I unwrapped it on the workbench Tuesday afternoon, and before I had the cellophane fully off, my eyes did the thing — the little tear thing they do when something is wrong at a level my body knows before my brain does. It smelled like a brand new shower curtain that had been left in a parked Kia. It smelled like the inside of a pool noodle. It did not smell like a flag. It smelled like a chemistry exam I would have failed on purpose.
Cole said, “Brooke, it’s just plastic.” And reader, that is the whole problem. That is the entire sermon. “It’s just plastic” is what people say right before their toddler develops a rash that the pediatrician calls “contact dermatitis” because the actual word is too long for the insurance form.
I went straight to a Facebook group called Stars, Stripes, and Solvents — 41,000 members, almost all of them mothers, almost all of them in some stage of stripping their porches of imported polyester. A woman named Brindley posted last June that her cousin worked four months at a flag-printing facility outside Shenzhen and said the dye bath they use to lock in the red is the same family of compound used to waterproof outdoor patio cushions. The blue, she said, is “a conversation for another day.” Brindley has not been wrong yet. Brindley correctly called the Stanley cup lead thing eleven months before NPR.
And I want to be very clear, because people on Nextdoor get strange about this: I love the flag. I am not one of those women. My grandfather flew B-25s and came home and ran a hardware store in Tulsa for forty-one years and would have hand-sanded a barn door before he let a polyester anything into his house. What I am saying is that the object I bought for $3.98 in the seasonal aisle next to the citronella buckets is not a flag. It is a flag-shaped petrochemical event, and I refuse to hang an event on my porch.
My sister-in-law Devra works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville, which means she is basically a nurse, and she told me last June three separate toddlers came in the week after Memorial Day with what the doctor wrote down as “contact dermatitis” but what she — and the other front desk girl, Pauline, who has been there nine years — quietly call “garage rash.” These are kids whose dads hung the flag, then handed them the leftover plastic sleeve to play with on the rug. Devra would not lie to me about this. Devra does not even lie about Costco samples.
So I have done what I always do, which is overcorrect cheerfully. Ember and I spent Wednesday night cutting bunting from a stack of old pillowcases I bought at the Black Mountain estate sale where the woman selling them cried about her late husband for forty minutes and gave me a free butter dish. The red is a little pink. The blue is more of a slate. It is not a regulation flag and I am not pretending it is. It is a piece of cloth that has been in a North Carolina house since 1962 and has earned the right to wave on my porch without off-gassing into my hydrangeas.
The Lowe’s flag is currently zip-tied to the inside of the goat fence, where my doe Pomegranate has been licking it skeptically for three days. I am going to let it air out there for six full weeks. If at the end of six weeks Pomegranate is still licking it, it can come inside. If she stops licking it, that is information, and I will be acting on that information.
I keep thinking about my grandfather standing in the seasonal aisle, picking up the $3.98 flag, turning it over, finding the little sticker that says where it was actually printed, and putting it back down without a word. He would not have made a scene. He would have walked to the lumber section and bought a dowel and gone home and figured something out. That is the energy I am trying to bring to this Memorial Day. A dowel, a pillowcase, and the quiet refusal to let a major hardware chain decide what patriotism smells like in my garage.
If you need me Saturday, I will be on the porch with the bunting Ember sewed, a pitcher of hibiscus tea, and exactly zero plastic in a fifteen-foot radius. Bring a folding chair. Do not bring a Bomb Pop. We will talk about Bomb Pops next week.