Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

In my wardrobe, pants of any kind seldom show up during the warmer six months of the year. I prefer skirts and dresses and have for nearly all my life. The older I have gotten and the more prone to overheating I have gotten, the more pants have gone by the wayside. Pants trap too much heat around my legs, and I just cannot deal with that. Yes, I have become one of those old ladies. By the way, I have never in my life been a shorts person.

Enter spandex, elastane, Lycra, or whatever you want to call it—all are names for the stretchy fiber that seems to show up in nearly every fabric these days, especially in jeans. The spandex-blend fabric is stretchy and therefore much more comfortable to wear as it moves with the body and doesn’t pinch or bind. The problem is that spandex, like most synthetic fibers, is not “breathable.” Most synthetics are impermeable to heat and moisture, so they are quite uncomfortable to wear in warm weather. You can take fabric that would ordinarily be very comfortable, like cotton or linen, then add spandex, and it will become hot and sweaty to wear. There are a couple of other major problems with spandex. First, it wears out or breaks down faster than, say, cotton, so after many washings and wearings, your cotton/spandex jeans will develop weird stretched out bands running horizontally. The other problem is that, like many synthetic fibers, spandex holds onto body oils and odors. This is why we can now get laundry deodorizers to “de-funk” athletic wear and other clothes.

I started thinking that I really needed some sturdy pants that I could stand to wear during the summer for those times when I need to do ranch work or have some reason for having protective covering over my legs. I started thinking about the jeans I wore in the past before spandex was in everything. Much to my surprise, I discovered Levi Strauss still makes the original 501 jeans, so I ordered a pair of the men’s jeans, stiff as a board, dark indigo blue, and looking a mile too big and long when they arrived. I tried them on—yep, too big—but I remembered what washing did to them. So they got washed once and hung to dry. They were still pretty stiff, but now fit perfectly.

I have been wearing them around for the past month and am remembering why I loved them so much way back in the 1980s when I first started wearing them. In fact, those jeans have been like a time machine for me. I put them on and can go straight back to the University of Tennessee campus in 1983, the time I slipped and fell in front of Andy Holt Tower and ripped holes in both of the knees of my worn out 501 jeans along with my actual knees. Or all the time I spent walking on the beach at the Isle of Palms in the winter when it was mostly abandoned, dodging around the washed up Portuguese man-of-wars and looking for sand dollars. That all seems like just the other day and a million years ago at the same time. Getting old is weird.

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