a house, a stove, an iron

[asakiyume]

sartorias's really moving entry on places she's lived and what became of them reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday when I went out looking for an iron. I'd been ironing, and mine had given up the ghost, just one sleeve short of a finished shirt. (You know what that means! I finished ironing that sleeve by heating up my cast-iron skillet on the stove. We need full use of all our limbs in this household.)

There were no irons at the supermarket and no irons at the CVS, but at the Dollar Store I hit the jackpot. The cashier, a woman maybe in her forties, was chatty, so I told her the story of ironing the remaining sleeve, and she expressed delight at meeting someone else who used a cast iron skillet and said it was good thinking. I said, "Well, it's what the old irons were made of, after all. My grandmother had a couple of them--she used them as doorstops."

"My great grandmother had some of those, and she used them as doorstops too! She used them to keep us out of her bedroom," the cashier exclaimed. "But I can't picture using one as an actual iron."

"You know those old cast-iron stoves? They used to put the iron right on that, and then when it was hot, you could use it."

"My great-grandmother had one of those stoves!" the cashier said, eyes shining.

"So she could have used the irons as actual irons," I said. "Where did she live?"

"Oh, over in Bondsville. You know where 'the grog shop' is? Across the street from that. It's totally different now though. After she died no one wanted the house--except me; I wanted it, but I couldn't afford it--so they sold it. The new owners totally changed it. I look at it, and it's not--it's just not the same house."

--All that's left are memories and shared stories. But sometimes those can be so vivid, like sartorias's, or the cashier's, and when you share them, they live in someone else's mind, too.

Here's a tailor's stove with an iron on it, courtesy of --Kuerschner 17:20, 1 March 2008 (UTC) - own work, own possession, Public Domain, Link

Comments

[sartorias]

My grandmother collected some of those old irons, which was actually amusing, as she was quite bitter about having had to use them as a kid.

What a fun conversation!

[asakiyume]

I bet she liked them much better as decorations than as tools for a hated chore!

[sartorias]

Oh, yes. She did indeed. There were other chore things she collected as decorations, such as a butter churn, and a pump organ from the Victorian era that somebody sold in a garage sale for $25.00. (She had hated having to treadle the organ at church for her mom, the organist, especially in winter.)

But I remember her hooting and cackling when we went by a neighborhood garage sale and someone was selling porcelain chamber pots as fine vases with lids.

[asakiyume]

I remember finding chamber pots in my grandmother's attic--at least, I think that's what they must have been.

[minoanmiss]

*beams at you and her*

Also, I read Sartorias' beautiful musing.

[asakiyume]

^_^

[sholio]

Wandered in here via network! We had one of those old irons when I was a kid, and a cast-iron stove to heat it on, but I don't ever remember using it; it was mostly just a curiosity that my parents picked up at some point. (My folks were hippies and I grew up off the grid in the 80s, so we had a lot of stuff like that.)

[asakiyume]

Welcome welcome!

As an adolescent, I yearned to have your childhood; I thought it must be wonderful. rachelmanija's memoir and talking to other people who actually lived that life made me realize the many possible downsides. How was it for you?

[sholio]

To be honest, I really enjoyed it. It probably made me, perhaps, somewhat more solitary and weird than I would otherwise have been, but I suspect I would've been solitary and weird if I'd gone to public school in a town, too. (I was home-schooled all 12 years.)

It didn't go so well for my brother and sister because they were more gregarious than I was and less self-directed, and I know they look back on it less fondly than I did. But I was the kind of kid who just wanted to be by myself all day with a book and a notebook to write in, and that was essentially the childhood I had. This isn't to say it was idyllic - my parents were a mess, and there were various dangers that included being menaced by wild animals and lost in snowstorms and nearly drowning in a flooded creek, but I'd honestly rather have had that childhood than the various other likely possibilities (which mostly would've been variants on growing up on the low end of working-class in a larger town or city).

[asakiyume]

Past me is reading this and saying, "See? See??? You would have loved it!"

Do you still have the notebooks?

[jreynoldsward]

Yeah, that's probably the kind of childhood that would have worked for me, too. Oh well.

[sovay]

--All that's left are memories and shared stories. But sometimes those can be so vivid, like sartorias's, or the cashiers, and when you share them, they live in someone else's mind, too.

Thank you for sharing this set.

We have a cast-iron skillet. It belonged to my grandparents.

[asakiyume]

Having a cast-iron skillet is great; having one with a heritage is even better.

[zyzyly]

My former father-in-law, who was a poor tailor in the Philippines had these kind of irons, and a pedal sewing machine.

[asakiyume]

I believe it. I was seeing online when I was looking for pictures that in Zimbabwe they're eager for these kinds of irons. To be honest, I use my modern-day iron like a flat iron--i.e., just as a hot metal surface--and then just sprinkle clothes with water to get steam. I have a superstitious belief that that makes the iron last longer, because there are fewer mechanisms to break. And, it works better, at least with the way I iron, for getting the clothes looking nice.

...Actually, that comment went off topic. What I meant to say with the I-believe-it and Zimbabwe story was that technologies that seem old-fashioned in one place can be in use elsewhere, and it's not merely (though your and my examples suggest it) a first-world, third-world thing. Sometimes it's just cultural habit--like that in England it's still common to get milk delivered to your doorstep in glass bottles, whereas here, that's like some special upscale localist perk you can get in some places, but otherwise doesn't happen much.

[skygiants]

Now I want to try ironing with a cast-iron skillet just for the heck of it! (But I still and will always miss the industrial iron with the vacuum table we had at the costume shop where I used to work.)

[asakiyume]

Ooh, and now **I** want to see an industrial iron set-up.

[pameladean]

I would never dare put a cast-iron skillet, of which we have something like six, on a shirt sleeve. It would never be clean enough. We clean the insides, of course, but the outsides don't get much more than a wipe in case there's a piece of onion or something stuck on there.

P.

[sholio]

That was my exact thought! We have a bunch of them too, and I can't imagine putting them in contact with clean clothes on purpose. Maybe other people's cast iron is a lot less, er, black and greasy on the outside than mine is ...

[asakiyume]

But if they're dirty on the bottom, don't they smoke on the stove? We're always wiping the bottoms so they **won't** smoke.

[sholio]

No, but we have a gas stove, come to think of it, so we use them on an open flame and that probably contributes to the outsides being a little bit black. The Dutch oven that's used in the oven isn't that way (though I still don't think I'd want to put it on a shirt because it's well seasoned and therefore a trifle greasy!).

I mean, I wouldn't exactly call them dirty any more than a well-seasoned cast iron skillet is dirty, but it is greasy.

[asakiyume]

Yeah--I was realizing that it must in part be because we have an electric stove.

[sholio]

It makes a lot of sense to me that it'd be the big difference! I could see myself working harder to keep them clean if I had an electric range, especially one of those flat-topped ones. Cooking with gas sears the pan every time.

[asakiyume]

I understand! This one was clean on the outside, though, so it was okay.

[queenoftheskies]

My grandparents had those irons and my mother brought one home at one point to use as a doorstop. :)

[asakiyume]

They make very good ones! Apparently they were all the rage as such in our grandparents' generation.

[amaebi]

When I heard Nathan Englander talk about translation, he said that every piece of writing is a translation as one attempts to get a concept from one's own mind to that of others. So when you say that the kitchen pain is a little dirty, nd the ceiling low, that the refrigerator hums and there's a copper-coloured fish-shaped mold on the wall above the door-- how does that appear in the minds of others, read through the kitchens they've known?

[asakiyume]

Yes!

I remember when a small detail shocked and enlightened me: it was in, I think Things Fall Apart (but it might have been a different novel by a different African novelist): it was a scene in which someone was shot in their home, and blood blossomed out on their clothing, looking like palm oil, said the narrative. And I was like, whaaaa--hold up. Blood is red, but oil is yellow but-- and that's how I learned that palm oil was red. ... I think maybe what I'm describing isn't quite exactly what you and Nathan Englander are describing, but right next door: I would picture a kitchen one way, and things in the kitchen--like cooking oil!--one way... so it takes adding a cue/clue, maybe a very dramatic one like a comparison with blood, to make me see the thing the way it needs to be seen.

[amaebi]

Yes, absolutely.

When I was little I read stuff from all sorts of times and places that were both technologically and sociologically different from 19602-1970s Southern Illinois. It didn't often bother me bit that I didn't quite understand some detail of background or of living-- adults were so sophisticated, so how could I? And really, practically every novel was set, in my mind, in our house, or in our double-lot yard, or occasionally in our wider neighbourhood.

Now, as a not particularly sophisticated adult, I know much of what, say, Louisa May Alcott was talking about in that take-for-granted way.

So I'm pointing out techno/sociological tidbits to Chun Woo as we read Little Women, and this often leads us on funny pathways, like epochal changes in the clothing industry. Fortunately he likes them.

[asakiyume]

Your reading-together experience sounds like a lot of fun!

[wayfaringwordhack]

What a wonderful read, all this reminiscing, both in the post and comments.

[asakiyume]

I love it too--loved talking to the cashier, love what people are sharing here.

[rimturse]

Ah yes, I have an old cast iron stove. No iron, though, but my childhood neighbours had one. They had it in the window sill for decoration. It was very pretty with a wooden handle and intricate patterns on the cast iron. :)

Sometimes I think it's pity we don't make things "pretty" the same way as back then.

[asakiyume]

I agree with you about making things pretty!

I guess people are sort of talking about pretty when they talk about things like "the Apple aesthetic," but while you could argue that phones or tablets are stylish, it's not the same thing as being pretty.

[pjthompson]

That's what driving through my old neighborhood is like these days. Everything is changed. Only my memory populates it with the people and places that once were there.

[asakiyume]

Sometimes it's not nostalgia, it's sadness, or grief, or loneliness... I'm sorry ;_;

[pjthompson]

No, it's not nostalgia. Closer to grief. But it's the way of the world.

[asakiyume]

I was thinking that too. This sorrow is just the way the world is ...

[pjthompson]

I'm not a Buddhist but I sometimes (if I can remember it) take comfort in their attitude to change. Nothing remains the same and we have to let the river flow. We can't hold it back.

[asakiyume]

I agree. Nodding at everything you say here.