Growing up, my mom was always very frugal. It was a revelation somewhere around 9th grade when she told me it was okay to do my back-to-school shopping at…gasp…the MALL instead of K-Mart, and that I was getting to an age where I wouldn’t be growing out of things as quickly so it was okay to invest a little more in my clothing and buy a little more of it. But, to keep things in perspective, my local mall still laid claim to the title of World’s Largest Outlet Mall at the time, and this was a time when Outlet Malls contained knock-off versions of the real stores that sold mostly factory seconds, and didn’t even bother knocking off GOOD stores. There was no Gap…no A&F…no Bath & Body Works at my mall. I still remember that one of my favorite shirts that I wore through most of high school came from Ross Dress 4 Less.
But even on our Fruit of the Loom budget, my underwear drawer had long ago graduated from briefs to…well…high-leg briefs. Just fashionable enough to avoid emasculation in the locker room. It wasn’t until my first year of college that two of my best friends introduced me to the joys of Victoria’s Secret. One worked for Express, which got her an employee discount at VS and Bath & Body Works. The other firmly believed that every woman must own a pair of black silk panties. So guess what I got for Christmas that year?
*blush*
And so began my new addiction: Good Underwear. They created a monster, really. Like so many women before me, I fell victim to the so-called “sales” that inevitably lead to an underwear drawer so overstuffed that, in the event of zombie apocalypse, I will surely survive because I can go approximately eight years before emerging to do laundry. Even plain cotton underwear, when well-made, is SO MUCH BETTER THAN K-MART UNDERWEAR.
But somehow…during the lightheaded, frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy of a Semi-Annual Sale, I wound up with…
A pair of bright orange.
Cotton.
GRANNY PANTIES.
In retrospect, I think I know how this happened. In a previous visit to Vickie’s, when I needed a black bra to go with my black silk panties, some sort of evil 2-for-one or buy-one-get-one-half-off deal had convinced me that I did, in fact, need a bright orange satin bra.
Nothing goes with a bright orange satin bra. Certainly not any of the underwear I had at the time. So come sale time, when hideous orange things turn up in large, poorly sorted bins…you grab whatever goes with that damn bra. And when you are young and inexperienced…sometimes you forget to check the style as well as the size.
This is how the giant panties end up in the back of your underwear drawer.
Oh, they got worn. Every now and then, when it was getting a little too close to laundry day or I REALLY wanted to wear underwear that was completely unflattering to everything about my skin, hair, and eye color. Once I came home to my parents’ house for fall break, and in a panicked laundry emergency threw them into the washer with a forest green sweater.
I now had a pair of…shall we say…burnt sienna granny panties.
I wish I could say that this is where I threw them out. But back in the drawer they went. Even though they no longer matched ANYTHING. Because, let’s face it, every woman has at least one pair of grannies haunting their underwear drawer. For a while, I think I had four – Ms. Burnt Sienna, and three pairs given to me by, of all people, a college boyfriend’s MOTHER (strangest. present. EVER.). There are just times when you want them – when you’re PMSing and feeling too bloated for your thongs and string bikinis, or in the event of those apocalyptic laundry days. And I think we all know that those bitches REFUSE TO WEAR OUT. Underwear, or undead? Too close to call.
But…wear out they did. Slowly, but surely. Or at least they got thrown out, one at a time, to make room for a couple of younger, cuter pairs of underwear. There may have been a cricket bat involved…I’ll never tell. Such is the circle of life. But Burnt Sienna hung on. Due to her quality and superior breathability, she was the last survivor of the Granny Panty Apocalypse in my underwear drawer. Until a few months ago, when she too succumbed to the great Trash Can in the Sky. The same scaling-down process that led me to give away half of my furniture in anticipation of a major move meant Burnt Sienna finally bit the dust.
Or did she? A cold, lifeless waistband may have just scurried out of my suitcase, muttering something about “BRAAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNS…”
