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 ironlike a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain massthrough a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
The other day I was in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara and paused by the impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. This was no small act, with me raised in Northern Ireland by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. I’m thinking of her this morning. It is Mother’s Day where I am from, and my mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her. The water is wide, but it takes only a second to transport me home. In my mind’s eye, she is standing at the ironing board in her kitchen, just as she was one morning when I visited her last year.
Smoothing out with hot steam the wrinkles in my old denim shirt – pausing to make a point about something I have since forgotten I am drawn back to all those times she would ease into a story I had heard a time or two before, to the lessons from behind the ironing board – the one about taking time to consider the lilies; to mark her words that there is plenty of time for work and plenty of fish in the sea; and, to believe that what’s meant for you won’t pass you by. Implicit in countless explicit admonishments not to wish my life away, was the fact that she was not wishing my life away. We’re a long time dead after all.
Mostly, my mother has tried – even still – to strike a balance between shielding me from the world’s dangers – tsunamis and hurricanes in far-away places I have never visited, mass shootings anywhere in the United States, or bombs in Belfast shops – while at the same time encouraging me to find the voice to explore its realities. But not all the time, especially not when I was in the throes of adolescent boredom, my eyes rolling to the heavens in response to the kind of home-spun wisdom I never thought I would miss. Not all the time, because our world was in Northern Ireland.
I recall one morning in the summer of my 12th year. It was wash day, and I was bored. She was ironing, the quiet of our little kitchen interrupted only by occasional bursts of steam and the voice of the man on the radio. With an uncharacteristic solemnity, he was telling us that on their way home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge, The Miami Showband, the Irish Beatles – had been attacked in a vicious, premeditated ambush, that members of the band were dead including the heartthrob lead singer.
Our David Cassidy was dead.
Until that moment, with unfathomable naïveté, people like us believed that musicians like The Miami were immune to the horrors of political violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. They represented what could be, themselves and their audiences criss-crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries. The band was as my dear friend, bass guitarist, Stephen Travers, recollected in his address to The Hague some years later, “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.”
That night in 1975 left no doubt that musicians were just as much a target as the rest of us. It became known as “The Day The Music Died,” a tagline that fails to convey the monstrosity of it, the chilling choreography behind it, and its haunting, harrowing legacy. As Belfast writer, Stuart Bailie, points out “The paramilitaries had literally shot the piano player.”
The handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, had been shot 22 times in the face. Twenty-two times. Vulnerable and on the ground, he had begged for mercy from men whose response was to continue shooting. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Stephen was gravely wounded and survived only by pretending to be dead. Later, he recalled the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
As the man on the radio continued his report, my mother kept ironing, all the while shaking her head and muttering to God. It was horrific – young musicians, Catholics and Protestants, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. No longer in denial, we wondered what would become of us? Would we stay? Some of us would, but many of us would leave, and maybe that’s why Granny’s final words in Kenneth Branagh’s movie Belfast pack such a punch, “Go now – don’t look back” – words I heard my own granny say to my parents so many times when I was very small. My parents toyed with the idea of immigration – South Africa, Australia, America – places some of our neighbors had chosen, but in the end they stayed, and I know it was probably one of the most difficult choices they ever had to make – especially in their later years as their American grand-daugher grew up far away, wondering why everybody else’s grandparents were always there for all the special days – birthdays and Christmases and trick-or treating.
I still feel guilty for leaving Northern Ireland, leaving them, especially now, our once massive extended family growing smaller – the last of my dad’s brothers died just a few weeks ago. My mother’s brothers all dead too. I have no more uncles. Perhaps the better thing – the best thing – would have been to stay – to strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night, to “stay on where it happens.” To keep going, like my mother and father, like my childhood friends, my cousins, like all the families most grievously harmed by our Troubles, all hurt but buoyed by hope and the promise of peace.
From the sectarian and political, to the deeply personal, Mothers Day always draws me back to another world, another time with her, when I was secure in my place; I knew my steps in the dance. On a day like today, the thousands of miles between us fall away, and there she is rushing in from our wee back garden, a great armful of shirts and sheets rescued from the clothes-line just before another rain. Next is the ironing, and then the folding, a precise\and intimate ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next.
My daughter learned those same moves not by my mother’s ironing board but on the sandy edges of California, late on an August afternoon just as the fog rolled in. 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. He wrote our names in the sand and waited for the tide to wash them away. Forever.
And still we dance.
I’m thinking of all the mothers back home today, to paraphrase Branagh’s dedication at the end of Belfast – the ones who stayed, the ones who left. And for all the ones who were lost.
Thank you for staying, ma – for being home.
As between clear blue and cloud,Between haystack and sunset sky,Between oak tree and slated roof,I had my existence. I was there.Me in place and the place in me
Happy Mothers Day.
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.”
