There were five kids in my family.  Four boys and the youngest one, the baby of the family, was a girl.My folks worked hard to make sure that all of us kids were well cared for.  While sometimes we lacked some of the material trifles of the modern world, we never wanted for the things that truly mattered - food, clothing, shelter, or love.

One of the staples for any young boys - or old ones for that matter, were jeans.  Those good old reliable, wear like iron jeans that provided shelter from the cold in winter, from the sun in the summer, mud in spring and fall, and from any in a long list of things that might damage a less hardy pair of clothing - scratchy hay bales, biting cats, spilled chemicals, flying debris from the lawnmower, hot panels on the tractors - just to name a few.  In additional, there was just the disgusting things on the farm that they would protect you from.  A pair of dockers wouldn’t stand up to cow slobber as you were trying to clean a manger.  A pair of shorts is useless against swarms of mosquitoes as you checked fence.

A good pair of jeans was a necessary part of the farm and growing up.  Skinned knees from riding a bike or riding the three wheeler through thistles were muted by ruggedness of the jeans.

There were also some things that a pair of jeans wouldn’t protect you from - a calf with scours with the right aim is going to soak through regardless what type of clothing you have on.

As strong as those jeans were, they were not iron.

After carrying so many hay bales rubbing against your knees, and upper legs, they were bound to wear through as the scratchy hay gradually took their toll.  Kneeling down to milk thirty cows a day, twice a day, 365 days a year eventually wrecked havoc on the knees too.  Jumping up and down off tractors, ladders, haystacks, feeders, haylofts, fences, combines, mangers, trees, ditches…you get the picture…usually lead to an eventual rip in the crotch.  Then there were the little dangers - a chemical spill cleaning the milk room might leave a hole, crossing the barbed wire fence may leave a snag, back pocket done in by a forgotten screwdriver - all of which would get bigger as time went by.

When I was really young, Mom would patch the jeans.  Sometimes even going so far as to patch a patch, or even put a patch on a patch that was already patched.  But even she had her limits.  Jeans that were too far gone became patches.

When I was older, Mom got a job in town (and there were fewer of us at home to keep up on), we started buying the cheaper jeans at the Wal-Mart in neighboring town.  The cheap cost more then offset the time and effort Mom spent in patching.  In addition, we found a good use for the big stack of patching that was growing in the corner of the sewing room - rugs.

Yup, a lady about eight miles east of my hometown with take old jeans, cut them into strips and make nice rag rugs out of old jeans and corduroy pants.  Boy, did we get a load of rugs…plus, like the orginals, they wear like iron!