Embrace the Wrinkle

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July 14, 2017 – Kirk looked at me as if I had sprouted three heads and asked “Who are you and what have you done with my wife?”

I have a confession to make.

I don’t iron.

Anything.

I consciously purchase clothes that don’t need ironing or that are meant to look ….. comfortably worn in.

Maybe it has something to do with my youth. After the divorce, I stayed with the house, and with Dad. I was 13 and there was no new city involved, so it just made sense to stay where I was. I had a room at Mom’s place and did stay there too, but home base didn’t change.

I also got a decent allowance for the year, but I worked for it. I did most of the yard work, all the cleaning, all the laundry, and was responsible for ironing all of Dad’s work shirts. I also had to do things like stain and varnish the garage doors and mow the lawns, but that was mostly when my brother was out planting or away fighting forest fires.

But back to those shirts.

I hate monotonous things, and I hate social convention. So being a girl charged with ironing a man’s shirts just rankled. How I came to hate ironing. So I learned to choose my own clothes wisely. On rare occasions I use an iron to apply an iron on patch to repair a hole in some article of field clothing, but that’s about the extent of my ironing efforts.

When Kirk stopped doing wiring and installation work he also started wearing nicer clothes, and that included collared shirts. His common sigh at the end of the weekend is usally… “The ironing faeries didn’t come…again….”

It would probably surprise most women, and certainly most men, that my husband sometimes calls out to me and asks if I need anything ironed. The answer is almost always no.

I embrace the wrinkle.

So a couple of years ago, when I tagged along on one of his work trips and he was getting ready for business as I was getting ready to entertain myself in a new city for the day, I asked “would you like me to iron that shirt while you get ready?”

See? I’d clearly grown two more heads or been kidnapped and replaced by an alien.

It’s good to catch your spouse off guard sometimes.

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