This Old Shirt

My daughter, Abby, forced me to throw away a perfectly good shirt yesterday.

Except for the holes, ripped seams and threadbare collar, it was a perfectly good shirt.

Plaid with long sleeves and snaps, I bought it when I worked on Utah desert ranch to wear when we trailed cattle down the highway.

We often moved cattle to various Bureau of Land Management grazing permits on horseback, wearing t-shirts, baseball caps, leather gloves and hiking boots as our daily uniform. But we dressed up in full cowboy regalia when we moved cattle along the highway where tourists traveled.

We knew our inside joke of meeting the boots, snap-shirt and broad-brimmed hat stereotype of a western cowboy was silly and that made it even more fun.

After all, tourists ought to be good for something.

I wore this shirt when I operated a trail ride near Great Basin National Park for the same reason: Tourists had more respect for me when I dressed in their version of authentic.

This shirt-earned credibility helped me on the day a mother stepped into my office to sign the liability waiver while she let her toddler wander outside.

When I spotted the toddler standing under a horse’s belly, eye level to a fly, I asked the mother whether she was trying to kill her child or just an absolute idiot.

She stammered as I quietly rescued the toddler, then loudly sent them on their way.

After all, you can’t fix stupid.

I wore this shirt as I flood-irrigated, packing my 3-week-old son in an infant carrier as I shoveled new cuts in the ditch and filled old ones to water my southwest Montana pastures. I took it off and covered his carrier, shading him from the sun, when I changed wheel-lines nearby. When I turned on the sprinklers and he howled, I realized this shirt wasn’t completely waterproof.

I dried his soaked face with a sleeve so everything turned out just fine.

When my mare had a foal the day we buried my brother, I happened to be wearing this shirt. Twenty-one years later, I was wearing it again when I had to put that old foal out of its misery.

The snaps on this shirt wouldn’t quite reach when I was six months pregnant, riding that same mare while Abby kicked inside my belly every time we stopped.

At 17, she still likes to ride fast.

This shirt served as one of many layers when I spent a week at the Beartooth Game Range hunting camp, bird-dogging for my friends who had bull elk tags before I shot a cow elk. That week – between riding out in the frost before dawn and coming back to hot food and laughs in the dark – I stalked to within 10 feet of three young bulls and stood silent between a doe and her fawn, listening to them mew to one another.

This shirt saw it all.

I wore this shirt on many pack trips that my husband and I took into the Bob Marshall and I wore it to spread his ashes there, too.

When Dr. Phil called and wanted to talk about ranching, I slipped this shirt on. By then, the right shoulder had a hole and I had snagged the back on some barbed wire.

Nobody seemed to notice.

This shirt made one more trip to the mountains last month, protecting me from the burning sun.

It heard the last evening notes of the mandolin and saw one more cow elk pass through the meadow.

When I slipped my arm out of a translucent sleeve, it tore.

Abby was right. It was time.