Just recently, my mom brought me a little stack of tenugui as a memento from a recent trip to Kyoto and Osaka, Japan. Tenugui are standard Japanese hand towels. They’re little, soft, absorbent fabrics, with brilliant patterns of penguins, cherry blooms, and sleeping kittens.
For most of my life, I’ve walked with a small cloth in my pocket or bag. Loved ones tucked cotton handkerchiefs among the packages of dried mangoes and underwear they sent out from overseas. I tossed bandanas into knapsacks, and put away boxes of ” fingertip towels” when I got wed. After my kids were born, I filled entire drawers with folded stacks of small, vibrant, and light muslins.
Carrying a small, multipurpose cloth on your person is not a groundbreaking innovation. As early as the very first century BC, the Roman author Catullus points out people bring scarfs to clean their noses or foreheads. In Shakespeare’s time, a scarf was an essential plot point in plays like Othello
For much of human history, we’ve
