Lintsagna And A Hard Pill To Swallow

My mother and I were having dinner at my sister’s house. I arrived first and noticed a large load of clothes wadded in front of her dryer. She informed me her dryer was broken. It had stopped drying clothes no matter how long she set the time for. On a whim, I pulled out the lint filter. I could not pull it free from its pocket without a struggle. What I pulled out was scandalous. At first, I thought one of her children had dried her cat, and what was left of the poor guy was attached to the filter. It did not smell like dead cat though. Suddenly it looked like a burned lasagna to me. Then I thought finally I had found all her missing socks.

Actually, it had to be at least 10 loads of lint from my sister drying clothes and not cleaning the filter. The heap on the filter was big enough it could have been used as a baby blanket. There was enough lint on this filter that, if I knew how to sew, I could have made 3 pairs of socks from it. This clump was large enough that its rings could be counted to discern its age. It had its own soft sediment deformation, which made it metamorphic enough that I am certain geologists would get their rocks off if they had discovered it instead of me. It was huge . . . and dangerous.

From working in law enforcement, I had heard stories that uncleaned lint traps have caused houses to burn down. But I was never taught that when growing up. I had always heard “your clothes won’t dry” as the excuse for keeping the lint trap clear. It is probably more important to know that your house might incinerate from an over-clogged lint trap. I have used lint as tinder for campfires, but I never seriously thought it capable of burning a house down before I had this incident with my sister. If the filter is being cleaned regularly so clothes get dry, I suppose that would abrogate any house fire. Somehow while growing up, both reasons escaped my sister’s home economics education.

My sister, Kerry, is the baby of 5 children. She was the last bird to leave the nest. My brother and I always did our own clothes, because we thought it was repulsive for women to touch our sordid garments. My mother did the laundry for herself, my dad, and my sisters. So I guess it’s understandable that Kerry would not know that dryers, without proper maintenance, can make lint blankets.

Kerry recently married and moved into her own home and was learning to be a working-mom and home-maker. I, on the other hand, was a bad brother. Actually, I was evil. Without shame, I told my sister the lint filter was broken and that I needed $20 to replace it. She paid me with a twenty dollar bill, which was probably all the money she had made in tips at her waitressing job. I took the money and pretended to go the local hardware store a few minutes down the road. All I really did was go briefly visit a friend who I also knew lived at the end of the road. The next day, I took my girlfriend to get some Chinese food for lunch. I even had enough money left to tip the waitress.

A year or two later, after I learned how important family is—and what a prick I had been—I gave my sister a Christmas card with 5 twenty dollar bills and an apology in it. She accepted both. I told her the extra money was for interest . . . and for her to buy a fire extinguisher or, at the very least, some extra smoke detectors. Dryers today have lights and sounds to warn you to change the lint filter. They also have regulators that terminate the drying if temperatures get too high. Back in the day, though, the cheaper dryers did not have these safety aids. What is more, if Kerry did not know to change a lint filter to keep her house from burning down, there is no telling what else she had to learn about being a home-owner.

Lint does burn rather easily. I used a good bit from the lint filter to wrap in some newspapers to help start a fire in Kerry’s fireplace. My mother arrived to the dinner late and almost too late to become a part of this lint story. I showed her what was left of the pile. Mom remarked that it looked like something she has pulled from “your father’s bellybutton.” I appreciated her comment; my sister did not. Mom then took what was left of it so she could place it in her backyard in a small net she hung on the tree next to her bird feeder. She said the birds would take this lint to build their nests. I cannot confirm birds do that because I never witnessed any birds near Mom’s lint net. None of her children remember her ever having a bird feeder when they were living in her house. She likely had to find other tasks to occupy her time after all her children became grown-and-gone. Now, because of my sister’s lintscapade, I have a nice memory of my mom still trying to be a home-maker to other creatures after she became an empty nester. My memory of her garage sale, which Kerry was also complicit in, was a bit more tickling.

My mother had only one garage sale in her life. It was held after my grandmother passed and the family needed to sale her items. Grandma was a product of the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time of her death, she was still living in the same small, 2 bedroom house her and Grandpa bought in the late 1950s. Thus, there were barely enough items in her house to justify having an estate sale. So mom got all her children involved and we had one giant sale at the house we grew up in. My sister, unintentionally, almost turned Mom’s sale into the Bill Cosby Garage Sale.

My brother and I were responsible for moving the few pieces of Grandma’s furniture, and my sister was in charge of collecting the smaller items from Grandma’s house. Kerry gathered all the medicines from my grandmother’s bathroom and bedroom. She had enough to fill a medium-sized box. With a black marker, Kerry wrote “prescription drugs” on that box and placed it on a table after the garage sale started.

Selling any prescription pharmaceuticals was illegal then and still is, or as my brother would say, only illegal if you get caught. Marge Simpson was even put in jail for it! There is an episode of The Simpsons in which she has a garage sale and makes a good bit of money from selling her husband’s unused, prescribed medication. The box at our garage sale was not as potent as the one in The Simpsons episode. Grandma’s box was mostly related to headaches, blood pressure, blood thinners, osteoporosis, and diabetes. Although there were no painkillers in her box, it was still the kind of medicine box that Hunter S. Thompson would have enjoyed. So dispensing these drugs at a garage sale would still be frowned on by law enforcement.

This medicine box was a tremendous source of amusement for our garage-sale customers. Across the yard, my mother noticed several people talking, laughing, and taking pictures of a table. Mom walked over to see what was so interesting to people. Of course they had not been taking photos of the decrepit table. Mother discovered the medicine box, immediately removed it, and then sought out my brother who she assumed was the prankster and culprit.

My brother didn’t have a real drug problem, per say. But on Sundays he and his best friend would roam the county for “open houses” only to go into strangers’ bathrooms to take pill bottles out of their cabinets. Stealing from ignorant people was more of a high for him than actually consuming the drugs. Kerry was the baby of Mom’s bunch and truly never did anything wrong. So it was reasonable for my mother to assume my brother had tried to make a profit from Grandma’s prescribed medicines. When she learned it was Kerry who put the box of meds on the table, though, there was actually no look of dismay or disbelief from Mom. My sister had a history of bloopers and gaffes like this. So Mom’s expression towards my sister was one of parental understanding.

Kerry has a bachelors degree in journalism. My sister is not dumb. She didn’t know about the lint filter, but she knew about cleaning the bag in the vacuum cleaner; she knew to get the oil changed on her car every certain number of miles; she knew to change the air conditioning filter monthly; and, from looking at the lint picture, she obviously knew to separate whites from colors. She made sure there were no opiates in Grandma’s pill box, and she thought the pills could be helpful to someone who had no health insurance. That’s also why she placed no price on the box. Kerry had decided to give them away for free. So she is not obtuse. Like the rest of us, she has her simple solecisms and quiddities from time to time that make her a unique, caring, and entertaining person.

I believe Mom got to the box soon enough that no drugs were dispensed to the public that day.