Fitted Sheets

As I was doing the laundry and remaking the bed, I got to thinking. Fitted sheets may be one of the best things since sliced bread, but they are also challenging little buggers.

On the upside, fitted sheets make making the bed infinitely easier than doing so with flat sheets. I can make a hospital corner that would put most to shame, but they don't stay on nearly as well as the fitted ones. And now that they make the extra deep pockets, there is rarely a need to re-tuck them between the regular changes of the bed linens. It's generally quick and easy to make the bed with a nice smooth sheet.

There are, however, some downsides to the fitted sheet. The first being the folding of the thing. I imagine that we were all taught by our mother, or someone, that the way to fold a fitted sheet involves tucking the corners inside one another, tweaking the edges so that it approximates a rectangle and then folding as if it were really a flat sheet. Naturally, those puffy corners don't lay flat and the approximate rectangle never really works like a rectangle, so the procedure is doomed from the start. But we give it the old college try and stuff the malformed mass in a drawer to wrinkle up until we need it.

And, given the sizing phenomenon of mattresses and bedsheets, it isn't always as easy as one might hope to figure out which way is up when making the bed. With a twin bed, it is easy to tell which end of the sheet goes where because it is so obviously a skinny rectangle. But the larger sizes are more square than rectangle, although not quite. If they were truly square, it wouldn't matter which corner of the sheet was put on which corner of the mattress, but they are not. So what should be a simple, straight-forward task actually requires a bit of thought in trying to assess which way is the long way on the sheet and then, when you realize you have assessed incorrectly, rotating it so that it will actually fit on the mattress.

While contemplating this situation, I began to think that people are more like fitted sheets than one might have imagined. When we are oriented correctly for our lives, we have the attributes of the well placed sheet. We fit, things are smooth and comfortable, and there are no wildly wrinkled places.

However, it's in the folding that the trouble begins to appear. When we try to make ourselves approximate some shape that we are not, things get lumpy, out of shape and crammed into dark places. And the wrinkles begin to set in with a vengence so that we cannot function in the way we were meant to. Similarly, if we try to make ourselves fit the wrong way round, we are stretched and pulled all to no avail. We neither function nor look right.

All of which makes me wonder why we try to do contortions like that. Probably because we were expected to for so long that we just come to enforce those expectations on ourselves. Sadly, many times we don't even notice the knots that we have tied ourselves into. I think a better model might be to be like sheets hanging on a clothesline on a warm spring day, blowing in a breeze and gaily waving our colors for all to see.

Folding towels

I pull an armload of towels out of the dryer. Their warmth seeps into the core of my body as I carry them over to the table. The combination of hot cotton and dryer sheet assaults my nose with a smell both comforting and false.

I begin to fold them; matching corners to fold in half and then in half again. The bath towels, in tidy squares, smoothed and piled together. The hand towels in their own little group of rectangles. Then stacked together, bath towels on the bottom, wash cloths on the top, with the hand towels sandwiched in the middle.

I carry them to the linen closet, burying my nose in the fading warmth. Trying to catch the last little whiff as the cotton cools. I straighten out some rumpled towels already there and neatly stack each category of towels with its partners.

The repeated actions lend a rhythm to the chore that echos another beat. I feel that these rhythms that feed my soul are part of and are reflections of the all encompassing rhythm of life which winds through all living things. And it is this connection with that larger rhythm that brings me satisfaction in the smaller tasks.