(This is a Reddit re-post I fired off at 3:00am one late night, after reading about the Hobby Lobby boycott over decorative cotton. September 2017)

Steve Bannon was right about one thing...they are never going to give back this country without a fight.

I feel like every day I am fighting and arguing with non-entities. Now these crazy lunatics are going after COTTON. I bled for cotton, I ached for cotton, cotton allowed me to have my first 2 children. So here I go off in defense of fibers.

In the Western part of North Carolina working in a manufacturing mill was your best chance at a decent life. Better than any retail job around, if you could leave high school and be lucky enough to get into a mill you could actually blue collar that life and raise a family. In 1988 I was a newlywed, looking to start a family and after some pushing and prodding I was able to get my foot in the door at Marion Fabrics in Marion, NC.

I was a young Yankee girl from a Catholic school upbringing born in New York City. We then moved to Jersey City and again to Bayonne, NJ. North Jersey, Sopranos country!! Having only left a life of pure pavement, bagel stores, Catholic cathedrals and public transportation a mere 2 years before, I was a teen Marissa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny". To find myself in western North Carolina alone was a culture shock I can't fully describe here. (I love that movie because it captures a glimpse of what I went through) My world changed in such a drastic way it boggles the mind. I ended up living in a rock and mortar dug out log cabin built in 1879. A single light bulb assembly hung from the center of the wooden hewn beams, being that electricity was added to the cabin in the 1930s. My fuse box contained 2 single glass screw-in type fuses. I was given a wringer washer that was kept outside. I had to manually fill it with a hose, manually drain it between cycles and it was powered by an orange extension cord I'd drag out to do laundry day. I used the wringer to squish the water from the clothes and everything was line dried. Hard jeans, crunchy towels. There was no reception for TV and radio other than a single AM country station I could pick up a signal to listen to my transistor radio. Who the hell was Randy Travis??? Where was my Duran Duran?? TV was nonexistent. No reception and no cable were run. Back then it was the giant satellite dishes and only the rich had them. Was it really only a few years ago I had HBO?? I had lived in an apt above a bar and restaurant in a city, in civilization. Through a convoluted chain of events I was now living among the poorest of the poor in Appalachia*, in Haywood County, North Carolina. I was 16 years old.

I had watched Coal Miner's Daughter as a kid up North, so I kinda accepted that the way of life depicted in tha movie, was where I was now and I made the best of it. Five days after I turned 18 and with $30 to our name, I married my boyfriend and played house. All I wanted was a baby to love and raise. But I knew we'd need money. Back then NOBODY WAS ON WELFARE. Didn't even enter into the equation. We were all just dirt poor, scrounging for what we could work, sell, cultivate and use. It never once entered our minds to go on any benefits. I needed good insurance and stability to have a baby so I set out to find the best job I could as a stranger in a strange land.

I stress this; THIS IS NOT THE WESTERN NC OF TODAY!! Circa 1980s Western North Carolina had no fancy restaurants owned by outsiders, hookah bars and pot-friendly environment. There was nothing 'cool' and 'progressive' about it. Asheville was the 'big city' in the mountains and they did not take kindly to Yankees. My accent was strong. I did not have any luck finding work and the drive over the mountain from Haywood to Buncombe county was so, so hard on my 1967 Oldsmobile Cutlass with a cracked intake manifold I repaired with JB Weld. But I held my stuff together and eventually I landed a job with Marion Fabrics in Marion, NC. It was too far to commute so I knew I'd have to move to the other side of Black Mountain, Old Fort. Through a friend of a friend we found out about another log cabin for rent in Nebo, NC. This log cabin was a bit different than the first one I lived in. It was built in 1900 and they added a bathroom to it in the 1940s and paneling on the inside. It was much, much more of a normal place to live than the previous cabin. I painted, fixed it up and made it into a cozy home. Termites were eating the logs on the outside but there was nothing I could do about that!!

And so it began. Working in a cotton mill is NOT EASY WORK. There are several stages cotton must go through to turn into fabric. From receiving bales of raw cotton harvested from the fields to cleaning it, getting the twigs and sticks out of it, pulling the seeds from each puff. Cotton gets worked into a pulling machine that makes it look like a big, thick never-ending soft rope-like wad. From there it gets combed and spun into a yarn, the yarns are then plyed together to make threads, the threads are spun onto a warp (which resembles a giant spool that's slit so all the threads are on one side coming up together) That warp gets mounted on a loom. Each thread is put into that loom, then the creeling reel and shuttles move back and forth to create cloth.

Cotton can only be successfully woven at 98 degrees and 100% humidity. Yes, 100%. The temperature stays hot because of all the machinery running and the mills usually have a hydration system which sprayed out swamp water from the reservoir outside to keep the humidity up. And you don't get one loom. You get DOZENS OF LOOMS all of them chug chug chug chug chugging away churning out bolts of cloth. I worked in several departments but because of the way I'd whip around they eventually made me a weaver. Weavers could make TOP DOLLAR at the company!! In 1989 I was making the badass sum of $7.00 an hour. I think back then minimum wage was $3.75.

BOY DID YOU WORK FOR IT. 12 hour shifts. NO BREAKS. Did you read that??? NO BREAKS!! In NC Labor laws were not the same in manufacturing and you were 100% NOT ENTITLED to a lunch break. You ate while you watched your looms. You had your buddy cover you while you ran to pee. 12 hours on for Mon, Tues and Wed day shift for a week, then the next week you worked 12 hour nights shift Thurs, Fri and Sat. Sundays went back and forth depending on which cycle you were on. Weaving required you to be ON YOUR FEET for 12 hours, running from loom to loom checking each one. The game is....don't ever let them stop. Never. If a thread breaks the machine stops and a red light flags it. You have to find the thread, reattach, knot it, pound the start button, get that loom back on line. One stops, another stops...oh shit hurry tie knot, pound, run to next machine, hurry find the broken thread, tie it, pound start button......are they all running?? Whew ok good, no red lights. Ok let me sit for a minute and catch my bre....shit.....#22 red light run run run.

As I write this it seems as vivid to me as last month. I haven't thought about this in years.

So I worked at the mill. The mill provided medical insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield Baby!! For $40.00 per payday every 2 weeks I got coverage. And I got my babies. My first son in late 1989 and my second son in 1991. I was able to repair relations with my family. With family support that I needed at 21 with 2 children, I divorced and left Western NC for the Raleigh-Durham area. Might as well have been Dorothy opening up the door after the house fell down. I left the poverty and mills behind, moved into a nice apartment complex with CABLE TV (what the hell are Simpsons?) Met a nice guy and remarried at the strip mall chapel and had a 3rd son. (Eventually in 1998 moved away from NC, this time to Virginia.)

But fresh out of the mountains living in Durham, NC the next thing you know there was this guy Bill Clinton who won the presidency. I always thought that having a billionaire in office would be a smart thing for the country. I had wished Donald Trump would run but this guy Ross Perot seemed like a good choice at the time. I literally had access to news and TV for maybe 2 years as a young mom with 2 toddlers. I thought the more channels I watched I was as informed as I could be. HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Fast forward to a thing called NAFTA. But won't that hurt the mills?? Ah, who gives a shit, you left that life behind, right?? My Hillbilly ex-husband had made $14,000 that last year we were together. My new husband was making $42,000. I was RICH now in 1993!! Who cares?? Those old mills have been there forever, it will be fine. Right????Why should I care?? I'm never going back to the mills.

Then very briefly: after 13 years in a declining marriage to #2 I got cancer. Among other issues, he said he wasn't cut out for being with a sick woman. I told him I'd rather die alone than know he didn't want to be with me through my illness. So he bailed back to NC and he left me with 3 teens in Virginia to battle out the cancer alone. I battled and won. Twice.

I also met an amazing man during my cancer treatment. After years of dating he proposed and I got my very first wedding in 2010! I wore a white dress, we had guests and food and everything!! I was 40, he was 50. We honeymooned at Biltmore in Asheville, NC. Drove from Culpeper, VA down the whole Blue Ridge Parkway as part of our trip! It was like visiting another planet, having not been there in 20 years. Asheville is this hip, cool, way-way liberal place now. Nothing like I ever imagined. Old locals HATE IT ( I talked to some ancient men sitting in a country store) so I took new hubby on a tour of my old place and we drove to Nebo, NC. The cabin was burned down after I moved out. The mills are all closed down, it is like a ghost town in huge swaths of land. NAFTA caused everything to close and move to Mexico . The only people who live around there now all have good vehicles and commute to Morganton or over the mountain west. But so many mills are gone, shuttered...just huge hulking buildings falling apart. It was crushing and depressing to see. I get mad at myself for being so flippant about it in my 20s. Not like I could have changed anything....but my attitude. I might be hard headed but I DO learn lessons!!! I have had this silly, fake spinning wheel since I bought it at age 17 from a yard sale in Clyde, NC. Daydreaming of Disney's Sleeping Beauty. I keep the sprigs of cotton I picked from a field on display on this spinning wheel. I picked them the week I started work at the mill. I can feel the seeds in the puffs. I have traveled and moved and life has changed so much but I still have the same sprigs of cotton. There is still a bit of blood from where the outer nut is sharp and I pricked my fingers. I see this wheel every day of my life so that I never forget how far I've come. Never will I forget the sweat, the knees aching, the pounding, my lower back hurt so badly from 12 hours on concrete, using up insoles in my shoes to help cushion the ache, the fire in the mill, the mosquito filled swamp water that stunk but you were so hot you'd stand under the pipes to let it mist you anyway. Missing my family, my old NYC life, pushing that down and just focusing on the prize...my children and family. If I work hard enough I can have a family. And I did it, I had my sons. Now I have granddaughters.

And so the rage I feel coursing through my blood when I read about some uppity, spoiled brat, insulted by seeing a sprig of cotton at Hobby Lobby calling for good people to get fired, or at a place setting at a fancy dinner......whew..... Dudes and Dudettes, if you are still reading this, it is like liquid fire in my body and I want to scream my head off. Those complaining racists don't know ANYTHING about cotton and what it means to our country!!

*Please, if you have time try to find the video American Hollow, by Rory Kennedy. It is the perfect depiction of life in poor Appalachia and can really put a visual to that world.