It’s certainly the fabric of my life. To wipe spills and tend wounds and make love upon/amid/between. In summer I drape myself in cotton. Each slipping-on of a cotton tee is a kiss on the cheek.
Bubbly cotton spokesperson Colbie Caillat sanctions cottonlust as she altos her way through the touch and the feel. If Colbie can sing to us the vanilla nature of cotton, what’s wrong with buying another set of six white tees like-right-now?
Well, in Tuscaloosa, where in 2010 Southerners still unironically debate reasons for the Civil War, we find a disconcerting new trend: cotton car tags. Huh—a rectangular steel emblem of diaphanous bolls. Camouflage-hat wearing F150 drivers love the cotton symbol, but why? Alabama cotton constitutes just four percent of the national crop, and considering how boll weevils Pac-Manned through their progenitors’ cotton fields a century ago, any car taggers’ displaying of the boll should serve only as cautionary tale.
Maybe this is an identity issue easier to understand than I’m letting on. Camo hats: loves hunting :: cotton tags: loves farming. But when the plates are on a sorority girl’s Beetle, I feel I’m getting mixed signals. Fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview and Lady Gaga on the stereo are not a part of the farmer’s ethos, but there they are, framing hard-plated Cotton (now available in fifteen assorted colors, including Lime Green and Bright Purple).
Is the tag a relative to Tea Party 2.0? Seemingly-innocuous cousin of the Confederate flag, saying, “We’re still proud of our heritage” but in fun colors? A subtle euphemism I’m offended (yet impressed) these folks are allowed to get away with in our purported post-racial America?
I’m not one for counter-protest, but when browsing through my closet-full of cotton shirts, I wish one of them read POLYESTER across the front.
Right on, Glad to be living in the 21st. cent. not the past.
[...] The sheets, too, are sweating. Hours later, you return to the balcony and rotate the line. Thin cottons are removed to allow more airflow. Dry. Dry. A meditation on what it means never to be thirsty. A [...]