The laundry is piled on the bed. There is masses of it, left over from before we went away, and now more has been added as we returned. It is washed, wrinkled and overflowing. There is no room for napping. While pawing through it, socks and undies get folded but the rest remains waiting for their warming turn under the iron. Not everyone irons today – but I do. As I pull out the ironing board and turn on the iron I look at the pile and believe it looks back at me. Where and how to start? I reach for the first pair of shorts – yes, even those get a once over lightly – and sigh.

The consternation of choosing where to start matches the full grey rain-cloud that is overwhelming my mind with thoughts of the desecration of Gaza, the bombs lobed between Russian and the Ukraine, the wars all over the world, the breakdown of medical services and the frightful, terrible behaviour of those in power in the United States of America and beyond. I don’t know where to turn or what to think as I sit here ironing. What can I do?

There are sweaters needing a soft touch, shirts and pajamas, pillowcases and tea towels, before the trousers pressed with a heavier hand. But as I work through the piles, I slow down. I can read and I can write, can’t I? And I can reach out to other sisters who write.

Substack has given us all a new platform where we can search out and find like-minded writers and readers.  I realize the writers I read are almost all women, who are tackling their own version of the piles of unwashed laundry that are littering our world. I start with some Sisters from Sybilline Press that publishes the brilliant work of women authors over 50. And among that brilliance there are some pretty passionate writers who speak out on the particular messes left on our doorsteps. Each one finds their own way to take on the stale loaves of bread that are the detritus of manic males and smash them open into crumbs on the worn wooden table of our lives. An analogy – I think lifted from that Creative Loudmouth Lorraine Devon Wilke.

I’m not sure I’m making any sense. But as I iron, just thinking about these women, calms me. Each one of them – metaphorically – has reached for a pile, of silks, cottons or linen to examine and expose the wrinkles and we each iron the creases.

Julia Park Tracey with her Book and Bone (@juliaparktracey) has written about waiting for her father to die. She wonders if she can forgive him his parenting, and how much do those thoughts render her a bad person – and one asks – in whose eyes? That’s a big scab to peel off of your life’s history. But how bravely she does it, and what courage she ladles out to her readers.

Lorraine Devon Wilke with her Musings of a Creative Loud Mouth (@lorrainedevonwilke) gets so mad, each and every time the OrangeOne, by his behavior, drives increased cruelty and attacks on women rendered with no impunity. And that is only one of her targets in the world she sees.

Karin K. Jensen (@karinjensen607571) looks again, reflecting at the resilience of her mother in her Memoir The Strength of Water, and in so doing leads us to see the strength of all mothers; good, not so, and indifferent. I am grateful to read these three Sybil writers on Substack. There are others, taking up their particular banner, raking through the muck of their farm yard. With that analogy you might want to check out Sarah Langford’s Tipping Point (@saramaggielangford). Then there is the supreme queen Margaret Atwood – In the Writer’s Burrow. Atwood remains our fearless leader in all things political, unjust and environmental. At 86 – with nothing to prove to anyone – she continues to write, overturning rocks hiding cesspools in the path to democracy, reminding us of the history that led us to where we are.

There are the softer men, like the artist Alex Hillkurtz (@alexhillkurtzart) who also share their own thoughts as to how our/their art can find a place to bring comfort and beauty to this world.

It has taken days to write this piece. I am mixing and muddling so many metaphors and maybe that is the state of my mind right now. The laundry that first inspired this sceed is all folded and put away while now a new pile is waiting on the bed. But maybe, having laid this out on the page, to be read and received by others, I can pull out the ironing board, plug in the iron and face the world once more.

This has been A Letter From. A Broad Written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side and as always supported by Beatrice from MurchStudio

With a deep homage to Tilloe Olson and ‘I Stand Here Ironing’.