It was a rainy day on campus, the flagstones slick and a slipping hazard. There was a dark coloured flattened out lump on a stone ahead of me. I stopped above it curious what it could be. Lifting it from its plastered to the stone state revealed it was a Maroon button up shirt. I wondered about the life of this maroon shirt before its plastered on the stone existence. How had it arrived plastered on the flagstone in the rain, abandoned by it's owner? A student with a stack of laundry returning to their room? Or had it been slung in a bag or tied carelessly around a waist? Had it experienced something more dramatic to be thrown, cast down onto the flagstones to become plastered by the rain?
Little did I care. It went back with me to my room and into the wash. My friend Rachel would forever heckle me about collecting trash clothes from the ground in the rain. It lasted with me all four years at university after that, including a summer subletting a flat with Rachel, who heckled me.
It lasted in my move home after graduation, and to the first town where I didn't find my place, and back to the university town. Rachel had bad reactions to malaria medication serving in Africa and moved back as well to share a sublet together, where she heckled me about the shirt. It lasted when I moved thousands of miles and back, out of all of the other things that were lost along the way, it perservered. Clearly it had no wish to be cast aside again and clung to it's new owner tightly.
It became well worn in and a comfortable choice for me to wear over tank tops with the sleeves rolled up or to button up with jeans to meet with friends. Despite it technically being a "man's shirt," which to me seemed only to mean it buttoned on the other side as far as I could tell. I thought it was ridiculous that they make clothes made for women and clothes made for men button on different sides. Why? Gradually the elbows ripped through. While my mother was alive, before her muscular/ nervous disease took the use of her hands from her, she did her patch work on the shirt many a time. It was something I grieved early in her disease that we would never have clothes repair to bring us together. Despite my attempts to learn how to use her sewing machine, they always and only resulted in the thread going in the wrong directions and never knowing how to get the thread working properly. My ability to sew only barely surpassed by ability to kill plants, ironically given my knowledge of fabrics.
Finally the rips and tears became too pronouncd to wear the shirt anymore, and over a decade after our unification in University, it was resigned. My mother died. I moved again without the shirt. The chapter had ended, but the shirt had a better second life than its first.
This month, I went outside with the dog. At the corner of our building, which sits on the corner, there someone had left a pile of men's poplin button up shirts. I thought about the plastered on flagstones shirt that had gone through me with my adult life, and poked through the pile with curiousity. They were mostly bright checked short sleeve shirts I would never use. However, under the hideously colored, short sleeved shirt, lay one dark purple long sleeve shirt.
I checked the size, being large enough to fit at least until I lose weight. The guy passing on the other side of the street gave me a strange look as I held the shirt up in front of me to check coverage. It was decided. It went with me back to the flat and into the wash. After the first wash, I find it still stiff as I roll up the sleeves and put it on over a black tee to go out for another walk with the dog in the crisp fall air not quite cold enough for a sweater. Clearly many washes will be required to soften the sleeve rolls and collar how I am accustomed.
The shirt has come back to me in a new life.
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