The image of an albatross weighing around one's neck comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." For some reason the phrase has stuck in my head since grade school, but not the fact that the Mariner was punished for shooting a friendly albatross by having to wear its weight around his neck for life.
Suffice it to say that ironing is also for life pretty much. And ironing has a bit of emotional baggage for me. It probably doesn't weigh me down quite as much as the albatross did the Mariner, but at this time of the year the pile can mount up here at Struan Farm during "peak farmstay." Along with the cleaning and laundry. We do have duplicate sets of bed linens and carefully crafted "efficiency systems," but at a certain point the rubber meets the road, Karen has to confront her dread and tackle the ironing. When I'd much rather be outside, weeding even. John threatens to help, at which point I'm prompted into action, sufficiently humiliated that I'm obviously not coping with my responsibilities. I can't have that.
I know well from where this emotional baggage comes. My mother spent hours holed up in our basement (it was called the "cellar") when I was growing up, surrounded by mountains of laundry and ironing. She'd stand at the ironing board, smoking and watching her shows on a small black and white portable TV, late into the night. For me it was an image of servitude, also of being trapped or perhaps overwhelmed. The house had a laundry chute from the top floor, so everything just went shooting down the hole for my mother to deal with below.
I never really talked about what I saw as this dreadful situation with my mother. For all I know it was her secret hiding place, an oasis of quiet far from the madding crowd. But for me it was claustrophobic, something to be escaped at all costs. At a certain point she tried to get my sister and me to do our respective laundry and ironing (but of course not our brother). My main problem with this directive was that I worked in a department store part-time after school, and my sister tended to steal borrow and wear my nicer clothes. Which she then didn't launder or iron. So I was forced to look after both hers (really mine) along with mine.
Here at Struan Farm the ironing does get done, eventually. It did today. There is no cellar where it can be left to accumulate, I have nowhere to hide (okay, there is the garden!). Plus the guests need their freshly ironed bed linens and table cloths, we do have standards to maintain.
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