On rare summer afternoons when I was allowed to play inside instead of being banished to the backyard after breakfast, I got to witness my mother’s strange ritual.

Sometime after lunch, she would pull the drapes closed over the open windows. Then she’d strip off her house dress down to her slip — modest, but cooler. She’d unfold the ironing board with a screech of its metal legs, plug in the electric iron, and wait for the hiss of steam to signal that it was hot enough. Lick a finger and tap the bottom — just to be sure.

She’d fill an empty Nehi bottle with water and a little cornstarch, then top it with a metal doohickey — her term for anything without a proper name. This one turned the bottle into a sprinkler, perfect for misting collars and hems before she ironed them crisp.

Finally, the last and most crucial step: turn on the television. Then commence to ironing while the music of The Edge of Night, The Secret Storm, or General Hospital floated through the dim room. Amid the scent of hot cotton and damp starch, the drone of soap operas and the faint sizzle of steam were the soundtrack of a pre-air-conditioning summer in Wilson.

illustration by James Bernardin

My mother wasn’t unique. If I ran into any house on our block in the midafternoon, I’d likely see the same thing: women in their slips, maybe curlers in their hair, sometimes a cigarette clenched in their teeth, standing in semi-dark rooms and ironing while soap operas unfolded on-screen. In homes with maids, the Black women kept their white uniforms on, but the scene rarely changed — hot cotton, quiet labor, drawn curtains.

Even then, I wondered: Why did they do it right then — in the heaviest heat of the day?

But in eastern North Carolina, life didn’t stop for July or August, or even the long drag of September. You had to find ways to exist with the heat.

There was a little air-conditioning here and there in my 1960s childhood — mostly in movie theaters, like the Colony with its glass doors painted in blue-and-white letters: “Cold Inside,” like they were promising a miracle. Some businesses had wall units with paper streamers dancing on the vents, just to prove the air was really moving.

But at home? We were the people of porches and stoops after supper, chasing a breeze in the dark. We relied on rattling box fans shoved into windows, or, better yet, a sprinkler and a swimsuit and a whole afternoon. We drank from garden hoses and didn’t mind the metallic tang. It was just summer.

Sheets became sails in a child’s imagination, until someone tripped and pulled them down.

Keeping clothes clean was a constant chore. The washing machine might be tucked into a kitchen corner or a utility nook in the carport. Wet laundry was hauled outside to hang on clotheslines — always the same “T” of wood or iron pipe on either end, always the clothespin bag dangling from the line. Sheets became sails in a child’s imagination, until someone tripped and pulled them down onto the summer-dry grass. That was a major offense. No pool that day.

Looking back, I better understand my mother’s ritual. House dresses were simple, easy to sew. A slip offered modesty with a little relief from the heat. The drawn curtains kept out the sun; people believed that made a room cooler, and sometimes it did. There was rarely a breeze anyway.

And the soap operas? They weren’t idleness. The women I knew were never idle. If they sat down in front of a television, their hands were moving — snapping beans, working a hem, writing a letter. Just watching, like a lady of leisure? Not done.

Combine TV with ironing, and you were still industrious. No Queen for a Day in our house, thank you.

So why iron in the heat? Maybe because the work had to be done, and the heat was simply a fact — like gravity or laundry or Tuesday. Maybe because it gave you something to do when your body couldn’t sit still. All you needed was a dim room, an ironing board, a pile of sun-dried clothes, and a soap opera on the screen.

Then, you could let your mind drift. To Pine Valley. To Port Charles. Or wherever the soaps took you.