Welch: When the glue doesn't stick, what else will do the trick?
My grandmother saved S&H Green Stamps. Everybody did. When stamp glue lost its efficacy, as it sometimes did, Grandmother got inventive.
My mother and I arrived at her house one day to see her using egg whites for stamp glue. She had several sheets of stamps and was filling multiple books. Mother wasn’t surprised at how she was sticking them to the pages. I was.
Online recipes tell how to make albumen glue. You beat the egg white, mix it with water and let it set over night. Was anybody doing that during the height of the COVID shutdown? Probably.
The year 2020 was an abbreviated golden age of reviving ancestral skills. Why buy Elmer’s if you’ve got egg whites? Why buy lettuce if you can eat that backyard weed? Online shopping flourished along with home and curbside delivery services, but pioneering types couldn’t help but try to mimic great-great-grandma. At least a little.
Someone should have invented a television show to let everybody know how to get by without shopping for life’s necessities. But COVID essentially caught everyone by surprise. Who had time to create such a show? And who would have sponsored it? Not Elmer’s glue.
Speaking of stamps, I made my own COVID postage scale. If you have stamps on hand but no ordinary postage scale and you don’t want to go inside the post office, it works.
Instructions: Drill a little hole in the vertical edge of a door (not the hinged edge) to accommodate a nail. Cut a notch for exact midpoint placement of a long balance to set on that nail. Attach matching plastic bags to either end of the balance. Use coins as counterweights for whatever you’re weighing. Coin weights are posted online. Pennies seem to be a moving target. No matter what, be ready to convert grams to ounces.
I probably wrote about my postage scale previously. Sorry. Yes, I still have it – my very own COVID relic.
If you’re still reading, that online egg glue recipe says you can add crushed shells to turn the glue into a paste.
Either way, it’s our sticky backyard pecan tree aphids that inspired me to think about homemade glue.
An online search for “aphid glue” led me to an abstract (love those abstracts) of a scientific paper by William A. Foster. It says post-reproductive aphids turn into “glue-packed warriors” in order to defend their colonies. Hurrah! Too seldom does such colorful language appear in typically boring scholarly papers – even in the abstracts.
I still hate those aphids, but Foster has given me some respect for the enemy. They’re just defending themselves.
If you have aphids in your pecan trees, you know how much stickiness they can deposit under the trees they inhabit, especially when branches are directly above a parking spot.
Aphid glue should be imminently marketable. It’s natural, very tacky, water soluble and GMO-free. If you figure out how to collect it, let me know. Till then, I’m sticking to egg whites.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Welch: When the glue doesn't stick, what else will do the trick?
