It all began rather innocuously with a scratchy throat during orchestra rehearsal. By the end of the evening, I knew I had submitted to a cold, the first of the season. I took to my bed, allowing myself to indulge in the first juicy oranges of the season and devour astounding amounts of pulp fiction (I love our library). The boys somehow survived, and after three days in my semi-comatose state, I returned to the kitchen to make up a huge pot of soup to use up the uneaten vegetables. My sinuses rejoiced at the steamy broth and released everything that had been cooking up there. Out came the boxes of tissues, and the wastepaper baskets filled to the brim far too quickly.
On the heels of the cold, Darling Husband and I flew to Denver for a conference (sans enfants!) and were struck by the lack of humidity and the attending drying of the sinus membranes. Granted, we come from the other extreme, but this was amazing. Our return home was a matter of rehydrating sinuses by drinking vast amounts of water.
Which made me realize that one of the downsides of this moist climate (there are many upsides that I may wax poetic about on another occasion), is that our sinuses are--how shall I put it--chronically hydrated. In practical terms, it means that a box of tissues is standard issue on the nightstand, and is one of the first things we tend to reach for in the morning.
Delving into a book that Hubs brought home from his latest foray into Library Land (No Impact Man), I realized that I had forgotten one of the lessons learned as a child: those expensive paper tissues were wonderful things when you were ill, but for the odd everyday blow, we had hankies.
And yes, I called them "expensive." You see, my father worked in a mill where they made the stuff. And precisely because he knew exactly what went into their manufacture (a lot of water, chemicals, virgin wood and electricity), they were not something to be used unthinkingly. He himself used bandannas for their original purpose (not a fashion accent).
I dug in my closet and found them, that stack of hankies from my youth: some dainty white things, some with colorful designs (including souvenirs of New York from the fifties), some basic, some a little more heavy-duty. I remember it was my girlhood job when Mom was hanging laundry to take the wet wads and flatten them on the bathroom mirror: when they dried, we didn't have to press them, since the flat surface did the work for us.
We will certainly use the boxes for future colds, but I am thankful for the reminder that we don't need to cut virgin forests just for our morning toilette. And as if to reinforce this lesson, our family curled up to watch a movie from 1980--not so very long ago. And here was this bad boy, dancing his escape from gangland, producing a hankie (albeit crumpled) for the weepy damsel in distress. How very civilized.
