Obviously
The little things that hold life together.
Paper clips, paper clips scattered absolutely everywhere. I have a plastic bowl, you know, that you could put a lid on it. And inside of it was probably a couple of hundred paper clips. Small ones, big ones, colored ones, silver ones. I love paper clips because they hold all my paper together. I mean, that’s obviously what they’re supposed to do. But I can temporarily hold papers together without having to staple them together.
Well, I went looking for just the right size one for this bundle of letters that I needed to keep together. So I rummaged down in the bowl, and I pulled out a very large paper clip and turned myself around toward the other side of my desk. Grayced the Cat realized I was no longer in control of that bowl, and he knocked it off the desk. A couple of hundred paper clips absolutely scattered everywhere, and no cat in sight. I just shook my head and got to thinking about the small things in life that we deal with. I’ve talked about it before, the small things that help us organize.
And then I got to remembering a conversation I had just a couple of days ago with a very dear friend of mine who had just never been in my house before. But she had come for a visit, and I caught her eyeing the curtains.
My curtains are not fancy. They actually are blackout curtains. So when I want to roll them up and keep them rolled up, I use clothespins. Yep, wooden clothespins. You know, the kind with a metal spring in the middle of it. Well, I can roll those curtains up exactly how high I want them or how low I want them. And then I take my clothespins and I pin them on each side of the row, and there it stays. Yep, just ordinary clothespins.
And I often use them to pin more than clothes, obviously. Sometimes I use them to actually gather up the green curtain that I use when I give my webinars. So the background is the green curtain, you know, and it makes it easier for everybody to see me. So depending upon where the sun is coming through all those various windows here, I use my clothespins to adjust exactly where that green curtain is hanging. Yep, that I can do.
But let’s get back to clothespins themselves.
Now, I grew up with wooden clothespins. I have numerous pictures of my mother out hanging the clothes and using the clothespins to hang them right where they need to be. And if a sleeve needs to be stretched out so that it dries just right, Mama would take a clothespin or two, stretch out the sleeve down the clothesline itself, and pin the sleeve right there.
And I’m sure you would not be surprised to find out that I’ve got clothespins inside my truck. They’re for various and sundry uses. Got some even inside my photography bag with my cameras. You just never know when you’re going to need to pin something and do it safely.
Oh, well, now, safety pins. Now that I’ve told you about the clothespins in the truck, maybe I also also should tell you that in my house and in my truck and in my various and sundry purses and carry bags, there is an absolute plethora of safety pins.
Some kids these days don’t know what a safety pin is when they see it. And I feel that they’re just missing out on something that’s very unique. I’ll hand them one and I’ll say, this is how you open it. And it’s called a safety pin because the cap, the hood on the top, keeps it from stabbing you once you’ve adjusted things and you close the cap down on it. That’s why it’s called a safety pin. So I’m also not without safety pins, and they come into a lot of use for me. They really do.
We used to have to use safety pins for pinning cloth diapers on babies. Those diaper pins were large and had an extra big safety cap on top. Gosh. Huh. It’s been a lot of years since I had to do that. A whole lot of years. It’s a whole lot easier these days.
Then there are broken shoestrings. Yeah. I just dropped my head down and realized that I was looking at my tennis shoes. You know, I’ve got some still with the shoestrings in them.
Well, you just never throw away a busted shoestring. Not in my world, you don’t. Nope, not at all. What you do is if it’s broken off on one end, you’ll roll it up and you put it in an envelope or you put it loose in the bottom of your camera bag. Because you never know when you might need a string piece to hook something together, to actually knot it together so it stays there.
Like if I’m trying to photograph a snail going up a blade of grass and there’s another piece of grass over there that keeps just blowing over the snail. I really do try to make my photographs natural and let the wind blow the other piece across.
But in this case, I knew that this snail was a variety I had not seen before. And I really wanted not a photo to even think about it. What I wanted was a picture of the snail that would allow me to submit it someplace like iNaturalist. And have them help me identify it.
So I very gently took that intruding piece of grass off to the side, took my broken shoestring, and tied that piece of grass aside for just a bit. I got my photo I wanted of the snail and eventually did get an ID for it. Then I reached over and untied that piece of shoestring, and the wayward piece of grass flipped back across the top of the snail. But it was all right. I then had the photo I needed to ID the critter.
Now, there’s some modern things, such as duct tape. There are some things that we have had in the past and have gotten so used to using - what we call more modern things, such as duct tape - that we’ve forgotten about some of the help aids, I guess you would call them, like safety pins and clothes pins and things like that.
I love duct tape, but you can’t use duct tape to hold a piece of grass over. You can’t use a piece of duct tape to make that plastic bag that you just wrapped around your camera to keep it dry … you can’t use duct tape to shut it. I can use that duct tape to temporarily repair a fracture, say, in a plastic bowl that just might have been full of paper clips.
So I’m not saying no to the modern things. Some of the glues, some of the tapes, I’m not saying no to them. But I’ve got a very fond place apparently in my heart for some of those other aids, like paper clips, clothespins, safety pins, and shoestring pieces.
So the next time you go looking for something to hold something together, say maybe a credit card and a paper check together, and you reach for that paper clip, remember, duct tape won’t work there.
Thank you for coming through the open door with me this morning. Have a very blessed day. Take care.
