This may surprise you, but I, a person who routinely writes down her innermost thoughts and puts them on the internet, used to be a shy child. How shy? Whenever my parents had company, I hid under the kitchen table as soon as I heard the doorbell. I could not understand why anyone would willingly answer the door and engage in conversation WITH SOMEONE THEY DIDN’T KNOW VERY WELL. It was all too terrifying for words. “Don’t you ever want to run and hide under the kitchen table when people come over?” I asked my mother.
Her reply stunned me. “Actually, sometimes I do,” she said. “But when you’re an adult, you have to pretend that you don’t.”
If there’s a better description of adulthood, I don’t know what it is. Adulthood is plastering a fake smile on your face and doing things you don’t want to do when you’d much rather be hiding under the kitchen table. Big annoying things, like hosting Thanksgiving or going to the dentist. But also little things, like folding fitted sheets.
I bring up fitted sheets because I am 56 years old and I just learned how to fold a fitted sheet in a way that the final product does not look like a kindergartener’s drawing of a tornado. I am literally giddy, y’all. I broadcast the news on all my social media channels (final achievement of adulthood unlocked!) and let me tell you, it struck a chord. People want to understand how to fold a fitted sheet. More precisely, they want to know how to subdue something anarchic and lawless, something that takes on a will of its own in the dryer, twisting around t-shirts and socks like an anaconda, something that comes out of its neat, deceptively flat packaging when it’s brand new and turns into an agent of chaos as soon as it comes near the washing machine.
Folding a fitted sheet is like the narrative movement of a Shakespearean comedy: it begins in disorder and ends with order. If I’m being honest (I am, after all, a person who writes down her innermost thoughts and puts them on the internet), my housekeeping skills are more like a Shakespearean tragedy: begins with order, ends with a pile of dead bodies. (Haha, not really. I just happen to love a good simile. Please don’t call the police.) As I look over some of my earlier posts, it appears that there’s a theme: the time I left a container of cabbage in the back of the refrigerator for seven months. The time I got a couch stuck in a doorway. The time I had an epic meltdown after one of my children asked me what was for dinner. The theme is, I am not a domestic goddess.
Then how, you’re probably asking yourself, did she perform this act of domestic sorcery? Pull up a chair. (Unrelated, but I now understand why people preface a recipe for a vinegary potato salad that’s perfect for summer with a lengthy accounting of their grandmother’s childhood in the old country and how she carried the earthenware bowl that now holds the potato salad across an ocean and a continent. Wisdom is hard-won. How can you not tell the story?)
Also, props to my friend Tracy, who did what no YouTube tutorial could: patiently explained each step after I saw her take a perfectly folded fitted sheet out of her closet and grabbed her forearm in a vise grip and said, TEACH ME YOUR WAYS. And she did! And it wasn’t even that hard! Not to sound all rah-rah, but if I can do this, YOU can do this!
An easy-to-follow guide to folding a fitted sheet
Find a flat surface and place the fitted sheet on its back, with its belly exposed. This lets it know who’s in charge. Remember, the fitted sheet is more afraid of you than you are of it, but if it smells fear, it may become aggressive. Approach it with a quiet authority and move slowly and deliberately. Resist the temptation to wad it up into a ball and shove it in the back of a closet like you do with all your unprocessed trauma.
You will see that the fitted sheet is roughly the shape of a rectangle, with two long sides and two shorter sides. The shorter side should be closest to you.
Identify the four corners of your fitted sheet. Just kidding! A fitted sheet has no corners. A flat sheet has corners, in the way that we understand a corner to be the convergence of two or more straight lines. A fitted sheet has… curves, I guess? These curves can be located by tracing a seam that goes to a place that looks like it should be a corner but is in fact not. This is what you have to work with. It’s not what you wanted or hoped for, but then again, neither is the Instagram feed you keep refreshing.
Whisper to yourself, “You got this.” Whisper to the fitted sheet, “I am not afraid of you.”
Firmly grasp the pseudo-corners (where the seam ends) on the short side closest to you and make your first fold by bringing the pseudo-corners that you are holding to meet the pseudo-corners on the far side. The pseudo-corners will not be perfectly aligned, just like when my husband David, whom I love very much, complains that my salad dressing is overly astringent and I tell him it’s pleasantly tart. It’s fine. They just need to sort of co-exist in the same space.
As you fold, tuck the elastic in, the deeper the better. The elastic is an agent of chaos. You need clarity and straight lines. Tuck and smooth. Breathe.
If you’re still with me, you should have produced a smaller, more manageable rectangle. Keep smoothing and tucking. There will be egregiously unruly lumps and folds. Tuck them away. Smooth them down. Your fitted sheet did not want to cooperate in the dryer, and it will certainly not want to cooperate now. Whisper to yourself, “I can do this.”
Fold the rectangle one more time by bringing the corners closest to you meet the corners on the far side (this time the edge closest to you is a long side).
Take the short edge and fold it toward the center, a couple of inches shy of the middle. Repeat on the other side. You should now have a rectangle with a small space between two folded-over edges. It’s not attractive, but neither is getting older, our current political climate, or that face your child makes when you ask them to put away their phone at dinner.
Think of the small space in the middle as the spine of a book, or maybe a chasm that swallowed your youthful idealism and boundless energy. Fold one short end onto the other short end over that space, which will create the illusion of a competently folded fitted sheet. That, my friends, is the whole point of adulthood: the illusion of order. The lumps and wrinkles and the disorder are still there, make no mistake, but all those messy parts will be hidden inside.
“All those messy parts will be hidden inside” is a good thing to remember when your doorbell rings and you want nothing more than to crouch under your kitchen table but you answer the door anyway.
and it only took 56 years!
I applaude you but I've found a different solution. Sheets go from the dryer right onto the bed. The monotony of those pale blue sheets is comforting. Attempting to corral them into the closet in an orderly fashion assaults my immune system and makes me holler and itch.
I am 57, it's too late for me! I am happy you mastered those dang curves Irena as I know how much those small victories in life can give so much joy and PEACE. I am doomed however, because my mom was so many Pac Man levels up from me in the sheet care department; she actually IRONED ALL the sheets while she stood in the kitchen watching Days of Our Lives and Merv Griffin. Me? As lovely as crisply laundered and ironed sheets are (exquisite childhood memory) I am mind blown at the time spent for that, so no, not ever happening in my home. The most I can muster is 4 corners tucked into each other and a hasty burrito roll up which is not as tidy but I also never mistake a flat for a fitted in the cupboard. My own hack of impatient coping.