The iron was still warm on the kitchen table when the paramedics finally left our house. It was a Saturday night, just after eight o’clock. My husband, Arthur, had been standing right there by the window, getting ready to press my Sunday dress, when his heart just gave out.

For fifty-one years, that was our quiet little routine. Every single Saturday evening, Arthur would set up the old wooden ironing board. He would plug in that heavy silver iron, the one his mother gave us when we got married, and he would press my church dress.

I never asked him to do it. Not once in all those decades. It was just something he started doing back when we were young and broke, and it eventually became a part of who we were as a couple.

On Sunday mornings, I would wake up and find my dress hanging on the bedroom door. The crease down the front of the skirt was always so sharp it could cut butter, as the old saying goes. It was his way of looking after me, I suppose.

Arthur was never a man of many words. He didn’t write me love letters, and he certainly didn’t buy me fancy jewelry. He worked at the local paper mill for forty years, coming home with grease under his fingernails and dust on his boots.

But he had these incredibly gentle hands when it came to my things. He would smooth out the fabric of my dress like he was handling something made of pure gold.

After he passed, the silence in our house was hard to take. I’ll be honest with you, some days I just sat in his favorite recliner and stared at the kitchen window where he used to stand. The house felt so big and empty without him.

My daughter, Eleanor, was worried sick about me. She is a good girl, bless her heart. She kept coming over to check on me, bringing me casseroles I didn’t want to eat and trying to keep my spirits up.

Then came Christmas. It was my first Christmas without Arthur, and to be perfectly honest, I just wanted to sleep through the whole thing. But Eleanor insisted on having me over to her place.

She handed me a heavy box wrapped in green paper. When I opened it, I almost started crying right there on her living room rug.

It was the exact same model of that vintage General Electric iron. Eleanor had spent weeks hunting it down, searching through old estate sales online just to find the right one.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. “I want to do it for you, Mom.”

I just stared at the heavy metal iron in my hands.

“Let me press your dress on Saturday nights,” she said. “I want to keep Dad’s tradition going.”