When I first encountered a beaded curtain as a kid I found it mildly annoying. A fabric curtain would hide what was going on on the other side of the opening, but a row of beaded strings hanging in a doorway, what does that hide? Obscure slightly, maybe. That was a goal? I didn’t like going through the curtain, afraid a bead string would catch in my hair. Plus, it wouldn’t go away. Every time you went through that door you had to deal with it.
A beaded curtain could be decorative, I conceded. I kind of liked the way it rattled as you went through. And I kind of didn’t. And I guess that’s where my engagement with beaded curtains ended. I’ve never considered hanging one.
But then there’s this footnote in Mary Roach’s latest:
[B]eaded strands that hang in doorways in Middle Eastern homes, allow[] breeezes, but not flies, to pass.
Oh.
Who knew? Makes me thankful once again that flies were never much of an issue in my neighborhood.
Or, as Mary Roach puts it:
Who among the thousands of youthful 1970s doofs who hung these in their bedrooms had any clue as to the beads’ provenance as fly control? Not this doof.
source: Grunt: the curious science of humans at war by Mary Roach
2016. W.W. Norton & Co, NY
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