The art of folding sheets

I have come to accept that there are some things in life at which I will never be adept. Folding bedsheets is one of them.

It's not like defective sheet folding runs in my family. My mom and aunt, for instance, would do the army proud with their folded sheets. But no matter how much they tried to show me, and I tried to do what they were showing me, I could never get it quite right. I would even study diagrams in home magazines of how to fold sheets, but they only confused me more. The directions never seemed to go with the illustrations, and I needed about 50 more illustrations ("take one corner between thumb and forefinger, now take another corner between thumb and forefinger, now take another..."). The illustrations they gave were sort of like how-to-draw-a-clown-in-four-easy-strokes, where the first three illustrations have one simple stroke each: "Draw an egg shape. Now draw a stick coming down out of the egg shape. Now add two more sticks coming out of the first stick." And from that, you are supposed to get the complete clown shown in the fourth illustration, with a red nose and multicolored hair and enormous, sad lips. In the case of sheets, from a tumbled mass of cotton lying on the bed you are supposed to get a crisp, tightly folded set of sheets no more than an inch and a half high. Mine came out looking like cottage cheese with stripes.

Mostly I have avoided the problem altogether by putting the same sheets back on the bed every time I wash them. I have 11 sets of sheets I haven't used since the first printing of Heloise's Household Hints. Even my husband, who doesn't usually notice such domestic trivialities, will sometimes ask whether we have any other sheets. I am always vague in my answer. "Define have," I say.

I just assumed this was a problem most women have. After all, if magazines have to run little how-to's on the subject, complete with illustrations, then clearly this must be a difficult thing to achieve. I wondered, too, whether the fact that they never included decent illustrations meant that even the magazine people didn't know how to fold them. I decided I could lower my standards a bit.

Until one day I found a set of sheets that a friend of mine had folded after washing them for the first time. They were perfect. "I can't believe this!" I told her. "They look like they just came out of the bag! How do you do that?" Before she could answer, the obvious dawned on me.

"Ooooh" I said. "You're Inspector #32, aren't you?"