Paper towels

We are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and there are shortages at the grocery store. I’ve stopped going into the grocery story because the mostly empty shelves of rice and beans strike some primal chord of insecurity and it creates a hyper-vigilant anxiety that requires a good chunk of the next day to recover. The paper towel and toilet paper aisle has been empty since the week before the shelter-at-home announcement. We had a lot of both so didn’t think about it much. Now that the shortages continue, and we are down to our last 4 rolls of paper towels, we are seeing them for what they are.

Precious resources.

Need to dry your hands after washing (10 times a day)? Tear off a paper towel. Need to clean up a spill? Tear off a paper towel. Faced with the soon-to-be lack, we had some deeper paper-towel-induced conversations than one would expect. For example, the fresh paper towel for hand drying made my husband feel clean. He didn’t want to use a kitchen towel for that purpose. To him, kitchen towels are dirty. No wonder he used so many paper towels! To meet his needs, and everyone else’s, we came up with a system based on inexpensive washcloths. Each person has a color. Each person can do with their washcloth whatever they want. Hand-drying only. Wiping up spills. Whatever. Two weeks into the system and it’s going really well. We still have 3 rolls of paper towels in our “cache,” everyone has been washing and drying hands like champs and we are all wondering why we didn’t do this earlier.

We didn’t see paper towels for what they were. Precious resources.