the pleasures of not ironing

I'm rather late to the single man's game of avoiding the ironing of my clothes-- this despite the fact that my mother used to practice that ritual herself when doing laundry. Her strategy: leave the clothes in the dryer for only twenty minutes, enough to warm them thoroughly, then pull them out, flap/snap them a few times like a mountain man breaking a snake's spine, then hang them up while they're still hot. Result: wrinkle-free garments.

At my old residence in Alexandria, our laundry room's ceiling was a riot of pipes and plastic hangers-- almost one hanger for each article of hangable clothing. Laundry day was usually impressive as a result: dozens and dozens of shirts and pants and sundry unmentionables would find themselves strung up. With all those dangling legs and torsos, the scene looked an awful lot like that moment in "Braveheart" when young William Wallace blunders into the village meeting house, only to discover that all the Scottish clan elders have been betrayed and hanged by the cruel, cruel English.

But I've learned-- albeit slowly, I admit-- that I, too, can avoid ironing: it's just a matter of plucking my pants and shirts out of the dryer as soon as I know they're dry, then hanging them up straightaway. Even though half of what I wear to work isn't permanent press, as long as I salvage the articles quickly, they remain more or less wrinkle-free.

I feel like a lazy bastard for abandoning my ironing ritual (I abandoned it about a month ago), but I treasure the extra free time. So it's a bit of a moral trade-off: a twinge in the conscience as my iron and ironing board sit sadly but dutifully in the corner, but a smile on my face as I flop into bed, content that there's one less item on my list of onerous tasks.


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