HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Here's hoping you're having a good day; take it easy with the leftover candy. This is a picture of my cousin and me, sometime in the early '50s.

The Farm

"I think I'll sell the farm," he said.

She looked surprised! Then, standing at the window, she silently communed with the land. "For forty three years you've been our home. We built a house on one of your corners and three little girls played on your green grass. We bought you with pride and anticipation, and with a sense of possessiveness we fenced your boundaries. We scattered barns and buildings over your surface. We pocked your face with wells, ditches for water pipes and electric wires, and graves for the old dog and the precious fuzzy cat.

You gave us grazing for the sleek, black cows and soil for a bountiful garden.

Your dust has filled our nostrils in the summer and in the winter your mud has clung to our boots, making us one.

"It's too late to sell," she said.
(This is a re post; having a little trouble with the blog and trying to see if this gets it back for me.)

Dishcloths

I need to buy new dishcloths. Each washday I hve intended to throw my old ones away; they're reduced down to not much more than holes with strings around them. They fuzz up in the washing machine and make lots of lint in the dryer.

It will be difficult to select new dishcloths. They come in so many patterns and colors: waffle weaves, terry cloth, plaids, solids, stripes, hemmed, and fringed. My old ones come in a variety of patterns and fabrics also: ends of old hand towels, tails of tee shirts, ribs of sock tops, or squares of flannel from an old sheet. These are dishrags.

Notice I said dishrags. There is a difference between dishrags and dishcloths. Dishrags come from an era when women recycled before they knew they were recycling. Every piece of fabric was used to its limit, whether it was as another wearable or as a rag. Today a young woman can throw away something before its time has come and buy virgin dishcloths. Oh it's true, some women have used an old cloth diaper for a dishcloth, but only after they experienced the unpleasantness of the waiting contents of the disper pail and decided not to be so environmentally protective after all.

I'll probably pick waffle weave dishcloths in a blue and green plaid; they'll match my blue kitchen countertop. They'll look nice and new in the drawer beside the old rags. I'll keep the old ones for a while; there's just no way I can scrub brown, scorched residue from a pot with a crisp, new dishcloth. I'll take the best of the rags for that, and maybe some of them could be used one last time as dusters. Tee shirt tails, sprayed with a little Pledge, are perfect for dusting.