‘The Art of Ironing’ by Natalie Harris-Spencer

Some flat afternoons I can smell the starch from my childhood. It comes to me by accident: the high whiff of linen on the bend of a washing line, the dense threat of rain overhead.

With this smell I’m fourteen again, back in my parents’ house, miles and miles away, watching my mother do the ironing. There’s a shut glass door between us, behind which exists a green dome terrarium. I peer through the glassy orb at my mother: a distortion. She’s a rainforest mirage, her mechanical ironing arm slick-hot and hazy. 

My mother irons things that don’t need ironing: hankies, socks, sheets. There’s no art to what she’s doing, this procedural flattening of creases, this daily smushing. I think she must really love the monotony of ironing. You’d have to love something that pointless that much.

Other things need ironing. “I have a pile of ironing,” she laments, like the pile is akin to a pile of dirt or a pile of bodies, and she really does: my brother’s football shorts, my father’s work shirts. She has a way with the limbs, rotating them so it’s like the board is wearing them. She wriggles the head between the little buttons, around the waistbands. The iron moans with the work. I’m telling you: it isn’t art.