The Lowly Clothes Pin

Not many people give much credit anymore to a lowly clothes pin.

It’s generally considered as being a woman’s thing in that women usually do the washing and hanging out of washed clothes on the clothes line on wash day. That activity demands the services of the lowly, three piece, deceptively strong little pain causing buggers called clothespins, unless of course, the wash is dried in modern $1 or $2 (Loonie) laundromat dryers with dryer sheets acting as fresh breezes of drying scented winds.

It is used to secure, with more security than the military seems able to provide these days, items fresh out of the wash day washer, to a clothesline, against stiff wash day breezes, winds and easterly gales, children at play and even neighborhood pranksters.

The three-piece clothespin is a very unique item and invention. Studying it, one is apt to ponder just how many pinches of excruciating pain its inventor had to endure before perfecting it and whether his or her nose, ears, and fingers were used as operational guinea pigs?

With its familiar wooden or plastic two identical sideboards and very sturdy spring, it can become an exercise thingy or a real pain. With just two fingers one can spend exciting hours of quality or otherwise time squeezing its two stiff sideboards together – together – together time and time again and again, repeatedly, until an aching pain develops in one’s forearm, hand or fingers.

It can hold coins or paper money bills firmly for you between its otherwise tightly closed jaws or hold a stack of papers when one runs out of paper clips. When carrying a spare in one’s pocket or purse, it can come to a thankful rescue holding together that embarrassing sudden opening in one’s shirt, pants or blouse when one of the defender buttons or zippers decides to vacate its post and purpose and stop doing its job.

Yet, without fanfare it sits out in the back porch or down in the basement on the laundry table or elsewhere, awaiting its next call to duty on the next upcoming, recurring weekly windy wash day.

Carelessly used, it can cause that before noted excruciating pain when allowed to clamp its powerful jaws grippingly onto one’s sensitive nose tip, fingers, ears, toes or otherwise sensitive body parts... ………. Render unto Cesar!

Give the lowly close pin its respect and the next time you’re in the garden or anywhere else, even walking down a street and see a downed one of those windy wash day troopers, pick it up and pin it back on someone’s clothesline somewhere or bring it home and give it to mom, grandma or sis.

The next shirt or blouse to be dried in outdoors blowing fresh air on some future windy wash day may be you own.

W.C.Hull © 2012-8-8-645 (D)

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