During my career in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, there were many iterations of me. I called myself the Menstruating Mountie, Maternity Mountie, Mama Mountie, and finally Menopausal Mountie. The running joke was that I was going to write a book featuring such important things as how to pee in the woods while wearing a gun belt and how to store feminine hygiene products inside a ballistic vest. I enjoyed getting a laugh out of people, but I struggled to find a balance between light and darkness in my writing and story telling.
I believe there is joy in the world and that most people are good. In difficult times during my career and since retirement, when those beliefs were challenged, I found solace and quiet in my workshop and I found reassurance and hope among the people who know me as the Clothespin Lady. This seems like as good a place to start as any.
It all began with woodworking, which all began in Grade 9 which may be a story for another time. But suffice it to say that back in the day girls didn’t take Industrial Arts. But for one glorious term in Grade 9, after special permission slips and assurances that nobody would burst an ovary, I got to turn a lamp, and I loved it. And then life happened and that experience was just a memory. (For the record, the lamp eventually caught fire… apparently my wiring skills were not up to snuff.) I wouldn’t work with wood again for 25 years.
Around 2009, with two kids at home and working in a plainclothes unit, one of my domestic pleasures was hanging the laundry out on the line in the backyard. Just stepping onto the back deck and sliding the patio door closed calmed me. There was such a simple pleasure in sorting the clothes, hanging them out in an orderly fashion and seeing them sway or hearing them flap in the wind. And bringing them in brought the textures and smells that no company or chemical has ever been able to replicate.
But the clothespins… the fucking clothespins! They irked me to no end. I bought the plastic ones that lasted for one season and then got brittle and snapped. (the clothespins, not me.) I bought the wooden ones, made of pourous mystery wood. Those irked me because the springs would rust, the wood would rot and the pins didn’t even match the surviving plastic ones. And most of them couldn’t hold the clothes on the line any better than I can hold my tongue. According to the world-wide web my dishwasher only had a life span of 5-7 years and now the CLOTHESPINS were disposable??? It was unacceptable.
Armed with a glass of red wine and a moderate level of indignation, I hit the computer and went looking online for clothespins to buy. Lee Valley was out of the bamboo ones that were reputed to be good and I drew the line at buying steel clothespins. I searched ‘sturdy clothespins’, ‘clothespins that last’, ‘traditional clothespins’ and ‘why are clothespins such crap?’ Lo and behold, I happened on a site belonging to American Herrick Kimball, inventor of the Whizbang Chicken Plucker. Mr. Kimball sold kits which included 50 stainless steel springs and the woodworking plans for Classic American Clothespins.
Who’s still with me? Leave me a comment.
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