Exercise 43 - An Article of Clothing

The writing pool has been swamped of late with projects.  So much so that we've kept postponing our writing exercises only to find out in horror that the last one we did was five months ago!  We've since vowed to do it every Wednesday morning instead of Friday afternoons.  Wednesdays being a less busy day of the week for most of us.  So far.  Hope the trend holds.  And hope we can get back on track to keeping this regular.  Millions of my writing brain cells have died of atrophy.  Time to get back in shape.

 

This week's exercise was hosted by Jovir.  Below is his email:

 

Supposing you or someone you know, or a character has been given something new to wear (clothes, shoes, etc.).

Describe it, showing how it feels or what it means to you. Here's a sample from M. Scott Momaday's Novel House of Made of Dawn in which shoes the character thinks at first are beautiful, begin to feel ridiculous to him:

 

He was wearing a pair of brown-and-white shoes which fat Josie had given to him. They had belonged to a man for whom fat Josie's daughter had worked as a housekeeper in the city. The man died and his widow gave away his clothes. The shoes were beautiful, almost new, thin-soled, sharply pointed, with angles and whorls of perforation. There were metal taps on the heels, and the leather creaked. They were too large for Abel, but he wore them anyway, had waited a long. Time for the occasion to wear them. And now and then in the bus he looked at them, would slide the instep and toe of one and then the other along the backs of his legs to removed the dust and bring out the shine, would flex the soles to hear them squeak.

But the shoes were brown and white. They were new, almost, and shiny and beautiful; and they squeaked when he walked. In the only frame of reference he had ever known, they called attention to themselves, simply, honestly. They were brown and white; they were finely crafted and therefore admirable in the way that the work of a good potter or painter or silversmith is admirable: the object is beautiful in itself, worthy of appreciation as a whole and for its own sake. But now and beyond his former frame of reference, the shoes called attention to Abel. They were brown and white; they were conspicuously new and too large; they shone; they clattered and creaked. And they were nailed to his feet. There were enemies all around, and he knew that he was ridiculous in their eyes.

Fire away with 200 words minimum.

 Below is my effort.