How To Fold Sheets

“Tuck the corners into the ears,” you tell me from across the vast ocean of a bed sheet. You shake it, snap it, and I rock backward from your energy. Half a beat behind, I fold my corners and think of a minuet I learned in second grade. The “ears” are pockets made by the fitted corners. On your side of this housekeeping dance, one ear folds into another, makes a seashell.

My sheet ears are sloppy, soft, as if I can’t hear how to make edges.

When I was little, you made my bed with hospital corners. Why we knew how hospitals folded their sheets so tightly is another story, a long one. Tuck the bottom end under the mattress in one swipe, then tuck each hanging-over side under the mattress in two more swipes. It should look like an envelope, you say.

This is a thing I learn. With you dead three years now, and hospital corners on my beds for nearly fifty years, I wake if a sheet comes untucked at my feet. It rarely does, because those corners are tight.

The day you refolded every sheet in my linen closet, you tucked ears into ears, made origami of pillow cases. When you were done, you labeled your work with index cards. “Yellow sheets, guest room,” you wrote. “Blue sheets, king sized.”

"My mother, holding me before I could fold anything."

- Jessica Handler is the author of Invisible Sisters: A Memoir, named by the Georgia Center for the Book one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Atlanta Magazine called it the “Best Memoir of 2009.”  Her second book, Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss, was praised by Vanity Fair magazine as “a wise and encouraging guide.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Bitter Southerner, Drunken Boat, Newsweek, The Washington Post, More Magazine, and elsewhere. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Oglethorpe University and lectures internationally on writing well about trauma. www.jessicahandler.com.

How to Fold Fitted Sheets Alone

My husband learned another trick of folding, this time for fitted sheets, that I’ve never forgotten. It is harder to do alone than the towel folding but it is designed for one person, too.

(ghost hand)

Take two corners of the sheet and put your hands inside. Make ghost hands, wide spread, to smooth the wrinkles in the corners. Then point your index fingers into the very corner of these corners, and bring them together. Now, flip one of the corners over the other so they nest.

Here is the part that is hard to do alone: Straighten the whole, and fold into a square as closely as you can. Fold the rounded corners inward until they do not show. Fold vertically and then--as with the towels--horizontally once, then thrice until your result is a neat, smooth, trifolded packet. It’s hard to describe how satisfying it is to do this right. My husband would fold & refold until he perfected it.

One of his last full acts on earth was folding laundry. He was listening to the game in our bedroom, vague and spacey on a toxic brew of Valium and Oxycontin, barely able to stand as his hipbone now crumbled with cancer, but folding, folding, folding with care.

- Lisa Schamess is a Founding Editor of Dead Housekeeping. The companion piece to this essay is "How to Fold with Only Two Hands: Honoring the Integrity of Towels," which was the first piece we ran when we started this site three months ago. 

How to Fold with Only Two Hands: Honoring the Integrity of Towels

This is how my dead husband folded linens.

 First, a towel, because it is easier to do alone, and because I still know what to do, even though he is not here. There is no gap in my knowledge about folding towels the proper way, only lapses of will and the urgency of daily life.

I often no longer do it. Here is a diagram of what I should do.

[figure 1]

Fold horizontally, once. I often do the fold in mid-air, with a brave flourish, but then I have to lay it flat for the rest. It is the rest of this that matters, not that first impetuous sweep of linen through the air. After that bold start, what matters most is painstakingly matching the corners for this fold and the next. Do it again and again till just right.

Fold horizontally a second time. Again, be ridiculous about the corners. No. Not that way. Do it again.

Fold the towel into neat, even threes. It will feel just a bit like rolling, with a gentle smoothing motion to reassure your towel it is home. The result will be a towel burrito with reassuringly neat ends. This towel will display well on shelves, stack evenly in cabinets, and retain its architectural integrity when handed to a guest.

[figure 2]

- Lisa Schamess