Ironing - A Family Tradition

I was a young mother of two boys, 20 years old, when my cousin Tommy was killed in Vietnam. The Marines came to tell Aunt Margie her middle son wouldn’t be coming home, or at least when he did it would be in a box, his body frozen for the two week trip home. 

We were a close family, cousins as close as siblings, aunts and uncles parents to us all. We all lived in the same area and not a week went by that I didn’t see my grandparents and parents and usually an aunt or uncle or two. Calls were made and one by one, or two by two, or in small groups, we all made our way to Aunt Margie and Uncle Bob’s house. They lived about two blocks from my parents. 

Everyone was stunned and pretty quiet. It wasn’t that we were shocked something like this could happen. Our family had experienced death before, and more often than most people I knew. An uncle killed in France in WWII. An uncle killed in Korea. Various other deaths unrelated to military service; a baby brother who didn’t make it past 3 days, an aunt who died at 13 years of age. A family friend shot by his girlfriend. As far as military service, we knew full well the cost of going to fight America’s wars. So we lived with the thought Tommy might never make it home.

As we all arrived, someone every few minutes, at Aunt Margie’s, hugs were given but I don’t remember that anyone really told her or Uncle Bob they were sorry for their loss. It was a communal loss, each member loved by everyone. It’s that way in close families. He belonged to all of us, a member of our tribe as we say today. Family as we said back then. 

I settled on the sofa and watched Aunt Margie iron clothes. She wasn’t crying or screaming, as I’m sure she felt like doing. She just quietly ironed. Jeans, shirts, pants, anything she could find to iron. Someone told her not to worry with that, just to come sit down. But she said she couldn’t. She had to stay busy. She said it quietly as was her way. She was a pretty, quiet woman and she’d had a hard life. Of all the women in our family, she was the one who seemed to me the most fashionable with an understated, classic style. Her thick black hair cut in a short bob at times and piled on her head at other times. She wasn’t too big or too small, just the right size. She had a lovely soft laugh and an easy smile. Rare in my family of loud, boisterous people. 

Watching her calmly iron clothes as her son lay dead on the other side of the world broke my heart. And it still does. I’ve seen people scream and cry and fall on the floor upon hearing bad news, of facing the loss of a loved one. But I’ve never seen anything more heartbreaking then Aunt Margie quietly ironing clothes as the family who loved her and who loved Tommy sat all around her. I’ve seen that same strength and calmness in others of my family, facing the loss of stillborn babies, of husbands, of children, of parents. And each time I think back to Aunt Margie and her quiet grace. We all learned from her and from others like my own parents, and it’s passed on to the generations that didn’t even know her. 

I rarely iron anymore. I choose to wear clothes that don’t need ironing and I’m not a fussy dresser. I’m retired so I have a boring wardrobe. Once, years ago now, when I was going through a life changing period in my life, I faced depression and despair. My best friend, who was worried about me, made me an appointment with her therapist. It was a week later before I could see her. In that time I managed to shake it off and I was much better. Because I had the examples of plenty of strong women in my family. When I talked to the therapist I jokingly told her the terrible thing about my being so down was that all my clothes were permanent press, as we called them back then, and I didn’t have anything to iron. I said if I’d had some clothes to iron, as was our family tradition in times of great stress, I’d be ok. We had a nice talk and life went on and so did I. 

I ironed a few clothes today. Not mine. I own two shirts that need ironing. I seldom wear them, and when I do I take them to the cleaners 45 miles away in Durango. Today I was helping out a loved one who has no time to iron. And as I do every time I run the hot iron over the fabric, smoothing out the wrinkles, Aunt Margie comes to mind. She’s there in her sleeveless button shirt and tan “pedal-pushers”, as we called cropped pants back in 1970. Ironing her family’s clothes, looking up every so often to ask if any of us need anything. 

What were your favorite toys as a child?

When I was growing up in my large family of 7 siblings, we played a lot of board games. Clue and Monopoly were the ones we played most often. 

I wasn’t a big fan of dolls. I don’t think I ever had a Barbie doll. I know I had a baby doll one Christmas when I was about 7 because there’s a photo of me holding one. But the only doll I remember was one that was a toddler about 2-3’ tall. You could hold her hand and make her walk along with you. It was nothing electronic that made her walk. You just had to kind of sway her from side to side causing her legs to move. She had a hole where her mouth was so you could feed her a fake bottle. One day my older brother David and I crammed saltine crackers in her mouth. Of course, you couldn’t ever get them out. After that you could hear them rattling around inside her if you shook her. 

We played “Cowboys and Indians” in the back yard a lot, shooting each other with play guns and galloping around the yard. We also played Tarzan, which was a very popular TV show then. We didn’t have any gear for that, we mostly just ran around doing our Tarzan yells and pretending to jump in rivers full of alligators. 

We also had jump ropes and one Christmas I got a pogo stick. I never could jump on that thing. I always started falling over! Other outdoor games we played were hopscotch, Red Light Green Light, and Red Rover. None of these required equipment. We never had any concrete driveways or sidewalks so we didn’t even need chalk for hopscotch. We used a stick and drew the diagram in the dirt. We also played “catch” with a baseball and gloves.

We had a swing set and one year we got a thing called a twirl-go-round. It had four seats and a handle at each seat that you pulled back, opposite sides pulling/pushing together. This made it rotate around.

And, of course, books to read where a favorite. I spent many days up in our big mimosa tree in the back yard reading. 

We all had bikes to ride too if we were old enough. It was pretty safe to ride in our neighborhood of small streets back then. When a rec center opened a few blocks away the older of us kids rode with a younger one on the back of our bikes during the summer to go swimming there. 

Other than the playground equipment we had, none of our toys were expensive. And our swing sets weren’t the top of the line variety. Buying bikes for 7 kids was costly but we never had high dollar bikes, just the kind like you’d find today at Walmart. The dolls we got were generic brands. Even if there had been American Girl dolls we couldn’t have afforded them. Back then there were Madame Alexander dolls but we didn’t have those and could have cared less. I’m sure we didn’t even know there was such a thing. We had the most fun in our back yard where imagination was the only thing required for most games.

What is one of your favorite children's stories?

I read Little Women over and over. In fact, I had the kind and sweet Beth in mind when I chose Sarah’s middle name Elizabeth. As it turned out Sarah’s personality was more like Jo than Beth! A writer, an independent woman with a mind of her own. Though both sisters cared for other people not as fortunate as they were, it has served Sarah well to be like Jo. 

All of us girls who read Little Women wanted to be like Jo, of course. And most of us like to think we are, though that’s debatable. She was, I suppose, my first hero in literature. Someone who didn’t fit the norm of what was expected of a woman during her time of living. Someone who wanted a certain kind of life and she went out and found it. And if she hadn’t met her unique and lovely husband who liked her the way she was, she would have still lived her life on her terms, not the terms of others. 

Another little book I liked was the kids’ book The Little Red Hen. It’s about a hen who did all the work on a farm to grow food for her family. She asked for help all along the way and all the other animals turned her request down. She’d always say “who will help me plant the wheat” or whatever stage the process was in. “Not I” said the pig, the cow, etc. But when she had the bread baked and asked “who will help me eat the bread”, well, everyone said I will to that! And she said no, you won’t! Most of us don’t have the nerve to tell people that, especially if they’re our family or close friends! 

Laziness was the greatest sin in my mother’s book. She was one of the hardest working people I knew or will ever know. But she always let it slide when it was time for the lazy folks to pay the piper. She didn’t have the heart to refuse anyone. But that Little Red Hen put her foot down and it was good for the spirit to see it! And hopefully taught everyone reading the story to be helpful. This book always reminds me of my mom.

Where Did You Go On Vacations As A Child?

I can’t fault my parents for their vacation choices, though for the most part I disliked them. A family with 7 kids to provide for and not much money, we were lucky to get to go anywhere. 

I always wished we were one of those families who went to the kinds of places I saw at the movies. A fun summer camp in the mountains like Hayley Mills did in The Parent Trap, where I could learn to canoe, practice archery, and have campfires. Or to a country house in Maine, like Hayley did in Summer Magic. Hayley, it appeared was living the vacation life I wanted! 

I also longed to go west on vacations. To ride the range with Roy and Dale. To see the mountains in Colorado and California. To go to Laramie and Cheyenne, places where the “real” cowboys lived! To ride horses where the creeks and rivers were clear and bubbly. To watch an eagle fly. 

I wanted to spend the summer in a big Adobe ranch house in a place with a Hispanic culture. Where the ranch hands spoke Spanish. In my mind I would immediately pick up the language and converse with them. Desert flowers would bloom around the ranch and saguaro cactus would cover the flatlands. Soft guitar music would come from the courtyard as twilight approached. 

None of this happened. Not even close, not even a budget friendly version. We never got in the car, all 9 of us in our 3 seat station wagon, never pointed it west and just drove away. 

My family was firmly rooted in the southern culture where we lived. All the men were hunters and fishermen. Our vacations, if we weren’t visiting family in Louisiana, were to fishing camps in the middle of swampy woods. We sometimes went to Lake St. John in northeastern Louisiana. We rented a cabin with our favorite aunt and uncle and cousins. The men and boys fished. I have no recall of what us girls did. I can remember somewhere cleaning little bream, scraping the scales off with a spoon. I asked my dad if it hurt the fish when we cut their heads off and he said no, they didn’t have any nerves. I suspected he made that up but I chose to believe it as I held the squirming little fish down and ended their lives. 

Once we went to a horrible fish camp a friend of my dad’s owned beside a small lake. There wasn’t an indoor bathroom. You had to walk out on the wooden porch to get to the “outhouse” type room. Getting up one night to go there, I saw the moon shining on the lake, lighting up hundreds of alligator eyes lurking just above the water. I was horrified. That trip also sent my siblings and I scurrying as fast as we could to escape some wild hogs we ran across in the woods. When we saw the movie Old Yeller, I could identify with the time the boys had to climb a tree to escape wild javelinas!

But one time we went on a vacation that down the road changed my life. We had gone to the mountains of Arkansas to visit my mom’s Aunt Leta, my Mamaw’s sister. She lived in Star City, Arkansas. We went up to the mountains during that trip, not staying with Aunt Leta. I don’t even know where we went. I remember we drove on a road on the edge of a mountain and I saw chipmunks for the first time. I fell in love with small clear mountain streams. So different than the huge muddy, swampy lakes and rivers I was familiar with, filled with alligators, water moccasins, cottonmouths, snapping turtles, and giant alligator gars. 

I vowed that one day I’d live somewhere where water was clear, where rocks were everywhere, and it didn’t rain all the time. It took years for that dream to come true. I married young and had kids. We seldom had money for vacations and anytime we went anywhere it was usually close to see friends or to Louisiana to visit relatives. But one time when the boys were around 9-11 we also went to Arkansas. To Lake Ouachita camping. And I remembered how beautiful the mountains were, how different from what I’d always known. How clear the water was. 

Many years later, when Rickie and I bought our property in central Texas and later built our little cabin, I finally made it to a place of clear streams and rocks. And hills if not mountains. Today I live in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As Merle sings after losing his love in Kern River, “I live in the mountains, I drifted up here with the wind”. And so I did after losing Rickie. I think had he lived we might have come here together, as we’d talked about it many times. 

It took me 60 years but I feel like I’m finally where I always wanted to be. While my childhood vacations weren’t normally to my liking, one was and it was key to choosing both my home in central Texas and here in Colorado. Though the credit for both those places belongs almost exclusively to Rickie. Who taught me you don’t have to stay somewhere just because you’ve always been there. 

I’m grateful for my family, strapped for money and having to travel with all of us kids in the car. I can’t imagine how stressful planning these trips must have been. Trying to get 9 people’s clothes packed, enough food for the road, and refereeing our squabbles. We rarely ate out, even while traveling. We stopped at rest stops for lunch and cooked our meals when we arrived at our destination. And though I didn’t like the places we went, I can appreciate that our parents tried to give us a break from our everyday lives. And, for me, that one trip influenced me more than they ever knew. 

My First Car

For my 72nd birthday Sarah and Justin gave me a subscription to something called StoryWorth. Every week I get a question to answer about my life. At the end of the year I get a book with all the stories. I thought I’d share some of the stories here on my blog as I write them. So many questions I wish I’d asked my parents and grandparents when I had the chance. I hope you enjoy reading some of my stories. 

My first car was a 1967 Ford Mustang. I was a high school senior and it was my graduation gift from my parents. My dad had been to the Ford dealership for some other reason. That evening he told me while he was there that he got to talking to the salesman and he showed him this Mustang. He was offered what he called a good deal on it and he thought he’d get it for me. I couldn’t believe it! My older brother David already had a 1965 Mustang. I don’t know if he bought that himself or if my parents helped. I was very naive and uninformed about financial matters back then. 

The cars most of my friends drove were older model cars, handed down to them or bought used with what little money they had from part-time jobs, or help from parents. They were huge long cars. Some with big fins on the back. The small sporty Mustang was nothing like what we were used to. It became a favorite as soon as Ford released it. 

I wish I could say that I understood it wasn’t what kids in my middle class neighborhood normally got for graduation. By middle class I don’t mean what’s considered middle class today but the modest middle class lifestyle of the 1960s. A brick home with maybe 1400-1600 sq ft on a quiet street in a new subdivision. Small lots, one tree planted by the builder in the front yard. A chain link fence in the back yard. Working class people who took vacations close to home or to visit relatives. 

But I had no grasp of what kind of money my parents had or of what anything cost. I knew we were better off than when we lived in Monroe, Louisiana where I shared a bedroom with my three sisters and our baby brother’s crib was in our room also. But I didn’t really know if it stretched my parents to buy me this car or if it was an easy purchase. 

My car was a burgundy color. I don’t think it was a popular color, not like the cherry red ones you see a lot at car shows now. It wasn’t my favorite color but it didn’t matter, I loved it! Only one problem. It had a standard transmission and I didn’t know how to drive it! 

My friend and fellow student David Krupa taught me how to drive it. He lived across the street from us. He bravely sat in the passenger seat as the Mustang jerked along, often dying, while I tried to learn to use the clutch and shift gears. Our heads bobbing back and forth with each gear change! Sometimes when I’m going down one of the high mountain passes here and downshift to control my speed I think about learning to drive a standard back when my friend and I were kids and with the confidence - or ignorance - of youth, jumped in the little burgundy Mustang and headed down our street in a car I didn’t know how to drive. 

I only had the Mustang a year. I got married the summer after high school and by the next summer I had a baby. We needed a bigger more practical car and replaced it with a Plymouth Satellite. I’m not sure that was more practical but it was bigger. I’ve had a lot of cars and pickups since then. Some I hated, some I liked, and a very few I loved. Most I’ve forgotten. But I’ll never forget the little burgundy mustang and the time I was innocent of the world and the cost of things, and how lucky I was and didn’t realize it. 

Pensando en Ti, Thinking of You

I opened the sliding glass door to the third floor balcony. It was a tiny balcony, maybe 3 feet deep if you counted the 6” stuccoed railing. Just enough to step out on. No furniture was there, there wasn’t room. Yesterday I had pulled back the curtains in time to see the setting sun turn the Sandia Mountains the red color that caused exploring Spaniards to name the range after a watermelon. It only lasted a couple of minutes, you had to be right there at the right time.   

The hotel I was staying at in Albuquerque had a nice big courtyard, landscaped with trees and plants native to the area. Tables to sit and enjoy the space were placed all around it and there was a nice outdoor fireplace area. The evening before I had wandered out there to sit a while at a table. A man, close to my age, sat by the fireplace alone. I wondered if he was waiting for someone, maybe killing time until the bar opened, or waiting on his wife to come down so they could go someplace good to eat. I had thoughts of my favorite place to eat there, the High Noon Saloon in Old Town. Maybe, like me, he was there alone, not for a getaway but with a purpose. 

There were balconies overlooking the courtyard. However my room was on the opposite side of the hallway from these rooms. The balcony off my room overlooked the busy I-25. It runs from Las Cruces in the south to Wyoming in the north, right through Denver and the more populated areas of Colorado. The traffic noise was unbearably loud for this small town girl. On the opposite side of the highway I could see a Target and next door a Cabela’s. 

It was early morning and the sun was up. I’d finished my mission the day before. A torn rotator cuff diagnosed with the upright MRI I had driven over 4 hours to have. Because I was claustrophobic and that was the closest one. In a few minutes I would finish packing and head back home, surgery to repair the tendon in my future. 

There was no logical reason to open the sliding door that morning. The traffic noise had already reached rush hour proportions. It wasn’t soothing. 

But 35 years of traveling to New Mexico from the hot and humid Gulf Coast had conditioned in me to always open the doors and feel the cool dry breeze. Even though I now live where I can feel that most of the year, it’s just second nature to me. It brings back all the memories of trips there with Rickie, and sometimes with Sarah. 

We’d get off the plane, or out of the car, and that’s the first thing we’d notice, the air. We’d take a deep breath and smile at each other. And wish we could always breathe that kind of air. 

So without even giving it a thought I opened the balcony door and finished packing. A smell, a coolness in the air, and the memories came back. Happy memories. As I drive out of town headed toward Santa Fe, then north on small two lane backroads, heading home, Selena came up on my playlist, singing Pensando en Ti. I don’t speak Spanish but I knew she was singing my song.

These memories weren’t sad for me. I was in a peaceful place in my mind. Even the 45 minute road construction delay didn’t distress me. I look forward to returning when the weather is warmer and staying in Old Town Albuquerque. Maybe return to Santa Fe on the Turquoise Trail and stop in Madrid for a little break. Take my time. As New Mexico, in its sense of timelessness, beckons you to do.