Writing this paper in the time of COVID has been strangely apropos. I always intended it to map to spring: a time for cleaning and Easter, which are my clearest memories of receiving hula hoops. I admit to hating hula hooping as a child. My brother and I usually used them for different types of games: they would be a safe spot on the floor which was otherwise lava, or a hole to jump through in the pool, or they provided a “harness” between horse and rider. These kinds of games nearly always pulled the hula hoop out of shape, bent it into an oval with dents and creases, sometimes made it entirely fold in half. The baser materiality of the hoop would never change, however: it would remain a tube of waxy plastic, brightly colored and insubstantial, easily bent and misshapen but nearly impossible to break or permanently damage despite our best efforts.

This Easter was instead the Easter that was not. Several days early I rushed to my parents’ place to see them. Arriving at dusk, I walked into the house, N95 mask donned, hand sanitizer at the door, and went immediately into the shower, where I bagged my clothes and put on ones that had been freshly laundered. I then proceeded to wear a cloth mask the entire time I was there, ensuring that I did not put my parents (sixty-five and sixty-eight respectively) and my grandmother (eighty-three) at risk of COVID. Everything I touched in the house was promptly wiped with Clorox wipes, or immediately put in the dishwasher. The HDPE was omnipresent: it contained the hand sanitizer, the body wash, the dishwasher liquid, the Clorox wipes, the laundry detergent. Nearly without exception, if there is a caustic material, it is housed in HDPE. Toilet bowl cleaner. Bleach. Vim. Mr. Clean. Clorox. Lysol. Tide. Gain. Persil. Liquid soap for hand washing. Every shampoo, every conditioner, all of the body wash. The lotion applied to the cracked hands of skin washed too many times. An array of colors, shapes, and designs, HDPE is amazingly versatile in this respect. Name brands, logos, and instructions printed directly onto the bottles or tubs, in every color of the rainbow—meant to convey information about the content within—bright, cheerful, cheap, and above all else, clean.