A sense of hole(i)ness

One of the lingering effects of all the time I was out of work is that I haven’t had much money to buy new clothing.  And the result of that is that most of the jeans I have are five to ten years old, and they’ve worn through the fabric at my right front pocket, where I always carry my asthma inhaler.  That’s always been where my jeans go first, ever since I was a kid.

Because I’m the age I am, I was raised to the idea that if your jeans got a hole in ’em, you put some kind of embroidered patch over the hole, which stops the damage and is decorative, if you can find a cool enough patch to use.  The problem is that these days, cool embroidered patches are hard to come by.  The few I could find were either too cutesy and little-kid or too rude and not safe to wear to work.  So I kept wearing jeans with holes in them.  About the only good thing I could find to say is that the holes weren’t in embarrassing places.

But a few months ago I got lucky.  I googled for “embroidered patches” one night and one of the first hits that came up was for Iguana Railway, which sells uniform shoulder patches for a whole string of railroads present and (especially) past.  They appealed to the latent steam-train nut in me, and I knew I’d found the solution to my jeans-hole problem.  I ordered a big fistful of patches for railroads in Texas, Maryland, and Virginia; I picked those states since I’m from Texas, and L’s family is from Maryland and Virginia.  They all got here a couple of weeks ago, and I picked out several of the largest for L to put over the worn-through spots.  (Repeated washing had made the holes larger over time.)

So now I have jeans mended with patches from the Norfolk & Western, Western Maryland, Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac.  I need to decide on one more, but my choice is limited because most of the patches I got are only two-inch, and the hole I need to cover wants a three-inch.