from here
This morning I was thankful for dryer lint. I try to stay in a mindset of thankfulness, but . . . dryer lint?
DRYER LINT: fuzzy, useless stuff that collects in the dryer screen; an annoyance that must be cleaned out and thrown away. (from Jean’s book of definitions found only in her mind)
You see, I remember before dryer lint. I can remember baby blankets being hung on clothes lines with red, chapped, freezing hands. The baby blankets froze into pastel colored boards – hard as Formica on a cabinet top. I remember the winter wind jerking my hair and making my ears smart in the cold. It felt as though the wind was driving the cold right through my coat.
Later, I looked out the window to see that the wind had snapped the baby blankets in two – just like snapping a graham cracker – with the frozen halves tossing about the yard like tumble weeds in a desert ghost town. I had to run around the yard chasing after the pieces of blankets as the wind played “keep way” blowing them this way and that. Somehow I managed to get the broken blanket halves and bring them inside before they were blown clean out of sight.
Lest you think I am 839 years old, lots of people had automatic washing machines when I was growing up, but my mother was a Thoroughly Modern Millie. When I was a teenager we had the only washer/dryer combo machine I have ever seen. Daddy loved gadgets and inventions that saved time. He bought Mother a front loading machine that both washed and dried the clothes. I believe it was a Bendix, but it could have been a Maytag. We put in dry, dirty clothes and took out dry, clean clothes. And we had dryer lint. We were affluent and didn’t know it. See? I’m not that old.
