The cotton boll sits fat and fluffy, like a miniature sheep tucked among curling brittle leaves, ready to be shorn. This one is still on its stem, sitting in a cup with several others, a bouquet of billowy brown flowers, whisper soft on the fingertips, like cotton candy made with maple syrup, like yarn waiting to be spun. The variety is Nankeen Brown, named for Nanjing, China, where the brown-lint cotton was grown and processed into fabric in the 18th and early 19th centuries, setting off a brief craze in Europe. The cotton sank out of commercial interest once synthetic dyes could routinely produce the khaki color of the finished product. It’s not just simpler to use white cotton; colored cottons have a variety of specialized handling requirements for best results, and commercial white cotton varieties generally have a longer staple (fiber length), making them easier to spin and more resistant to abrasion during spinning, weaving, and wear—an attractive quality as textile production shifted to powered machinery, which was tough on the finer yarns seen in historical textiles.
Brown is not the only colored-lint cotton, although others saw large-scale production even more rarely. Green-lint cotton, another short-staple variety, was briefly pressed into service for uniforms during World War II to get around a shortage of dyes. But in South America, green, brown, and pink (usually a pale blush color) cottons have been grown traditionally for thousands of years, used for embellishments on clothing, along with a variety that is a subtle off-white. Modernly, these native varieties are grown with encouragement from the Native Cotton Project, established in the 1990s to support heritage textile work (and offer an alternative to coca cultivation). Cottons cross-pollinate easily, so growing different colors is a logistical challenge. (If I won the lottery, I’d build a set of greenhouses and grow at least 3 varieties, maybe more.) And sometimes the color is regarded as a fault. “Oh, Maud, we have a problem, because the beige cotton, the light brown cotton, this year didn’t really grow beige,” growers sadly told Maud Lerayer one year. Her home goods company in Brooklyn, Behind the Hill, partners with indigenous growers in Guatemala (and a group in India). The cotton was pink. She reserved the whole crop.
I grow only a few plants a year. I love their richness and their call to a time when more of us lived closer to the sources of our material culture, and did not just roll with such surprises or buy our way out of them but tended and explored them.
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Southern Exposure Seed Exchange sells many heritage seeds, including cottons. In addition to Nankeen brown, they offer 2 green varieties and another brown called Sea Island (Gossypium barbadense) that combines brown color with the longer staple of commercial white cotton.
James Vreeland, who identified surviving naturally colored cottons in the course of work in South America in the 1970s, went on to champion the Native Cotton Project. In 1999, he published an article charting this work, The Revival of Colored Cotton, which has delicious photos.
In 2021, we got a pair of kittens from a rescue organization. One of them, Grace, was sheer easy mode. Cute, low maintenance, gentle with her claws and teeth, not a big lap cat, but that’s ok. The other, Horatio, was very sweet and cuddly, a fluffy little orange boy who was underweight for age and ended up being sick all the time – we were at the vet almost weekly for a while there, with a constellation of symptoms from runny nose to listlessness to stumbling. And the vet finally said, “I think we should check bile acids.”
Grace and Horatio shortly after their arrival in our home.
Bile acids aid in digestion, and they are, in essence, recycled by the liver as it processes what comes out of the gastrointestinal tract. A portosystemic shunt (liver shunt) is an extra blood vessel (in the simple case) that routes blood around the liver, so the liver doesn’t get a chance to do its many jobs, including metabolism, storing nutrients, and filtering out toxic material. Testing for levels of bile acids before and after a meal is a clever way of seeing whether the blood is flowing into the liver correctly. If it is, acids secreted in response to the meal will be promptly recycled. If not, they just keep floating around, hinting that other stuff is building up in the blood. A particularly dangerous example is ammonia compounds, a natural by-product of protein digestion that, if not filtered out, can cause terrible symptoms – lethargy, vomiting, disorientation.
Liver shunt is a developmental defect – the vessels just didn’t get built right – and while these symptoms can be managed somewhat with diet and medication, the outlook is poor. In the right cases (simple, with one big vessel, rather than complex, with a lot of little ones) surgery offers a chance at a normal life. The detouring vein is fitted with a ring containing absorbent material that, over time, slowly narrows the errant vessel, and the blood follows the path of least resistance right into the liver, as intended. We scheduled the bile acids test, and the results were clear, later confirmed with an abdominal ultrasound. The ultrasound yielded a ray of hope: there seemed to be just one big vessel, making him a good candidate for surgery.
The stomach (not shown) nestles under the liver, with a blood supply right into it (lower blue vessel). Blood moves around inside the liver and comes out, filtered, above it (left). Horatio had an extra vessel that popped up and around (right). A lot of blood was still being filtered – so his liver was working well enough to help him grow – but it wasn’t enough to keep him healthy.
We were fortunate that Horatio was diagnosed before receiving any kind of surgery. The liver processes medications, too. Some pets are discovered to have this defect only after they fail to recover from a routine spay or neuter because their livers couldn’t clear the anesthetics they received. And Horatio was lucky that we were easily able to manage his special diet and medication to keep him healthy and growing while we waited for a surgery that we were fortunate we could afford. He was very lucky to have a single vessel, an easy target for the surgeons. And we were lucky that he was a perfect little gentleman in the car when we drove him two hours to the hospital; our regular veterinarian referred him to the University of Pennsylvania’s Veterinary School so he could be treated by specialists who had actually done this surgery before.
Horatio was a perfect passenger on the way to the veterinary hospital.
We had a few hiccups getting him onto the surgery schedule, but when the day came, everything went as well as could be hoped. The only real surprise seemed to be that he needed a relatively large ring – a size usually needed only for dogs. We found this charming, because we joke that he’s our little golden retriever: friendly, unflappable, and in love with his tennis ball. The surgery protocol called for a 3-day stay, but after the first day or so, that’s often just to ensure that the animal is getting an appetite back, and Horatio bounced back more or less right away. They invited us to pick him up early, saying, “We’re just sitting around watching him eat!” We got him home, and our other cats accepted him back almost right away (our third cat didn’t love his cone at first but got over it). His incision healed promptly, and his first follow-up bile acids test was normal.
All of that is wonderful, but that’s not the marvel.
Most cats – more than half – have some form of yellow eyes, about 4 times as many as have green eyes. The color reflects how much melanin is in the cat’s eyes, with blue being none – just showing the light scatter through the eye.
Copper eyes in healthy cats are caused by lots of melanin, which is rare in the eyes of the general cat population. So when it seemed liked most of the cats showing up with liver shunt had copper-colored eyes, veterinarians made a note of it. Some even made the tantalizing suggestion that eye color had been reported to change after surgery, but I could never find before-and-after pictures.
Copper or orange is not just a normal (if rare) eye color for cats, it is also part of the standard for some pedigreed cats, but it’s not known why it’s common in cats with liver shunt. In most of these cats, another buildup, related to the interruption in the liver’s function, is likely to blame. Whatever the reason, Horatio had very arresting, deep, copper-colored eyes. Before surgery.
5 months old
6 months old
9 months old
It took a few months, but his eyes did start to lighten, and by about 7 months after surgery (during which he was weaned off his special diet and medications with no ill effects), they were yellow.
3 months after surgery
8 months after surgery
11 months after surgery
Seeing him now, playing chase with the other cats, hanging out in the back yard and watching the birds, being a cute lap cat, it’s hard to believe he was ever so frail and sick. And while his coppery eyes were gorgeous, we are more than happy to see this clear evidence, every day, that the surgery worked.
Horatio has grown to be a handsome adult of 9 to 10 lb, bright and curious and healthy.
Would you like to use photos of Horatio’s eye-color change? Send me an email and let’s talk!
This is a substantial revision of an article originally posted in 2023.
If you are respectful of others, you will be welcomed, and people will be excited to see your web pages and to meet you. This is not a special characteristic of tilde.club; this is a basic characteristic of decent humans that somehow has become atypical on the Internet.
I got online in 1992, and this piece is making me so nostalgic, even though everything about what he made sounds distinctly nicer than most of what I encountered then. Wait, is that what nostalgia is? Being suffused with a sense of what the good old days could have been if they actually had been good?
Girls know the difference between “like a girl” and “the way I (a girl) do it.” Boys know they are insulting girls, and are fine with it, but they don’t like insulting their sisters.
Let’s close those gaps.
Related: Verizon ad that calls attention to the ways we tell girls to stop what they’re doing, be pretty, and let the boys do it. Let’s stop doing that.
Perspective can be tough to get, especially on our own behavior. We know that “seeing the big picture” or “getting an aerial view” is important to deep understanding, that we need to get some distance. It’s much easier to give someone else good advice than to follow it ourselves (even when our ability to give good advice comes directly from needing it).
It’s true for group behavior, too. The conventions, the little in-jokes, the “way we’ve always done it” – these can be harmful to individuals, but if the group is homogeneous enough, the pressure to refrain from pointing it out can be just as strong as the negative experiences themselves.
When women went to work to support the war effort, they entered an environment few of them had ever seen, supervised by people who barely recognized where they were coming from. These pages, along with 2 other spreads at the National Archives, Southeast Region, give us a look into a booklet to help those supervisors get the best work out of these mysterious new employees.
This is good advice for all managers of any employees.
The presentation has all the hallmarks of a startlingly condescending piece, but the words tell a different story. Women are cooperative, patient, teachable. It may seem ridiculous that any of those things needed to be said, especially at a time when women were expected to be agreeable, long-suffering, and obedient, but the language is certainly more respectful than those cultural expectations. And the guidelines themselves are remarkable for what they really are: just plain good advice about welcoming new employees and managing them effectively.
This IS people management.
As minority interests of all kinds receive more attention, we see over and over again that familiarity goes a long way, that seeing the old, established ways through the lens of the people who had no say in them brings harmful behavior into focus and creates the potential for a better experience for all. Men benefit just as much as women from respectful treatment in the workplace, arguably more because they still have advantages there as well!
People don’t like change, and they often can’t stand the idea that someone ‘has it easier’ because of a classification difference. Fostering the understanding that they don’t have it easier – quite the contrary – is probably a lost cause, but we don’t really need a “who has it worst” contest at work, anyway. Workplace practices that proactively and supportively resolve issues that get in the way of actually getting the work done put the emphasis where it belongs: on the work getting done.
Worth1000 has the best photoshoppery contests. I want to do one of those marvelous blog entries that is like a magical journey through the imagination, but the problem with Worth1000 and me is that I get lost down the rabbit hole, and nothing gets done for at least a day. So you will have to be satisfied with this.
