Olliemae smells fried, I thought. It was washday, and we were in the cool basement, with me helping the help. The air was damp and thick with the smell of bleach and Oxydol and later the perfumey smell of starch when Ollie fit the pants-stretchers into all the trouser-legs. Fried, like potatoes fried in bacon grease, with some onion on the top for flavor. She smelled that way most of the time, though now and then she smelled like a backrub, or sometimes like a bottle of dimestore perfume broke on her, a wicked-smelling scent all in the front of your nose and nothing like any flower.

We carried the heavy laundry outside, load after load in creaking wicker baskets, past the rosebeds, the coral bells and correopsis and calendulas, out past the line of gooseberry bushes. We took down the dry and hung the clingy wet, then propped the lines with the smooth long forked sticks, worn with years of water and sun and hands peaking up clothes-lines with them. My bare feet felt like smiles in the sweet cool grass.

Then we went back in with the dry and ironed. I ran the mangle on the towels and T-shirts while Olliemae ironed my Sunday dress, the men's shirts, my mother's silk underwear from the hand wash, on cool. I fed the mangle everything flat there was: pillowcases, handkerchiefs, folded sheets, undershirts. The heat of our irons made the clothes smell even more like air and Oxydol, sweeter and stronger. When the ironed linen tea towels came out of the mangle roller, I could fold them like sheets of glass.