Shut hern Legitimacy Statement:I am a farm girl who still reaches for her gum boots to go feed the birds. I grew up in the arms of a grandmother who worked 40 hours a week for 36 years in a tube factory and a retired grandfather who, after a heart attack, whittled sticks and watched his cows eat. I live about eight miles from that same farm today. It’s odd how even though we can’t go home again, that’s is exactly what we often do. We ate tomatoes right off of the vine (my grandmother carried a salt shaker with her when we went). When my uncle told me that if I walked through his garden while I was having my period I would kill everything in the garden, I tested my power by tromping up and down each row several times. Nothing happened. I have discovered the power of sharing my southern heritage with the pen (or keyboard, in this case), and I embrace that power today. I am a college professor of 27 years who takes her Ph.D. into everything that she does.
Boodoo vs. The Pantyhose
The battle begins at 5:30 a.m.
The yellow-and-green plaid lounge chair cushions Boodoo, as family members affectionately called her, for the fight. She sits holding the panty hose in her hands. She stretches them width-wise, feels them resist her tug, then takes a deep breath and dives in, much like a diver jumps into the deep end of a swimming pool. There is no time for hesitation.
She places the first three fingers of each hand near the top of the hose and rolls the hose down until her fingers are right inside the left toe, the hose bunched in her hands, and then places them over the toes of her left foot.
Then, creepingly slow, she begins rolling and gently pulling the hose up over her calf. The hose don’t seem to notice.
The hose are control top, so the battle is a true one. Boodoo isn’t a small woman by any means, but even large women born in the 1920s are not to show that they are large. The goal is to look as small as possible, from head to toe, with the exception of the breasts.
And then the hose come alive. They fight back. Sometimes they win, like when a fingernail turns turncoat and pushes through them. She taught the girl, her granddaughter, that if that happens, dab the spot with clear nail polish. That will stop the streak that will run up the hose. Otherwise, the streak will race in a line all of the way to the top of the hose.
A lady never wears hose with a runner.
Today, the hose twist as she rolls them up one calf. When that happens, the hose will “cut you in two,” as she had told the girl, by creating a line of bunched hose that deliberately eats into the flesh. She takes the hose off and the battle begins again. She stops, gasps for breath.
And then the sweat comes.
“A lady never wears a dress without panty hose,” she had told the girl.
“A lady never wears a dress without a slip under it,” she had told the girl.
“A lady always wears a dress,” she had told the girl, as Boodoo’s mother had shown her.
And so she became the cloth plaid dresses and hose she wore. To the laundry mat, to the grocery store. Hose, hose, hose.
To her job as a line worker in a factory where she inspected tubes for medicine, toothpaste, and various sundries, where the heat in the summer would reach more than 100 degrees, 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Hose, hose, hose.
At work, sweat rolls down her crevices like a brook.
Once a coworker mailed her an advertisement from a magazine for deodorant. She quickly threw the advertisement away and bought a super strength deodorant for women from Avon. Hose, hose, hose.
A lady never sweats, even if she is wearing panty hose.
