Remember playing with milkweed pods as a
kid? If you weren’t careful picking them, you’d get that sticky white sap all
over your hands. We’d open the pods and release all the fluff into the wind.
When I was doing research for my short
story, “Typhoon Prompting” (part of The
Hope of Christmas releasing on Friday by Celebrate Lit), I was surprised to
learn all that fluff was valuable to make life jackets during World War II. The
floss was used as a substitute for kapok, which could no longer be imported
from Indonesia.
School children in the Midwest collected
pods. Five thousand bags of pods were collected in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin.
The bags were sent to a pod separation plant in Petosky, Michigan. It took
eight hundred pods to fill a bag, and two bags per life vest.
Who knew that stuff could save lives? Now
you do.
