

6.      When you get married, do not iron your husband’s shirts. If you start, you will be ironing his shirts forever. Take his shirts to the dry cleaner.

My husband irons his own shirts. I’ve watched, and he does it wrong.

- Jacqueline Bryant Campbell