Labels

 Labels have always been important. Long ago in the primitive days of Man, your label might be how you wear your hair or paint you body or carry your weapons. Today the same applies, but in a different way. They, labels, the little bits of annoying plastic or paper or cloth that go on the napes of garments or are placed not subtly, so that no one misses who  made it. The more money your paid for that little bit of material, is likely worth far more than what actually went into it. The truth is that everything, or almost everything, is made in rather exotic locations usually where there is more sun than where I live next to the ocean, well above the equator and where very little is actually made. The exotic locations employ people who shock us that they would take so little pay and work so hard, but we buy what their hands have labored over, anyway. We can cluck about that, but we must not  forget our own history when small children were shoved down chimneys, dangerous small places in a much sang song. Remember?  Getting back to labels, today I found one that didn't make we want to cut it off. My all cotton sheets that are never ironed but look truly real because their origins are and that I love their natural slightly wrinkled honesty have a label. I dry these daily pleasures, illegally outside on my deck. Horrors, some would say, you can't hang laundry on your deck, tsk tsk. I must admit I have to be sneaky about it so I hope my Council won't see this. I could be fined for breaking the condo law. I may get time for it, and not the good kind.  To me it makes environmental sense not to waste  sunshine but to use it instead of an electric dryer. The smell of fresh air when you slip into those sheets makes your guilt disappear rapidly. Getting back to labels, in the middle of the flat sheet, a woman must have been involved because the label reads "top/bottom". Now don't laugh. You wouldn't if you were the laundry maven in your place. It saves a lot of wrestling with sheets to know which end is up - or bottom. This is the one label that will never be, by me, guillotined.