Why Margie Thompson Papered Her Walls With Kotex Boxes (this is a made up name)

I don’t know why.  But she did.  To fully appreciate the weirdness of this chapter, you have to go back to a time when menstruation was hardly spoken of, and then privately in whispers.  I don’t know much about the history of what women used before Kotex pads in the 1960’s.  I believe disposable pads replaced rags.

(By the way, one of the books about the Lizzie Borden case says she was in her basement that morning to wash her rags but the lawyers on both sides agreed not to mention it, because everyone was too embarrassed to discuss it.)

But, back to the pads.  Kotex pads were held in place by an elastic band with two little metal hooks that grabbed the ends of the pads.  To visualize this, imagine an absorbent thong.  The pads were big, and came in big boxes that were either pink or blue.  I suppose the color had something to do with size or absorbency, but it doesn’t matter.  The only thing worth remembering is that it was absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to buy a giant box of Kotex pads without EVERYONE in the store knowing what you were doing.

There was a cellophane wrapper that went around the middle of this giant box, and when you got it home, you took off the wrapper and now you had a “discreet” giant pink or blue box in your bathroom cabinet.

Oh, and on the front and back of the giant pink or blue box, there was a slightly darker pink or blue rose to “decorate” this thing.

And now back to Margie Thompson.  She lived across the road from us in a house that could charitably be described as “a shack”. She was friendly enough, but notably peculiar.  Who can forget the time she was soaking her breasts in starch to make them less floppy and a fire truck went by and she ran outside to see what was going on?

She apparently liked the artwork of Kotex boxes, because she unfolded them and covered her walls with them.  Today, this would be seen as some kind of deconstructionist artistic statement, but then it was just odd.

She also insulated her attic with hay bales that drew in mice and rats.  Duchess, the egg-sucking pointer, once famously fell through her ceiling when she went to chase the vermin, landing in a shower of hay straw in the Kotex-box living room.

Later in life, this delightful old lady moved to a small shack on a highway, made memorable by the collection of cooking pot lids hung with strings outside the windows.  This was an early burglar alarm.  She lived there for many years, and we saw her place each Sunday on the way to church.