Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

It is Mother’s Day in Ireland. I am hoping the flowers arrived and that the florist remembered to write on the card, “I’ll see you next weekend.” Next weekend. It’s been a long three years, the pandemic and its attendant restrictions keeping us apart. As my brother – only 250 odd miles away from her – reminded me, “this thing has made a mockery of distance. I’m only a few hours drive away but I might as well be on the moon.”

The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me to the South Derry village where she lives with my dad. In the movie that’s playing in my head, she is no longer just inches away from me on the screen of my phone struggling to remember a password. She is young again, her hair red and short. She is standing at the ironing board, smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in pillowcases, telling me a story I have heard before. When she returns the steaming iron to its stand, she’ll pause to deliver some bit of home-spun wisdom I’ll carry with me always, the kind of thing that only Irish mammies say: What’s for you won’t pass you by.

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Meanwhile, my father is fixing something. There was always a home renovation project – always – and as the work continues in the Mexican house I now call home, I wish my dad were here – to do it right.  It’s an older house, the kind that needs more care and cleaning and patience than I anticipated. I suppose home renovation is a bit like childbirth – you forget the pain  – which might explain why people do it more than once – people like my parents. And, I suppose, people like me.

Before YouTube videos and apps for that, daddy taught himself how to make things – and how to fix them. Ma was always close by, ready to hand him whatever tool he needed – and to clean up after him. I remember one particular spate of home improvement when he single-handedly gutted the ground floor of my childhood home to create a new kitchen and dining room. Then he added a laundry room, doing all the wiring and plumbing himself. He added a glasshouse in which he grew tomatoes and other plants not native to Northern Ireland – the slips of which my mother probably ‘collected’ from plants and trees in places they visited.  Exotic and far from home, they were right at home with him. He painstakingly decorated the outside of the glasshouse with dozens of scallop shells that he and my mother collected from a beach in County Donegal.

I’ve said it before, and I mean it. Daddy belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem – he has the “Midas touch” of the poet’s thatcher and the grasp of the diviner. Frugal and a fixer, his is the artisanal handiwork that imbues the Derry townlands he crossed on his motorbike as a young man in the early 1960s. Ever the pragmatist, he reminds me that this began as a matter of economic necessity – the potato-digging, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, his craft and carpentry all shaped by and shaping the place that produced him. His first project was a guitar for my uncle – his parents lacking the means to buy an instrument for the boy who loved to sing,  my father – at 10 – figured out how to make it.

A man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. If you’re going to do it, do it right. He used to obsess over such things with a sense of urgency that I now understand. The truth – I think – is that we want to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. Sometimes we are no match for the things that cannot be fixed.

My mother knows this, having lost too much sleep since that November evening over a decade ago when the phone rang too late to bring anything good.  I imagine her telling my dad to turn down “The Late Late,” on the telly,  so she can hear me deliver the blow. “What? What’s this? What’s this anyway?” crying into the phone, “My wee girl has cancer! My wee girl has cancer!” And again, another November night and in her Castledawson kitchen, undone once more, unable to fix my broken heart when the man who loved me died so far away from us.

Just when she thought she no longer needed to watch over me, she is right back to where she started in 1963, hoping for only the very best for her wee girl – hoping I will stay safe and healthy, that I will wash my hands and wear my mask and if I need another booster shot, to get it.

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There is a  clothesline in my garden, and when I brush past it, I know I am home. One day last Spring, armed with what seemed an acceptable translation on my phone – “pinzas para ropa” – I drove over the kind of cobbled streets that would not be out of place in Connemara, to a little shop in the village. “Si amiga,” and she handed me a bag of pastel colored plastic clothes pegs. Victorious, I returned to my sunny kitchen and while the workers took their siesta, the cumbia no longer at full blast, I did a load of whites and turned my back on the dryer, because – and every Irish person will understand this – “there’s great drying out there.”

Standing back to watch my blouses flutter in the warm breeze, my mother is with me.  She is rescuing a great armful of sheets and towels and daddy’s shirts from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Soon there will be the folding, a precise ritual, and my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.

My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen on the Dublin Road, but on the sandy edges of California before the fog rolled in late on an August afternoon. Facing me, a blanket stretched between us, she steps forward, intent on matching her corners to mine, my edge to hers. In the middle we meet, and there we pause to make the final fold.

Unbeknownst to us, her father took photographs, and he wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.

And still we dance.

Happy Mother’s Day.  I’ll see you next weekend.

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From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I

“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line 
Made me think the damp must still be in them 
But when I took my corners of the linen 
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem 
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook 
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, 
They made a dried-out undulating thwack. 
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand 
For a split second as if nothing had happened 
For nothing had that had not always happened 
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, 
Coming close again by holding back 
In moves where I was x and she was o 
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.“

Listen here as Seamus Heaney reads the poem.

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