How do you get sun-cream stains out of white school shirt collars? Tell me you’re a mother without telling me you’re one.
Apparently, a combo of baking soda, vinegar and fairy dust works. Other suggestions that have come up on searches included toothpaste, lemon juice, sunshine and a paste of Vanish. The collars are still yellow.
Maybe it’s the hard water on the farm here. Maybe it’s my woefully lacking knowledge of the types of material and what each needs to stay sparkling white.
Don’t bleach it, say the eco-conscious and the health nuts. (Also, this fades out the school badge!)
So, on photo day, it’s the least yellow collar that went on, alongside a hope and a prayer that Photoshop includes whitening collars in annual photo shoots. Say cheese, but don’t spill any of the yellow onto the collar, please.
These school photos really are something. It’s one day a year, but from my own school career, it was often the only photo.
I came from the era before digital photos. That time when mommies who could attend sports or other events had to bring a tripod or a steady hand and an extra spool to capture one or two good images of us precious darlings. Sports photos? Hopeless.
I have vivid memories of walking into Clicks to collect that little packet of developed photos. It smelled funny. Mom would flip through the photos and laugh or snort at the blurs, missed shots, and fingers in front of the lens.
She’d take the good ones and put them into real-life albums with sticky plastic things you lift up.
When they get old, the photos don’t stay behind them anymore and get all mixed up when you take the photo album off the dusty bookshelf.
But the images are still there. Immortal, for a while. That eighties hair on my friends’ moms is something else, I tell you. Perms, beehives, and bright colours stand out, even in faraway group photos.
It jogs the memory, even if you have to flip back a few pages to slip the lost photo into its correct place.
In the history of things, photos feel like treasure to me. A silent glimpse into what’s come and gone that speaks far louder than many of the stories people tell.
Ordering school photos might not be a thing in a few more years. I think I’ll miss it.
Oh, and the answer is that green sunlight soap bar, of course. That’s the cure for yellow stains and everything else you want to sparkle.
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