the seven-year itch gift she will never see coming

the traditional seventh-anniversary gift is wool. the modern list says a desk set. i want to make the case for a stick.

here's the part nobody mentions on the anniversary gift blogs: the seven-year itch was an actual itch first.

before it was a movie about a subway grate, it was a rash. nineteenth-century america had a scabies problem and a superstition to go with it — that once you caught the itch you were stuck with it for seven years. it shows up in print in an 1839 newspaper ad for a patent medicine in the ohio statesman, and thoreau uses it in walden in 1854. the marriage version is almost nobody's idea of ancient: george axelrod took the phrase off a comedian for the title of his 1952 play, and billy wilder's 1955 film did the rest.

so for a hundred and thirteen years, the seven-year itch was something you scratched. the object for that already exists, and it has better stories than the marriage does.

japan: it is named after a woman you should not have asked

the japanese word is 孫の手, mago-no-te — "grandchild's hand." lovely image. small hand, reaching your back. it is also, according to japanese etymology dictionaries and the japanese wikipedia entry, wrong. the phrase is a corruption of 麻姑の手, mako no te: magu's hand.

magu is a daoist immortal out of the 神仙传 whose fingernails grow long and curved like a bird's. in the story a man called cai jing takes one look at those nails and thinks — silently, he never says it out loud — when my back really itches, those would be perfect. another immortal reads his mind and has him whipped for it.

the moral of the founding legend of the back scratcher is: do not ask another person to scratch your back. every japanese convenience store now sells the workaround.

and one from the international department

in london, in the cuming collection at southwark, there is a back scratcher. buffalo horn and ivory, 34 cm, with a little bird carved on the end of the handle. the catalogue entry (object C02566) dates it to 1825 and notes it was "said to have been obtained at the sack of the palace of the king of kandy" — that is, someone stormed a royal palace in what is now sri lanka, looked around at everything a palace contains, and left with the back scratcher.

aberdeen has one too. ebony and ivory, 53 cm, nineteenth-century northern india, donated by somebody in 1973 and now in a climate-controlled store, viewable by appointment.

people have been putting these in their luggage for two hundred years and then being slightly embarrassed about it later. this is the tradition you'd be buying into.

china: the one everybody already has

my grandmother's is bamboo, dark at the handle. lives on the back of the sofa, which is easy to reach without turning your head.

i thought it was hers. it is everyone's. if you grew up in a chinese household, go look at your sofa.

the chinese folk name is 不求人 — bù qiú rén. you won't have to ask anyone.

the fancy version made it into museums: the jade 如意, the curled ceremonial sceptre emperors hold in portraits and hand out at weddings, is generally reckoned to have started as exactly this stick, and is named after the feeling of finally getting the spot. ru yi: as one wishes. one emperor was buried with a silver one in 918 and the notable thing about it, per the museum that holds it, is that it wasn't decorated enough.

that is all the history i'm going to make you read.

the ones i sell are grass

not bamboo — sorghum. the seed-head stalks of broomcorn, hollow and springy, the material chinese brooms have always been made of. most of it grows in bairin left banner in inner mongolia, which the chinese press calls the country's home of the broomcorn, and where the standard pattern list the weavers work from already includes a five-finger claw and a tapping hammer. i did not invent a clever new use for broom material. i bought two shapes off a list.

the sorghum hand is the five-finger claw, 36 cm, hand-bundled, corded, red tassel. the sorghum hammer is knuckles on a stick — one, two or three heads — for the tapping thing, which is a whole separate pleasure and does not require anyone's cooperation either.

the pitch

seven years in, the traditional gift is wool, which itches.

a back scratcher says two things at the same time. one: i know exactly where you can't reach. two: you won't have to ask me.

one of those is romantic. i'll let you two work out which.

go play.