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Yup! I was just fixin' to go down to the cellar and make a clean sweep of those dusty old overall jackets I inherited when we bought the Newberry place, and then I read it right there in Time magazine: Saks Fifth Avenue was selling old denim jackets for $26! And bikinis made of old denim go for $20. Wow! If Nelson Newberry thought his overall jackets might be resurrected as bikinis, he'd have himself reincarnated!
Odd as it seems, there's justice in placing such value on genuinely faded blue denim. (It seems they try to simulate the faded effect, but imitations don't command the price of the real McCoy.) In order to achieve the desired quality, blue denim needs to do a lot of bending in the sun and whipping in the wind. It needs to be dunked in farm ponds and ground into the slag of playgrounds. It needs to fall from horses or motorcycles or bicycles a few dozen times, and be forgotten on a fence post for a while. It should kick around in a dusty pickup truck a couple of weeks. Most of all it needs to be soaked repeatedly in sweat. It has to lie in dirty laundry piles on damp cellar floors and hang for long spells on clotheslines. It needs to be shortened and lengthened again and mildewed in the mending, nursed back to health with patches.
Then and only then does a garment of blue denim have integrity. And believe me, it's worth more than any city slicker's money can pay.
I wonder idly, while I'm pondering the new values, if there's any market for a retread farmer's wife in her late-forties who can bake bread in an old black stove, make apple butter in one of those old kettles, can tomatoes (she raised herself) in those old mason jars, make butter in a stomp churn, and manufacture faded blue denim as a matter of course.
Reprinted from All My Meadows, by Patricia Penton Leimbach. Copyright © 1977 by Patricia Penton Leimbach.
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