A Soft Pad

The summer of 35 when I was ten years old I passed the holidays in Sweden with my mother and my aunt. We lived in a cabin and took our meals with other vacationers in a dining hall.
One day, just before lunch, I got something in the eye and my mother couldn’t find it and get it out. I felt miserable and didn’t want to eat, so my mother and my aunt went off to lunch without me.
Soon I began to feel lonely and hungry and the eye felt better. I decided to tie something over it and go to lunch before it was too late. I searched my mother’s drawer for a handkerchief but instead I found a marvelous soft, sausage-shaped pad with a string at each end – just the thing!
I tied it over my sore eye and went up to the dining hall. When I entered, a hush fell over the company and all eyes turned towards me. A wave of suppressed mirth went through the room and my mother got up and took my hand and led me back to the cabin to find a more suitable pad for my eye. When I realized the use of the pad I had found, I was embarrassed, but my mother just laughed it off and took me back to get my lunch.