In the mid 60s, my family moved to Syracuse, New York. Previously, we had lived in Buffalo on the second story of a house owned by a crazy Italian lady who looked to be 150 years old. I was scared to death of her.
It was exciting to leave that apartment and move into a split-level home in Liverpool, a suburb of Syracuse. The home was owned by the church my father was pastoring. Surrounded by Catholics, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, as Baptists we were afraid we would be considered weird by our neighbors, but the church had become rather well known in the community so we were tolerated.
The house had a basement that contained large packing boxes from our move. Some of the boxes were 4-5 feet tall and were created for hanging garments. They were rather expensive, so my father had not destroyed them. Instead, they were in the basement and seemed designed to make the perfect playhouse for a child.
One day, I invited a friend over to play, and the first thing we did was run to the basement to play in the boxes. My five-year-old sister came down and wanted to play, too. I was about nine years old at the time and highly imaginative, so as far as I was concerned, more people meant more playhouses we could make. So we got down to business creating a box town.
As we turned our boxes over on the sides crawled in them and pretended to have little houses, it dawned on me that bedding would be awfully cool. So I searched through some other boxes nearby and found a bunch of old drapes that my mother had not put up in the house. We pretended they were dresses and wrapped them around our bodies and used the rest of the drapes as beds and curtains for the openings in our box playhouses.
We had a rip-roaring great time! We played for hours… until we began to itch.
The itching grew worse and worse. We began to vigorously scratch our itchy skin, and that’s when I realized something was wrong. I turned to look at my sister and my friend and noticed they were covered in red welts. Looking down at my own arms and legs I saw that they too were covered in welts.
As we stood there looking at each other scratching and itching, we became frightened and started screaming our heads off. Running up the stairs, I found Mama, and we all began shouting, scratching, and itching at the same time.
Startled and confused, my mother looked at our faces, arms and legs and begin asking us where we had been and what had we been doing. When we told her that we had been playing with the drapes in the basement, she suddenly shrieked, and hustled us off to the bathtub.
Stripping us down, we three girls ended up together in a bathtub full of soapy water where she commenced scrubbing us from head to toe with what felt like a Brillo pad. I thought she was trying to scrape the skin right off my body. When she finished scrubbing us, she emptied the water, filled the tub up again and started over. Instead of itching, now everything was stinging.
While miserably sitting in the bathtub, I just had to ask her what had happened.
“You crazy little nuts we’re playing with drapes made out of fiberglass,” she said.
“What is fiberglass,” I asked.
“Very tiny strands of glass, like hair,” she said. “You have glass cuts all over your body, and that’s what’s making you itch and sting. I had to scrub all the glass off of you, which is why I scrubbed so hard.”
There had been glass in the drapes? Who would be stupid enough to make drapes out of glass, I wondered. It made no sense to me at all.
But what I did know was the itching was gone, and by the next day so were the drapes. A few days later my mom asked me to close the linen drapes over the picture window in the living room.
I ran.
To this day, every time I hear the word fiberglass, I feel all itchy. As I wrote this, I wondered if drapes were still being made with fiberglass, so I Googled it. And do you know there are still people sadly commenting that they miss fiberglass drapes? Go figure.
