Mending Day

Reader Contribution by Connie Casey
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Today was a bore. It is mending day. Fixing buttons, seams and zippers is a tedious chore. At ten years old Logan has seven pair of jeans with both knees ripped out from one seam to the other that flap furiously as he walks. They are in such bad shape they look like they might be from the set of a zombie movie. Hunter has his share too.  He has spent the last seven years honing his destructive skills on his clothing. I sat in front of the sewing machine a good part of the day cutting off those jeans and hemming them for shorts for summer. I was complaining to myself about the task. After giving it a little thought I decided I was lucky to be able to sit there and do that mending.  Those threadbare pants were the uniform of a healthy childhood … one not spent in front of the tv or gaming system. In the minds of little boys those jeans became a soldier’s fatigues worn waging fierce battles in the back pasture. They played football and raced cars. They became tattered when they met the gravel after being pitched off a bicycle racing the mail truck down our bumpy and rock filled dirt road. Many aliens were slain wearing those pants when they traveled to deep space. They climbed trees and caught fish, went camping and rode bareback on a favorite horse. They protected knees when sitting on that rough barn roof and collected the mess like mud flaps when standing on the back of the tractor as daddy bounced along moving hay. Those mangy old farm boy jeans, ripped and stained as they are, carry memories that can’t be made anywhere other than outside, enjoying the fleeting moments of a magical childhood. So I carefully stitched together the remnants of the discarded pant legs I cut off that can no longer be worn and made pillows for the man cave … where those growing boys can loaf around and dream up the next adventure to ruin the new pants in the closet.

  • Published on Mar 14, 2016
Tagged with: Reader Contributions
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