Sep 4, 2020 3 min read

The package arrived on the doorstep this week, tossed there in its dark blue bag by the delivery man. He had parked the van up on the road and ran just far enough down the driveway to hit his target.

It landed softly, because inside was something soft: a bright orange-red cotton sweatshirt bought for about $18 with an online coupon from Old Navy. It would replace the sweatshirt I had purchased years ago. That one started its life the same flame color, but had with time and wear faded to something more in the peach family. The sweatshirt has been my go-to top for years -long enough for the bottom band to lose its oomph and go all floppy.

I’m retiring the shirt, because I just can’t face it anymore.

It’s become the pandemic shirt, the upper half of the outfit I wore during the long, weird, go-nowhere days of the shutdown. I’m sick of it – the shirt and the pandemic.

When life contracts, as it has for all of us these past six months – and we aren’t doing big, interesting things – the days can be measured with small details. Pot of coffee, bowl of cereal, let the dogs out, answer e-mail, let the dogs in, load the dishwasher, think about dinner. My working from home has caused me to carve a groove in the floor plan of the house: office to kitchen to office to kitchen and back.

Those kind of days don’t call for much primping.

For a long stretch of weeks in July, I never put on makeup or styled my hair. That benign neglect extended to what I was wearing. My work wardrobe of blouses and blazers and dresses stayed languishing in the closet, with no place to go and nothing to do.

The months can be measured in loads of laundry, too.

That faded sweatshirt always seemed to rise to the top of the clean-clothes basket. There it was every morning, tired and worn, but right within reach. I’d put that on and then step into the yoga pants with a hole in the one knee and get to work.

This must have been what it was like to live a century and a half ago, when women owned two work dresses and a Sunday frock for church. The day we moved into an old farmhouse when my children were very young, I was disappointed to find that the bedroom closets were shallow and had a metal rod poking straight out, enough to hold only three or four clothes hangers. That’s all the space a farm girl needed.

Apparently, one sweatshirt is all a work-from-home girl needs in 2020.

And what a strange year it’s been. Normally, the crisp tang in the September weather puts me in the mood for a new work outfit, or new boots. This year, it’s shaping up to be only the new sweatshirt.

I’m retiring the ratty old one. Yesterday, I put it away, rolled it up and stuffed it into a basket with my other castoffs, the scratchy wool sweaters and the too-small jeans. Someday I’ll go through that basket and find that sweatshirt, and I’ll think of this strange, trying time when we all stayed at home and the world got so small that one ugly shirt was enough.

And I will still hate that shirt.