Beech Tree News Network

When Garey’s mom, Aggie, was in her younger days, she would insist on doing laundry for us when she visited.  She would inevitably wash something that was in a pocket of Garey’s jeans.  Aggie would insist that she had checked every pocket before she put it into the washer, but I knew how Aggie checked pockets.  She was very persnickety about what she touched, and she refused to stick her hand down into the pocket of another’s clothing for fear she might touch something unpleasant, like a snotty tissue.  She would simply pat the pocket from the outside, which meant items from tissues to blasting caps got washed.  For Garey, the last straw was when Aggie washed his checkbook.  After that, I made sure all the laundry was washed, folded and put away before she visited.

One day last week, Garey was working on the hydraulic pump on his tractor when the pump kicked on, shooting a geyser of hydraulic oil over his shirt and jean shorts.  He returned to the house, stripped off the oil-soaked clothes, removed coins, knife and other miscellany from his pockets, then plunged his clothing into a Tide-infused bucket of hot water.  After his shower, he started looking for his wallet, which he found—you guessed it—in the back pocket of his now-water-soaked jean shorts.

I had no idea any of this had taken place until I noticed ID cards and five, ten and twenty dollar bills laid out on the kitchen and bathroom counters.  Garey’s trifold wallet was standing at attention on the far end of the kitchen counter.  He was so aggravated with himself, but it’s like I told him, the good news is the money powers that be had the foresight to make our “paper” money out of cloth.  Twenty-five percent linen and seventy-five percent cotton, to be exact.

You might wonder, as I did, why that particular combination of materials?  According  to Yorkshirefabricshop.com, “The softness and smoothness of cotton resolve the roughness and skin friction issues of linen.  The lightness of the cotton material is shouldered by the linen’s stiffness.”

Most of us know that cotton comes from cotton plants.  As a fabric it dates from 5,000 BCE to 3,000 BC in the middle Nile Basin.  Linen also comes from a plant, the stems of the flax plant.  Linen fabric dates from 10,000 to 36,000 years ago.  Egyptian mummies were wrapped in linen, much of which still survives today.  The process to produce linen fabric is much more labor-intensive than that to produce cotton fabric, because it comes from the stems of the plant (yorkshirefabricshop.com).

The cotton-linen “paper” is produced by one company in the US, Crane Currency, in Dalton Massachusetts.  It is illegal for anyone else to possess this fabric, which also has red and blue fibers distributed throughout, so it is harder to counterfeit (BEP.gov).  Crane and Company has supplied the US Treasury with the fabric since 1879.  The company can trace its roots back to the civil war (perinjournal.it).

Garey’s US currency dried out—thanks to the rapid drying properties of linen—and it is safely back home in his wallet, which is also dry, but not in as good shape as the money.  I see a new wallet in his future, probably for Christmas.