Linen, clothesline-dried on a warm windy day, becomes smooth and crisp. Linen, washed and hung to dry without wind, is soft and wrinkly.
I mostly wear linen and however it presents is usually fine with me. But on occasion, like this morning, the sight of skirt hanging on me in waves got me soonest putting out the ironing board (and the type with short legs that sets up on a counter is handy and efficient), plugging in the iron (a plain, non-steam one), and sliding knob to the highest setting.
My mother used to dampen her laundry by wetting her hand under the kitchen sink tap and shaking her hand over the lined-dried clothes spread out, one by one, on the counter, then folded into bundles and placed back in the woven wooden laundry basket. (That same basket housed my newly-born brother; I don’t know what happened to laundry during that time.) At a church sale I came across an old bottle corked with a tin stopper with holes in it: a laundry sprinkler. It works well but does not have the panache of my mother’s method.
There is a special smell to the steam rising from a damp garment being ironed dry. There is a nice feeling to stepping into a warm skirt. There is something pleasant about the sound of an iron cooling down with a ping.