Today’s musings are centred around the mutability of my favourite pair of jeans. These are not the jeans that inspired the name of this blog all those years ago, but a passable substitute, which started out life black.
They have faded to grey now, as has the tarmac on the road I was walking on in bright sunlight in the early afternoon. The rather steep inclination foreshortened my shadow so that it approximated my true physical stature.
As I looked down, I noticed that the colour of my jeans, the shadow, and the tarmac itself were all of a muchness, and stuck through with the solid white line—also faded—on the side of the road.
I was in Porto three years ago, standing on pale grey calçada (cobblestones, more or less) waiting to meet up with a translator colleague with whom I have worked extensively. She spotted me first, from behind, and startled me from my reverie as she called out in her customary imperious yet cheerful tone, “I thought I recognised those legs!”
Then, as now, I laughed at the oddity of the remark, for the jeans I was wearing on that day, mutable as they are, were the same ones I had on today – and there is nothing grey about that thought at all.
©2019 Allison Wright
That elusive pair of jeans 
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