Recommended: Ironing Sheets
It’s the part of my weekly calendar I look forward to, even more than regular exercise or watching my favorite TV show. When it’s time to iron my sheets, I prepare for the evening accordingly. First the laundry. I pile the wrinkled sheets and pillowcases into the machine and add the fragrance free detergent. The promise of softer sheets after every wash is like an aroma of good coffee. You know what’s coming. I wait until after dinner, with the dishes done and nothing else left to do but enjoy the art of ironing. I set up the board, plug in the iron and fill it with water. I hear the gurgle of the steam rushing through the flatiron. A quick lick of the finger, a flick on the steel surface and that delicious sizzle which signals it’s the perfect time to start. I take a pillowcase and pull it over the narrow end of the board, setting the wrinkles in place for their moment of purification. I glide the hot iron with heavy pressure over every inch, watching as the wrinkles melt away and the stiff, perfectly flat cloth emerges from underneath each pass. Turn. Another set of wrinkles appear, like a sandbar and then disappear as the iron presses against them, over and over again until the first fold. Another pass of the iron, another fold until the pillowcase forms a perfect little package, and I toss it onto the sofa and pull the next pillowcase.
Glide
Turn
Repeat.
I didn’t always iron the sheets. In the last eight or so years of my 30-year marriage, when I was spending more time alone, I sought comfort in the process of creating a soft and beautiful bed. My husband thought I was crazy to bother. But over time, it seemed the bed became more mine than ours. Thoughts of his clandestine meetings in other women’s beds made me all the more possessive of the one I slept in, alone or not.
It was my place to dream or languish and eventually to just pull the covers over me. In the morning, I would set the pillows back in their place, upright against the quilted headboard and pull the sheets to their rightful position, creased at the base of the pillows and folded over the woven cotton blanket we’d found on Nantucket during a get away weekend some years before. I’d puff up the duvet and set it across the foot of the bed like a cloud. I would stand there admiring my bed like a beautiful place setting. Whatever had happened overnight would be tucked away, wrinkle free, restored to the beauty that was meant to be there. Nourishment would come from the softness of the sheets surrounding me. The ironing made me happy. And the finished product was unquestionably sublime. After our divorce a few years ago, I invested in some new sheets and the ironing continued.
It occurred to me that my indulgence in bed linens harkens back to my favorite time of day as a child — bedtime. When I was a little girl I had a featherbed. Today we might call it a duvet. The outer covering was a purple print covered in flowers so tiny they made it look like a dot matrix pattern from a distance. It was soft and billowy. When bedtime came, my mother would lift it up in the air like a parachute tent and I’d jump onto the bed and wait while the purple cloud would gently descend over me. Then she would tuck it in tightly from my neck all the way down to my toes with soft karate chops outlining my whole body. I’d be swaddled in it like a baby. A kiss on the forehead and I’d be ready to doze off.
Years later, I would find myself pouring over catalogues and researching the softest bedding. Pillows that sighed when my head would hit them, blankets woven with cottony thread and sheets, white and crisp and cool. Sheets became my obsession and when I finally found the perfect set, I also invested in the perfect iron. Crisp and cool sheets are ironed sheets.
Mindless and yet mindful. I do it for me and me alone. It would be nice to share the sheets with someone again. Someone to mess them up with once in a while. Then wash, and iron and float them over the bed like a canopy or a chuppa where the purest form of love is practiced over and over again.
Each time I iron my sheets, I imagine the nights ahead when I will visit my bed as if dropping in on a friend who is waiting to greet me and comfort me. I will slip underneath the layers and be closest to the crisp top sheet that provides the cool touch on my chest and belly and legs. No pajamas to interrupt. Scrumptious texture that lightly covers me, like a breath. Ironing my sheets is a gift to myself. And some day it will be a gift I give to someone else.
For me, there’s nothing like the love that comes with bedtime. Ironing my sheets is an act of self-love.
