My favorite jeans were a pair of J. Crews that I purchased
out of duress one spring visit to Ithaca, NY.
The occasion for the visit was to send off an old friend as he prepared
to leave Ithaca, his schooling at Cornell complete. I flew up from Alabama with a southern
wardrobe and was greeted with the type of Upstate NY weather that I knew I
should have expected, having lived in the area for a time a few years
earlier. I had nothing but the
sleeveless and cropped shirts and pants that I was accustomed to wearing in the
late spring south, nothing warmer than the one hoodie I had packed as an
afterthought. I was doomed to freeze in
that town I loved, a town that was reported to have had snow on Mother’s Day
in May of 1996.
So, with my Ithaca chum Donna, she of infinite
wisdom of best places to shop ANYWHERE, we headed to The Commons to try our
luck at Trader K’s. And it is there
that I found THE JEANS. They were soft,
gently weathered boot-cut and long, too long for my petite legs. But I tried them on and, despite the length, found
they were made for me. So I bought them
and, with hems rolled up, wore them out of the store and into the cold drizzling
rain of our long walk to our friend’s apartment.
Upon walking in the door, I asked for scissors and promptly cut the excess
fabric of the hems and from that day forth wore THE JEANS frayed for the rest
of our years together, which were many, until I accidentally sent them in a
stack of unwanted garments to a thrift store in Denver. Oh, the heartbreak of realizing my mistake. Oh, my futile attempts to track them down…
No other jeans have fit the same as those jeans.
