Made

My mom was a nurse who taught me to make hospital corners. I put her lessons to work every morning as I smooth the bed sheets and prepare to start my day on a crisp, optimistic note. And I firmly believe that if you don’t make the bed regularly, wrinkles collect until getting in is like reclining on a washboard.

My husband does not believe in making the bed. He reasons it’s a waste of time to do something every morning you undo every evening.

So it really meant something when he made me a bedspread as a wedding present.

He started with a large piece of mud cloth, the handwoven cotton textile from Mali recognizable by its bold geometric designs created by an intricate process that involves dyeing in a bath of leaves and branches and painting with clay. When he made the spread we were living in South Africa, which drew craftspeople and traders from across the continent. My husband was able to find undyed strips of the traditional cloth to make his border and a backing. The result, filled with a layer of batting, is somewhere between a comforter and a weighted blanket. It’s a joy to top the bed with every morning, and sleep under in winter. It makes the bed.

A few years after our wedding, we moved to India. Our flat on the top floor of a house in the New Delhi neighborhood of Jor Bagh looked out on a communal garden where a dhobi worked every day. Dhobi means washerman, but our neighborhood dhobi just took in ironing. He worked on a large padded table with irons heated by glowing chunks of coal. We sent down shirts, dresses, the salwar kameez sets I started to wear regularly, the occasional sari for special occasions. And our sheets, which came back smooth as polished marble. The dhobi worked under a tree. I would sometimes find a leaf in the folds of a sheet, as if pressed in a book.

We also sent our ironing out in the next country to which my career as a journalist took us, Egypt. There, the ironing man was called the makwagi. Ours worked in a shop around the corner from our downtown Cairo flat. One evening an Egyptian friend who lived nearby and used the same makwagi for her clothes arrived for dinner at our place and announced she had seen him ironing sheets as she walked by. She concluded that only a khawaga – a foreigner – would be so extravagant. I admitted I was that khawaga.

Back in my native country now, I do my own ironing. For the most part shirts and blouses. And napkins, having picked up the sustainable habit of using cotton instead of paper when we were abroad. While I often think nostalgically of those leaves in India, and of my Egyptian’s friend’s teasing, ironing the sheets myself would be too much bother. I do iron our Egyptian cotton pillowcases for a touch of luxurious smoothness under our cheeks.

And as I tuck my wedding bedspread over those crisply encased pillows in the mornings, I can reflect on marriage as a union of individuals willing to make room for one another’s differences.