Lint in the Butt

TG brought her daughter, Miss America, downstairs to my bathroom where I was getting ready for work. "Tell your Nana what you found," she said, teetering between empathy and impatience.

In her pleated jeans skorts (and topless), four-year-old Miss America looked up at me with sad, teary brown eyes and a pouty lower lip I could have set my coffee cup on.

"What's the matter, sweetie? You okay?"

Miss America's chin quivered and she clammed up, wiping at her eyes.

"She found lint in her butt," my daughter explained with that exasperated smirk that's half chuckle and half I-can't-believe-I'm-a-grown-woman-talking-about-lint-in-the-butt. You know the one.

"Lint?" I asked.

TG nodded. "She's freaking out."

"But how did she --" My lightning quick faculties assessed the situation: Miss America had found lint in her butt. Rather, she had found lint in the crevasse of her butt. How she managed to find it was not my concern. The important thing is that she was not happy to discover this little treasure and had promptly fallen apart.

"I hate it when that happens," I said. "It's okay. Really, it's just lint. I get lint in my bellybutton sometimes. There's lint on everything."

I could see my little cherub wanted to believe that the offending lint had not emanated from her behind, but then her eyes grew wide, which I took to mean: If there's lint on everything, maybe there's reason to panic on the scale of a planetary invasion.


"Come here," I said. "Let me show you." I took her hand as we wound our way through the house to the laundry room. At the dryer, I pulled the lint catch out of its deep hole. "See?" I stroked the screen with my fingertips allowing the thick, flaccid cushion of speckled fuzz to fold over itself and into the trash can. "Lint is in all fabrics. All the clothes you wear have lint in them. It's everywhere, like germs, but you normally don't see it."

I suspected the wheels of her imagination turned that big swath of dryer fuzz over her crevasse and left an unwelcome hanger-on.

"This like, almost NEVER happens," I assured her, resigned to my matriarchal ineptitude. "It was a fluke that you even found it!"

Miss America nodded and whimpered, "Will you make sure it's off?"

"Um . . . sure?" I led her back into my bathroom where TG was in my adjoining closet jacking my wardrobe. I pulled a rag from the linen closet, ran it under the faucet, and squeezed. "Drop 'em," I said.

Miss America slid down her skorts and undies, and I zipped the rag between her cheeks, then held it out for inspection. "See anything?"

Fingers in her mouth, she mumbled no.

"That's because there's nothing there!"

TG peeked out the closet and rolled her eyes. I tossed the rag into the hamper and dusted off my hands. "I think my work here is finished."

Then I joined TG in my closet. We held up blouses and dress pants, assessing them for wearability based on how skinny we didn't feel. We hopped around without modesty in our panties and bras, trying each outfit on (and off). Miss America watched from the edge of the bathtub. Her small voice stopped us, each with one leg in a pair of pants we had exchanged.

"That's disgusting," she said. The village idiots looked into the big brown eyes of the cherub with the scrunched-up face. "That's disgusting," she repeated.

This, from the child with lint in the butt.

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