Many layers of pants

Stacked
London, ON
December 2016
This photo originally shared on Instagram

I find myself missing scenes that were once commonplace.

Like this stack of neatly folded jeans. Relatively neatly folded. Relative to my admittedly limited folding skills, that is.

I took this a few years back in a hopefully-still-in-business store in a mall that's spent most of the pandemic gathering dust. It recently reopened as part of the province's gradual/staged/phased approach to restarting the broader economy. And at some point in the near future, when I need something I can't get any other way, I'll don my face mask and venture in.

But I won't wander to the back of the store for a spontaneous shoot under the display lights. I won't linger. I won't see it as an entertaining way to spend a bit of time away from the usual pressures of life. Because even the most basic act of local commercialism has been reduced to the cold calculus of managing risk:

- Get in
- Get your stuff
- Pay for it
- Get out
- Avoid others in the process
- Don't get sick

I cringe at the thought of mall and store employees, lucky to still have jobs, but still going into work terrified that the very thing that puts food on the table can also infect them and those closest to them.

And I miss the kind of carefree experiences that resulted in photos like this one, and hope the neatly folded jeans - and the healthy employees who folded them - are still there when I can actually take the time to take it all in through a lens.

If I knew then what I know now, perhaps I'd have lingered a little longer and appreciated the seemingly mundane moment just a little bit more.

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