It’s a familiar scene in southwest Montana: Drive by any elementary or middle school around lunchtime and you will see kids happily playing, surrounded by a yard sale of winter clothing strewn about the playground. If, by chance, a child is wearing a coat, it is likely unzipped and flapping in the wind like butterfly wings.
I can recall winter days when my children came home with one boot. How does that happen? Or someone else’s boots (more reasonable). If the hats made it home, they were always wet from lying in a snowbank. Missing socks? We won’t even go into socks. That’s a complete loss from the onset of purchase. And then there were the gloves and mittens. An investment most new parents should be informed of … I’ll just say it. Buy stock in HEAD. Costco always has them for sale and, once you’ve accepted the fate of your kids’ gloves, you’ll be buying them in bulk. One year I chose to fight the glove battle. I stole a little goodie from the ‘70s, taking a string long enough to fit through one arm of a winter coat and out through the other. I then clipped the gloves to the end of the string on each end. The idea was that if the glove came off, it would still be a part of the jacket. The result? At the end of the day, my child would arrive home with a string caught up in one arm either with clips, or no clips, but definitely no gloves. You can bundle them up in a mummy-like puffy coat like little Randy Parker from A Christmas Story, but they are still going to undress on the playground, and they are destined to come home at some point without something. Or without everything. It happens. Go ahead, buy beautiful new color-coordinated outdoor gear and write their names on all of it. When your little Suzie leaves for school in all of her adorable name-bearing stuff, she will still come home with Amy’s hat and Lucy’s boots. So, while the lost and found table before winter break resembles donation day at Sacks, my suggestion to you is to buy used and inexpensive. Accept the fate of outdoor gear once it’s purchased and leaves your house. May all of your mittens come home in pairs.
10
december 2021
