The Blind Leading the Blinds

I am being invaded by the forest. Usually, one invades the forest. At least one did in the days of Robin Hood. No, I am being invaded--by forest green, the color. I have not had a prior intimate relationship with forest green. Since I moved, it now greets me every morning when I wake up. It’s on the shower curtain and the shower curtain liner--a double whammy. It’s on the scatter rugs. It’s on the damned window blinds. It’s on my towel, my personal towel! And, it’s on me. Don’t you hate it when your new towel leaves its fuzzies all over you? Those fuzzies are now intertwined with all three of my chest hairs. This is all to much too soon for me. Where are the soft pastels of my past, my roses and yellows? I do not like change.

Why do windows have blinds? Why were they ever invented? Can you imagine how many people it takes in some third world country to assemble all of those slats? What is wrong with shades or curtains?

These things never work. That mechanism on the long string (that gets stuck on every thing) never works. When you pull it down, do you push it to the right or to the left to get it to work? I can never remember. It’s like that hot and cold water thing. I grew up in a house which had one bathroom with the hot on the right and another bathroom with the hot on the left. No wonder I cannot work the blinds. I do not like them. Did I mention that they are green - forest green?

This is not my first encounter with blinds. You probably guessed that this was another one of those childhood things and you were right. You see, my house was covered with venetian blinds--fourteen rooms with venetian blinds. Should the Venetians have to take the heat for inventing these things? Obviously, they must have taken some legal action to get their name off these things. Now they are called levelor and other fancy, non-ethnic names.

Did you ever try to clean blinds. Nowadays, they have little panel trucks which run around town and are dedicated solely to cleaning these things electronically. Electronically! What do they do? Plug the blinds in? Emit a screeching sound that scares the dirt off? Come on.

In the good old days, when I was young, I use to dust those suckers by hand--slat, by slat, by slat. I think that my fingers were the only ones small enough to fit in the holes between the linen straps and the taut string. That taut string was made with at least two strands of cotton. It was the key to the whole mechanism. Snap one of those and the slats would be every where--wooden slats which would break. Mom and Dad would love that.

Do you want to know what is wrong with shades?