Beautifully thought and said with clarity Front-Ranger!
As you say:
Another way of looking at this is that Ennis learned in his later years, alone, how to "do the laundry" which is to say, let his feelings flow. In carefully folding the sweater, he is "doing the laundry" for his daughter. He folds and then smells the sweater, as he smelled the shirts in the story, hoping for some lingering scent of Jack.
In the story, one of Ennis' last acts was to take the horseblankets from the Coffeepot Ranch over to the carwash and spray them down. After that, he went into Linda Higgins' gift shop to get him a postcard of Brokeback Mountain, north a there. This action was translated in the movie into the careful folding of the sweater.
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I thank you very, very much for that!
And may I add, why the change from masculin to feminin actions, without prejudice as I have not other way to describe right now sorry, in his ways?? Do you and all think?