Greetings and Happy Earth Day Dear Ones!

Well, I never in a million years thought I would say this….. but… I miss Prom Season! I’ve been trying to focus on the many blessings in each day… Last night, the winds howled and it snowed again, but just a dusting. Spring in Vermont gets dressed in all her frills as slowly as a sulky teenager getting dragged to church by her parents. The apple trees won’t look like bridesmaids for another month yet. This morning, I took a vacation from my sewing machine and wandered about Hermit Hollow looking for reasons to smile and be cheerful. I sat for a while in the sheep fold, getting nuzzled and covered in lanolin-smudged hugs. There is a patchy green rash spreading on the hill and I noticed a garden rake has taken its place next to a snow shovel on the porch. Signs of Hope. Despite ice-crisp mud, the frogs have turned the pond into an amphibian brothel. Songs of avian courtship echo from the trees and banks.

We have ten baby chicks coming along nicely in a make-shift brooder by the wood stove in the basement. I stopped to count them before going to bed last night and noticed one was missing. Only nine were cuddling in their little nest in the corner under the heat lamp. I scanned the box, fearing for a moment that one of the Jack Russell monsters might have had a snack. Then I saw her—sprawled, tiny wings flat out to each side, legs straight out behind her, her chin (do chickens have chins?) resting on the edge of the feed tray. She had fallen asleep in the food. Being almost the same color as the crumbles, she was hard to notice at first. She was not curled up with her beak tucked under a wing. She was passed out straight, toes down, resting on her belly, looking replete and peaceful, as only the very young can do. I barely touched her and she squawked and scrambled back to her friends. Is there such a thing as chicken envy? It must be nice to climb into a bowl of food and munch until drowsiness overtakes you and you simply fall asleep eating your bed. How I would Love to lose consciousness, lying in an enormous bowl of spaghetti! Perhaps, for many of us using our couches as dining rooms, this is already a problem. No wonder our pants no longer fit…

I’ve been thinking a lot about pants these days and how they may be good for morale. There are a lot of people joking online about how “no one is wearing pants during the pandemic”—making it something of a pants-demic and I am wondering if that is having an effect on our mental states? Are pajamas and what I will optimistically call “leisure wear” allowing blood to pool in our buttocks and avoid circulating anywhere near our brains? Is this why crazed people are taking to the streets to demand the right to buy wine and haircuts despite the genuine safety risks to others they don’t care about? Are people seriously so fed up with homeschooling and watching “Tiger King” that they are ready to enact social policies of “trample the weak; hurdle the dead”? It makes me ponder the quote “my right to swing my arm extends as far as the edge of your nose and no further” which makes me think of my favorite story concerning pants.

Outside North America, the word pants generally refers to underwear, not trousers, though there are probably a significant number of North Americans not wearing undies either during this lockdown. (“Why must you mention that?” mutters Prudence testily. “It doesn’t bear thinking about!”) To be clear, this story is about trousers:

A customer came in to the old shop years ago. It was hard to guess his age but he was definitely suffering from “elder shrink.” He was a spry man, full of abrupt, spunky movements as if his entire body short-circuited with every electric thought he emitted or perceived. He told me confidently that his inseam was a 30 but that “these thirties must have been marked wrong because they were way too long.” One look at him told me he was probably now about a 27. He radiated pure delight as he slapped his pants on the table. “These are great pants!” he announced, beaming, “so I had to buy two pair. It’s hard to find good pants that fit right. There’s nothing like a good pair of pants, made right, that fit just right!” His eyes sparkled enough to make the air seem to vibrate and crackle with energy around him. His enthusiasm charmed me. I very much enjoy people who enjoy “the little things.” He leaned against the table and launched himself heart-first into this memory:

“I had my first love affair with a pair of pants when I was in middle school. How old is that now? Ten? Twelve? Fourteen? I don’t know. I wanted these pants so bad. They were pistol pants. Remember pistol pants? With the two-toned pocket going down the leg like a big hot slash?” I shook my head.

“No. My era was devoted to a questionable fondness for parachute pants, not pistol pants,” I said. He sucked his breath in, rolled his eyes to Heaven, and made a sound as if he was tasting his mother’s homemade lasagna.

“Look ‘em up!” he said, pointing at my phone on the table. “They were the Best. I loved them. Rockabilly pants. So cool! My mother said no way. She wasn’t buying them for me. She couldn’t afford pants like that. I think jeans were about two, maybe three dollars then. These pants might have been ten—three times the price. She wasn’t going for it. I asked her if I worked for them and earned my own money, would she let me buy them? She said yes. So I did. God, I loved those pants. I worked for them for months, a nickel at a time. I wanted them so bad. I don’t know how long it took me. I got a dollar for my birthday and was over the moon. Finally, I could buy my pants! I went right downtown and picked them out.

The next day, I wanted to wear them to school. My mother said “No.” I snuck out early and wore them anyway. I wanted to show all the kids I got my pants. Instantly, the school bully is on me, taunting me, calling me “mister fancy-pants” and sayin’ he’s gonna poke me in the nose for wearing pants like that. We weren’t allowed to fight in school so we agreed to meet after school at the playground to settle this. All day long, he kept saying “I’m gonna poke you in the nose.” I started to get real worried about my new pants. I didn’t want them to get blood on them or get ripped ‘cause then my mother would find out.

So, when school got out, I asked the bully if he would mind waiting to beat me up until I ran home and changed my pants first. He said sure. I ran all the way home, changed my pants, and ran all the way back quick as I could. I didn’t want to be called a chicken. As I ran, I got madder and madder. Who was this guy to poke me in the nose for wearing my own pants? I decided I was going to poke him in the nose instead! So I did. I ran all the way back, right up to him, and poked him in the nose as hard as I could and then turned and ran home again just as fast as I had come.”

“That’s a lot of running for one day,” I observed, thinking that modern children have nowhere near that kind of stamina.

He laughed. “That bully never said another word about my pants. And my mother never knew a thing.” He shook his head and giggled until a tiny tear squeezed itself out of the corner of each of his eyes, which he dabbed with a cloth handkerchief from his pocket. “Those were damn good pants,” he whispered.

There is nothing quite like “a damn good pair of pants” to help us decide who we are, remember who we were, and determine who we want to be going forward. Clothing makes us stand out or fit in. It makes us brave and determined, or sloppy and forlorn. We don’t just dress for others; we dress for ourselves. Clothing—literally “cloth + ing”—is the cloth we choose to protect ourselves and others, rather like a Covid mask. As Americans, we believe in a Right to our Choices. If you are feeling crummy—dress up as you wish to see yourself today. Whether you go out or not is immaterial. (ha! Pun intended!) YOU get to decide whether you look like a ballerina, a business person, or the spaghetti-stained victim of a closet avalanche that happened to hit all the leftovers in your fridge. Just remember, your Choices, be they the swing of your arms or the spray of your droplets, have no right to another person’s nose.

Well, since I’m NOT a chicken, well, not one with access to a trough of food large enough for me to lie down in, I may as well get up and put on some pants. Be well, my darlings! Get dressed and Remember who you are. You are Magnificent. I love you so much. Thank you for your Good Work. May the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy