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

[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.