Oh, good grief! The Pond strikes again! I read this, smiled and started to think what to say about the whyness of my smiling. It never occurred to me for a millisecond to wonder about the gender of the arse that owned the underpants. I "knew" it was male and carried on.
This has all the simplicity of the red wheelbarrow. It's a take-it-or-leave-it jumping-off point. A little thing, to hold in a clenched fist, like the thing Seree gave me on another of these threads, a thing that I wrote down on the pad by the phone. (It was the phrase "associative thinking", which I'd never heard before and which I shall cherish because I didn't know how much I needed it till it I saw it.)
I then noticed in the crib that the word is "panty", which is little and twee (and girly) and the translator has made it less sickly for me, but why do I like it so much better? It's only for Brits that the gender is changed by the word chosen to replace it.
Oh, this is going to go round and round in my head like stuff in the frontloader that I can see between the banisters if I look down to my left. The poem sat me in front of it, watching, as I sometimes do. Did I put the red Sloggis in or did I leave them in the bathroom? I watch the whizziness and yes - there they are. I feel happy for having spotted them. They are a feature of the midweek load. One day the gusset will give and they won't be. But not yet, not yet.
Let me throw a different detergent capsule in among the word-washing here. What about that phrase in the crib "of color"? It must be important. It is repeated. Is it a metaphor for... ?
Here (in the UK) when washing was a bigger deal than it is now, we used to refer to the contents of our washloads as "whites" or "coloureds" and nobody thought twice. Why, my neighbour Mary, who moved to Tenby, used to ask me not to burn my garden rubbish when she "had her whites out".
Mary died a couple of years ago. One of her front teeth was missing...
Oh, stop it, poem! I am not sure what it is you're trying to say, but I'm listening, I'm listening. And no, on second thoughts, don't stop. I'm enjoying the ride.
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