Patrica Paris
I’m sure many of you, if not most, think of beautiful debutantes in sweeping pastel gowns gliding majestically on the arms of their handsome escorts when you hear the term ‘cotton ball’, especially those of you in Chattanooga.
I remember other cotton balls, though not as elegant. I remember driving past a field of cotton in Georgia when I was a small child, past a field that seemed to stretch forever. I asked if I could have a cotton ball, and someone stopped the car and walked into a stranger’s field and broke off a twig with several cotton bolls on it. They were just beginning to burst open and that was the first I learned that cotton balls had seeds in them. The only other cotton balls I knew about came from the top of a medicine bottle. I also remember my ears being stuffed with cotton balls soaked in warm oil as treatment for my frequent and painful earaches.
But most of all, I remember those cotton balls on the screen door.
In the small town where I was born, there was no air conditioning in the early days. During hot weather, we relied on open doors and windows as well as the screen doors at the front of the house and at the rear of the house, to the kitchen, for ventilation.
Every spring, my grandfather pulled a fresh ball of cotton from a St. Joseph Aspirin or Alka-Seltzer bottle and, with needle and thread, affixed it dead center to the outside of the screen door. Once it was secured to the screen door, he would then tug and pull very gently on the cotton ball to expand it until it was misshapen. If one had a good imagination, and I did, that stretched out ball of cotton resembled the filmy wisps of angel hair that had once adorned our Christmas tree.
Once, while riding through the residential streets, I noticed that many other houses had the familiar little white clump on their screen doors. This piqued my interest enough to ask what the cotton balls were for. His poker- faced, deadpan answer satisfied me at the time. "The flies think it’s snow and they freeze to death."
At five, it sounded perfectly reasonable to me. After all, I had accepted without question a tale of a frog turning into a prince, a sky falling on a chicken’s head, and that someday, if my foot fit inside a tiny glass slipper, I would marry a prince. I even wore a pink-banded Cinderella watch as a reminder never to let my feet grow very large.
Screen doors all but disappeared as a cold wave called air conditioning hit the Deep South, but I always remembered those cotton balls and wondered what they were really for.
I mentioned the cotton balls to Doris, a friend who has lived in several towns in the South and even on Sand Mountain, Alabama, where all the old Southern customs were surely treasured and archived, but she merely laughed and said she had never heard of such a thing. I contacted several of my Tennessee relatives who said they believed it had something to do with keeping flies out of the house, but they were not sure how it was supposed to have worked.
A few months ago, the subject of ‘cotton balls on the screen door’ came up again and made me even more determined to know the origins and purpose of this long-ago, rural America custom. I knew if I was to ever find the answer, I would have to turn to the Internet. I went to Yahoo and typed in 'cotton balls on screen doors' in the search box. I found a reference to exactly what I was looking for in an article written by Texas author and columnist Delbert Trew. I contacted Mr. Trew and asked if he knew what purpose the cotton balls of our childhood had served. He replied they resembled moths (at least, to the flies), and when the door was swung to and fro, flies and other flying insects would skedaddle away from the 'flying' moth.
The truth always comes out, doesn’t it. The flies didn’t freeze to death after all; they just skedaddled away in fear. My granddaddy fibbed to me. I suspected as much.
Copyright 2005 Patricia Paris
Patricia Paris is an author and columnist from East Tennessee.
Contact : patriciaparis@gmail.com.
Member: Tennessee Writers Alliance, Int’l Women’s Writing Guild,
Tennessee Mountain Writers, Chattanooga Writers Guild