TRAVELING PANTS -

This morning, I put on my favorite old jeans. I have several pairs of favorite old jeans, but these are really old and really favorite. Historic, actually. I say ‘historic’ because they hold threads of my life history, reminding me of times with people and places and pets I love and have loved.
It’s been years since I’ve worn these jeans because the behind ripped out riding my horse one day and they became unwearable.
Just a few weeks ago, I found them tucked away on the top shelf of my closet. You should just throw them away, went through my mind, but instead, I hugged them to my chest. Torn up though they were, parting with these jeans would be like parting with a piece of myself. Two pieces, really, because these jeans so remind me of happy times with my daughters, Cami and Lacy.
In my closet, staring at the badly ripped jeans, I thought of them as true TRAVELING PANTS. Like that movie where the girls share a special pair of jeans that change each of their lives for the better.
The thought of throwing away these jeans shattered me. I recalled the day I attained them. On vacation in Monterey when our girls still looked like girls in their bathing suits. No womanly curves yet, though at the time, Cami and Lacy couldn’t wait to get curves, and I was too young and dumb to dread this curve-getting day: the day our girls would grow up.
Wearing another pair of unmemorable jeans, I had gotten wet and cold in the surf, and the girls and I, all wet and sandy, walked down the street to a thrift store where I bought the historic jeans.
They became historic that very weekend because I fell instantly in love with them and paid way too much for these already well-worn, Italian-made, denim trousers. I think they cost like 40 dollars and had a rip in the knee back before normal people paid money for already ripped jeans.
I lived in those jeans that beach weekend and Scott kept saying how cute I looked in them and the girls kept saying, “When I get bigger I want those jeans!” And by the time I spent another half-dozen years wearing them, when the behind blew out while riding my horse Soda Pop, I nearly wept.
Soda Pop died soon after ~ a crushing event in my life ~ and I tucked the torn apart trousers away in my closet, not bearing to look at them, not bearing to part with them, heartbroken that my favorite jeans and my favorite horse were gone at the same time.
It never occurred to me that one day the girls would be gone, too. Not completely gone like Soda Pop, but gone enough that Cami no longer keeps even a pair of underwear in the upstairs bedroom she once shared with Lacy, and Lacy’s bedroom door is almost always closed because she is off at work or college or away with her twenty-something-year-old friends and only sleeps there occasionally now.
When I found the historic jeans on the back shelf of my closet, and the thought plowed through my mind that I should throw them away, I about threw up. That’s what I felt like doing in my closet holding those jeans. Throwing up. Not because of the jeans, but because I missed our girls so much my stomach turned over at the thought of them growing up.
So I took the jeans to the sweet lady at the dry cleaners who sews up the holes our boys get in the knees of their school jeans.
“I don’t know if these are even fixable, but I want to try to save them,” I told the lady and she put on her reading glasses and looked at the jeans with her wise Asian eyes and I looked too, both of us staring at the torn out backside like the patient needed major surgery and was she even operable at all?
“We try to fix them,” said the Asian lady, and I smiled and left the dry cleaners feeling hopeful for a change.
Hopeful the jeans could be fixed. Hopeful I could get over this tide of sadness swelling in my life since Cami’s wedding when it really hit me that she would now only visit from time to time, and that Lacy would be gone soon, too.
Then it would be just me and the gorillas in the house. That’s what I call Scott and our five boys: the gorillas. Don’t get me wrong, I love my gorillas. They pee all over lawn, and smell like wet dogs until I force them to bathe, and I’m usually feeding them in an attempt to keep them calm, but I do love the gorillas.
But I really, really miss the girls these days.
So when I returned to the dry cleaners to pick up the jeans, I was relieved to see a smile on the sweet lady’s face.
“You fixed them?” I said, smiling too.
“We fix them,” she answered, smiling even wider, and I returned home eager to try them on.
But when I walked in our door, the gorillas were jumping around, throwing Doritos at each other, and scratching their backsides, and the silverback (Scott) was quietly studying at the kitchen table, reminding me of silverbacks in the wild that recline on the grass while the troops (the rest of the gorillas, that’s what they’re really called by the way: troops) tear the jungle down around daddy silverback’s head.
So I put the jeans in my closet, and put on my apron, and another week with the gorillas went by before I remembered the jeans there. Which brought me to today.
This morning at sunrise, I slipped them on. They fit like a glove, though one cheek felt like plaster against my body from the large patch in the rear of the pants.
Meeting Scott at the coffee pot, I took the baby from him so he could fill up his school thermos. Barefoot, I padded across the cool tile floor to scoop my clean coffee cup off the counter.
“You look good in those jeans,” Scott said. “Really good. Those are my top favorite jeans of yours,” he announced in the quiet kitchen.
I turned back to face him, coffee cup in hand, baby on my hip, hearing the coffee filter down into the pot. “Do you remember these jeans?” I asked.
“Should I remember them?” Scott said with an inviting smile.
I nearly broke into tears right then. “They’re old,” I said, looking out the window at the morning’s brand new sun, thinking of Cami and Lacy in their pubescent bathing suits on that Monterey vacation way back when.
“Well, you look good in them, babe.” Scott kissed me and headed out the door unaware of my sadness. I’ve been hiding this sadness because I don’t want to admit to him or even myself that I’ve been sad.
After Scott left for work, I reminded myself that I’m wearing my traveling pants again. Experiencing life in my favorite old jeans. Building new memories. Some beautiful. Some painful. Letting go of riding horses for now. Letting go of my girls. Taming the gorillas. Keeping my silverback happy because my favorite jeans are his favorite jeans, too.
That I’m traveling
in my favorite old jeans
to a place I’ve never been before,
a place called today
where I long to be ~