When I was a little kid, I spent a lot of time on our back porch. Our house, built by my grandfather in the late 1920s, was an early Craftsman style, high up on piers with five very large rooms inside, many tall, double-hung windows, and wide French doors separating the living room and the dining room. There was a huge wrap-around front porch with a hanging swing and a screened-in L-shaped back porch from which you could access the back yard. Supposedly, our  house had been the first private residence in Victoria to have both an indoor bathroom and electric lights, and I’m told people came from all over just to see such modern innovations when my grandparents first moved in.

     Of course, what it did NOT have was air-conditioning, and it was well into the 20th century after I had left for college before my mother finally installed some window units. Yes, we had fans and we could open those tall, double-hung windows to let the breezes blow through (when there were breezes), but South Texas is hot. In my memory, it seems almost my entire childhood was in the summer, which is why I spent most of my time on one of the porches.

     We lived in this house with my grandmother who was at home with me while my mother, a young widow, went to work. She was only about 60 when I was born, but she seemed already old with all sorts of ailments as far back as I can remember. She cooked some, made chili or mustard greens or malfouf, and she talked on the phone a lot, but mostly she complained of the heat and sat in the kitchen or on the front porch fanning herself and watching the world go by. Everyone knew “Miss Annie,” since she had lived in this same house since she was a young married woman, and she knew who to call for whatever needed to be done.

     And most things got done on the back porch. When I was really little, we still had an “ice box” and a man with giant tongs would come regularly to put a giant ice cube inside it. Service men — plumbers, electricians, repairmen, exterminators, yardmen (yes, they were always men) — would come to the back of the house first to check with my grandmother about what was to be done. Many of our own everyday chores also took place on the back porch: that was where we peeled pecans (from a tree in our front yard), where we shucked corn (bought from one of the local farmers who sold from his truck), where we made homemade ice cream (the old-fashioned way with rock salt), where we did the laundry (in a rattling, “walking” washing machine), and where Viola did the ironing. 

     As soon as the screen door slammed and I heard her lilting voice lamenting the heat, I knew “Aunt Viola” had arrived and I’d come running. She wasn’t really my aunt, of course, but children back then were not supposed to call adults by their first names, so women friends were addressed as “Aunt” first name or “Ms” first name.  Viola might as well have been a relative, though, since she had such a long history with three generations of women in my family. Long since retired by the time I came along, Viola was still a regular part of our lives and made herself available to help out when needed, when one of us was sick, for example, or with chores that my mother couldn’t get to. One of them was ironing, and we had a lot of ironing because, in those days, we wore nothing but natural cotton and linen fabrics. Even the bedsheets were all cotton.

     For me, it was a delight when Aunt Viola came to iron. After depositing her purse and in the kitchen and exchanging small talk with my grandmother, she would head out to the porch, gather up the laundry basket, and start sprinkling the clothes and rolling them up like jelly rolls to absorb the moisture. (We had an electric iron by then, a GE if I remember correctly, but one without a spray steamer.) Viola had a whole system, a set of rituals if you will, to her ironing and she was deservedly proud of her crisp and wrinkle-free results. 

     I, meanwhile, would settle myself in the doorway on a step down from the kitchen to watch her. I brought my dolls or my books or my drawing paper and Aunt Viola always engaged me with questions about what I was doing. “What you got there, Missy?” she’d ask, and then she’d listen as I went on and on about the stories I had made up for my dolls or the pictures I had drawn in my tablet. She never failed to be anything but interested and encouraging. “I do believe, you are one smart lit’l girl,” she’d say smiling and nodding her head. “You sure do have one smart granddaughter, Miss Annie,” she’d then shout up to my grandmother who was usually sitting at the kitchen table. 

     As I got older, the conversations with Aunt Viola got more interesting. She told me stories about my grandparents, how the family got their first car and Viola’s husband drove them everywhere (and fixed the car when it regularly broke down). She talked about my mother when she was a little girl, how her older brother was always trying to drag her into mischief and how she always had sense enough to say no. “Your mama was a smart little girl too, just like you,” Viola would tell me. 

     Sometimes she’d just hum softly while she was ironing, moving back and forth with a mesmerizing rhythm, and I would just sit still and listen. Naturally, she was the one who eventually taught me how to iron, how to begin with the collar and cuffs on a shirt and finish with the back yoke, or how to fold a pair of pants or shorts so as to iron the front creases sharply down the center. Once done, Viola would carefully put each garment on a wire hanger, hold it up for inspection, and then say, “See there? If you’re gonna’ do it, do it right.” Later on, when I was a teen and Viola was no longer able, the ironing fell to me. I think I made her proud.

     My mother, my grandmother, Aunt Viola — even the house I grew up in — are all gone now, but I think of those afternoons on the back porch every time I’m at the ironing board myself, which is often. I don’t have a back porch these days, but I do have an ironing board permanently set up in my sewing room, (because you can’t sew without an iron at the ready). And since I have always preferred natural fabrics and we now live in South Texas where every season is summer, we wear cottons and linens all year long. Most of all, I actually like to iron. For me, it’s a domestic meditation. In my mind’s ear, I can hear the humming and I find that soothing, as soothing as I did when I was a child and actually sat by the board with Viola.