My favorite Jeans

This was an essay I submitted to a magazine (2008). The theme was "Delicious."

Every time I dig out my old favorite jeans I notice a few more places where I would like to fit into them better. I get indignant - there’s no reason I can’t wear these, after all, my bones have not grown! Wearing them around the house is a gentle reminder. Rather than snicker when I look in the mirror, I resolve to get back to my long morning walks with my dog. I’m inspired by my dog's gorgeous thighs!

Though my morning walks set out to be thigh-toning and waistline-trimming, they quickly become mind-expanding. I go with my dog in any direction as if the whole world is my exercise gym. When I was much younger, I was terrified of everyone, and sometimes the neighborhood felt hostile. Now I make a point to wave to everyone in my neighborhood, and say hello to anyone I pass on the street. I live in an urban environment, and everyday kindness builds a truce and a bond between myself and my neighbors.

But back to my thighs.

I love having an appetite and then satisfying it. If I crave vanilla pudding I'll take out the Joy of Cooking, find a recipe, and make it. It's easy, fun, and delicious. Satisfying my appetite includes the creation of my food, and satisfying my desire to wear favorite jeans will have to include the creation of my exercise. One year I played music at a swing dance and was inspired by a woman in her early sixties with gorgeous, muscular legs. Her silky white hair was pulled back and woven into a French braid. She danced with her partner all night. I want to be like that, I thought; strong, fit, beautiful, with great legs. I want to live life, eat well, dance long, sing my heart out, play music, swim through the first frost, write, walk, dream.

I became a health food nut starting at age thirteen. I became a vegetarian and I learned how to make my own yogurt. I made bread, bran muffins, granola, and grew bean sprouts. I worked at health food stores and restaurants. Then during college I learned how to cook at a hip urban pub that had fabulous food. I would make ten gallons of chili, twelve pecan pies, thirty spinach casseroles, hummus, tabouleh, spinach and white bean soup, chicken marinades, chocolate pudding. On my days off I would scale it all down for my own little kitchen in the apartment where I lived alone with my dog. Craving something of my own is how I learned to cook. Now I live in a house with a couple of kitchens, a husband, and my dog. I'll buy fifty pounds of whole wheat flour at the local baker's supply along with thirty pounds of raisins, six pounds of cornmeal, a gallon of blackstrap molasses, six pounds of honey and ten pounds of raw sunflower seeds. I like buying my groceries on a fork lift! Down to the chest freezer in the basement it all goes.

I feel lucky that I never liked sweets. When I was a kid my mother took my sister and brother and me out to Cooks Restaurant and Arcade on Boston Post Road for an ice cream, and I asked if I could have a hamburger instead. I remember eating six hamburgers instead of cake at my friend Alice’s 11th birthday party. Luckily for my thighs I was also a gymnast!

When the chill arrives in autumn, and we have to close the windows, I bake the house warm. I get out my huge cast-iron Dutch oven and fill it with chopped carrots and lentils and a few quarts of stock or water and a tablespoon or two of olive oil, and I let it bake slowly all day in a 300 degree oven while I am upstairs in my office with my dog at my side on her cushion. The scent climbs the stairs and I am the luckiest person alive. This time of year I want to roast a turkey outdoors over hardwood charcoal and eat the crispy wings and blackened skin. I want to cook collard greens with garlic and olive oil and red pepper flakes and then brighten my dish with sweet corn niblets. Yams too! That gorgeous orange singing on my plate of greens.

I have always had a strange relationship with my clothes. I rarely buy them new, but instead get them from friends or find them at yard sales or thrift stores, and I hang on to them for decades, because wrapped up in the clothing are the years I wore them, and the stories I lived in them. Those aqua pants I wore to French class in college, for instance, when I had a crush on my teacher, still (almost) fit. As a child I loved my navy blue Danskin pants and turtle neck, and the way it looked on the gold carpet in the living room. The dark blue became an obsession that was eventually replaced by black. I should force myself to wear white, for at least a day, but someone stole my nice white T-shirt, so maybe it's not meant to be.

The T-shirt was stolen off our clothesline. I noticed a bare spot the next morning, and the chain link gate open, and a clothespin on the ground as if it were neatly placed there. I'll bet it was a drunk in the middle of the night realizing a white T-shirt was just what he needed. It had a hole in the armpit. My husband said, why would anyone want a T-shirt with a hole in the armpit? I said I'm sure he didn't see that. It was just that it was white, and all of our other T-shirts are red, turquoise, orange, teal, yellow - not the sort of colors for a thief looking to get dressed in the moonlight. I have always feared someone would steal my favorite jeans, the ones I've had since 1986 that I still LOVE even though they are ragged.

This morning I walked with my dog, in my favorite gently-reminding jeans and a new white T-shirt, and said hello to the man who picks colored glass out of the gutter and saves it, and on the way home I smelled ripe Concord grapes. I ran home, got a plastic bucket, and came back to the parking lot behind the hardware store where the large and small maroon wheelbarrows are stacked like mating turtles. I found the grapes and picked them by the handful while my dog gobbled what I dropped. When I got home, I pulled out the Joy of Cooking, found the recipe, and cooked up some grape jelly. It'll go great with the turkey.