Tea Towels
My friend A. & I are chatting in the kitchen. I am drinking coffee, he is drying dishes. He has this thing about tea towels: he just hates wet tea towels and makes sure he has lots of spare ones, so he can get a dry one out as often as he likes. He remembers tea towels always being wet at home and how he hated the feel & smell when he had to dry dishes as a child.
Talking about tea towels he reminds me of something I once told him, that my mother told me once that the English clean their shoes with a tea towel. I must have been quite small and I can't remember the context, only that it was such a strange thing to say and how I was pondering and wondering about the significance of that remark.
The other day I was getting out an old tea towel to polish my shoes and the memory came back.
posted by Solveigh Goett at 8:26 pm
2 Comments:
I do remember helping my mother to do the washing up daily ... I especially liked to unfold clean, dry and well ironed tea towels. Who iron them nowadays? Definitely not me!
My sister brought me for Christmas Swiss tea towels with cows grazing, edelweisses and bells.
There is definitely a shared memory there of social gatherings around the sink!
I brought several still unopened packs of teatowels back with me from my mother's flat when she had to leave it. They are 'Halbleinen', the warp pure cotton, the weft pure linen. I don't like ironing and try to do as little as possible, but I do like ironing small pieces of linen such as tea towels or napkins, it's easy and satisfying in an odd way, like a caress that smoothes away creases almost without effort. I also like the hiss of the hot iron on the damp cloth and the smell. Sometimes I use a bit of starch spray to enhance the memories.
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