It’s shaped like other irons, but there all comparisons end. Heavy steel, encased in chrome, like a ’53 Buick or our navy-blue Caddy with the white leather seats. It’s authoritative – requires a sure hand and perfect attention.
No pushing, pulling, or sudden jerks. You must drive Mother’s iron as if your life depended on it.
If you practiced (a 1000 Saturday mornings) and learned the rhythm of touch, and speed, and turning, your precision would be rewarded with the crispest linens, smoothest satins, and creases that could slice bread. I was only 10 when it all began – when I knew my work had to be perfect.
I managed Mother’s expectations as best I could, but slowly our town and our world began to change. Sharp pleats gave way to polyester, and
the clean hay smell of linen succumbed to linoleum-scented Wash and Wear.
It was about that time that Mum painted over the knotty pine walls Dad had planed by hand, encasing us all in Cool Aquamarine latex.
Before long, it seemed that everything was synthetic
and Mother’s iron became harder to handle. If you weren’t careful, or rushed to make your ride to a one o’clock movie or a football game, the power, intensity, and weight of the burning steel would melt silk blouses into gluey clumps, and turn summer dresses into parchment paper, leaving crazy brown sunflowers where daisies used to be.
But the iron wasn’t traded in or tossed away – it wasn’t part of the Great Planned Obsolescence. Of course by then I didn’t care about any of it. I was a teenager, overwhelmed with self loathing and a dull ache you could call lust.
While the days wore on like a sentence to me, there were milestones, markers, on our journey to the upwardly mobile American Middle Class.
Mums’s fancy aprons were the next to go. Back then, she had dozens of them – one for every holiday or function.
But gin and jealousy ruined most of our parties.
Friends and relatives stopped coming,
and Mother’s iron became dangerous, as Time and Memory seemed to flatten out and accelerate without us.
Our Cool Aquamarine home gradually went dark, and we observed the new automation as if at a picture show. But the motion was all herky-jerky, and our brains began to stick, and our bodies began to burn, as we fell shrink-wrapped onto the neon-lit stage, half human, half machine, still smelling
of Mother’s household helpers.
March Brainstorm
Let it blow!
Blow through,
rip, tear and take
back to Kansas
the decaying clutter of
last year’s living.
This mind left a mess here.
It held onto, no, dogmatized
the rites of living.
Now I live in Boo Radley’s basement,
with fetid furnishings,
stale air, and
clocks all stopped at 1:11.
[The curse of imagination is to see what you ask for.]
The spider-webbed fruit of my forced labors –
an etheric fabric of false beliefs –
covers everything,
denying all
access to light.
Dead…nothing but dead stuff.
Blow wind, blow it all away!
Make sweet storm wreckage of my mind.
I give you permission
to leave me bare.
It’s easier to risk rebirth
than pretend living.
