It's Not Fair!

Normally I blog about words, books, and kids, but today I'm making an exception. This is a gripe!

In Northern California where I live the weather isn't too hot. In fact it's unusually cool for this time of year. But early in July we had extremely high temperatures and those could return since August is usually the hottest month of the year here.

Normally I wear clothes made of cotton or rayon and polyester during warm weather, but when it gets extremely hot I switch to pure cotton, linen, or rayon since those fabrics are much cooler than synthetics.

But all of those kinds of cloth need to be ironed. And ironing clothes or even using a steamer requires heat and raises the temperature where the work is being done, and that's not how it should be. The cool fabrics shouldn't be the ones that need heat to care for them.

Of course I can iron clothes in the evening when the temperature has cooled off, or early in the morning before it warms up. And I do have air conditioning so that extra heat is not really much of a problem.

Come to think of it, I have a roof over my head, clothes to wear, electricity, clean water, adequate food, and lots of other things many people in the world don't have.

It's so easy to gripe and complain about little things that don't really matter when I should be grateful about the things that do matter.

From now on when I must iron clothes, even on a hot day, I'll try to use that time to think about all the good things I have and to say, "Thanks."

Ironing

Do you iron clothes?

Back before perma-press, wrinkle-free, and other synthetic fabrics were available nearly all clothing that wasn't sent to the dry cleaners had to be ironed. Housewives often set aside one day every week to iron all the clothes their family needed. Before steam irons, clothing would be sprinkled with water and rolled up for a few hours or overnight so the moisture spread through all the fabric before it was ironed. It was a lot of work and we were glad when the newer fabrics came along.

Now we still wear some clothes made from those traditional fabrics, and even the newer ones often need touching up, but ironing isn't nearly as difficult a chore as it was years ago.

Recently I had bought an outfit made from crinkle-cotton that came with instructions saying it shouldn't be ironed at all, but it was badly wrinkled even when washed according to the directions. I also had another crinkle-cotton outfit made by a different company that said it was okay to use a low iron and no steam. Since I couldn't wear the first outfit as it was, I decided to be brave and iron it the way the instructions on the second outfit said to do. It worked!

Years ago I never thought I'd be grateful that something could be ironed.