Grease Rags

Wednesday my husband had been up at the hayfield fixing on equipment all afternoon after he made a morning run to Rapid City to get parts first. When he pulled into the yard that evening I walked out to the shop to find out how his day went and if his fixit work put him in a grumpy mood.

He was cleaning out his welding trailer/toolbox traipsing back and forth to the shop putting things away, while he explained how he got equipment parts put back together. He grabbed a grease-covered rag out of the trailer and stopped midsentence to hold them up for me to see and said, “Here’s your underwear,” with a big grin. He made a point to tell me in a teasing way that our bachelor neighbor saw them.

At first I didn’t believe him until he held up a pair of white and grease-smudged women’s underwear in the air and flipped them front to back. It took me a while before I remembered getting rid of some of my worn out underwear a long time ago and took them out to the rag pile in the shop.

While my husband was working on equipment our bachelor neighbor stopped by to see if he needed any help. When he saw my husband wiping his grease-covered hands on a pair of women’s underwear, he averted his eyes while talking, which my husband thought was funny.

Normally I turn old, holey socks, underwear, t-shirts and pants into rags by cutting them up into washcloth size scraps. I try to cut off all the elastic so underwear isn’t recognizable. Evidentially I missed cutting up a pair that was mine but our neighbor didn’t know that. When my husband went to grab a handful of rags, one of them was an intact pair of my old underwear.

I’m not sure who’s more embarrassed me, for having my old underwear exposed or our neighbor for having seen them. Regardless of how the equipment repairs went, getting the chance to tell me about my underwear being used as a grease rag put my husband in a good mood.