Pink Flowy Pants

Pink Flowy Pants

August 3, 2026 – 8:40 a.m.

I woke up in my pink flowy pants after ten hours of a melatonin-induced coma. The pink flowy pants holding my legs were the ones I wore through nearly all of my days off in Pocatello, Idaho. They became a trademark of mine, often getting caught in the green bike I rode around town. There are knots tied in the front and back of each leg, gathering the fabric that would otherwise get caught in the chain. Even so, there is a large hole in the back of the left pant leg from one of the times it slipped between the brake and the spokes of the green bike. If these pants weren't so good at hiding stains and dirt between the patterns of pink and blue, I believe they would tell an even better story than I can. Their history is written in holes, faded colors, and stains that only I know how to read.

Their story began at a farmers market in southern Florida, where I had just returned from my first season in Antarctica. The shorts I used to wear were now tight around my legs and waist after six months of eating strictly frozen food while living a semi-sedentary life, letting my legs carry me to work and allowing the two-ton diesel engine of a bulldozer to carry me from there. These pink pants fit that version of me perfectly. They had elastic wrapped around the back of the waist, hidden beneath a pink and blue pattern, allowing them to rest effortlessly around my hips while wide legs flowed from there. They were pants that danced with me whenever the wind blew.

Beyond their first taste of life on my legs, they continued to see the world. They rode twenty hours through South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, collecting a dirt bike along the way. Eventually, we ended up together in Idaho, sitting in a classroom full of men pretending to be cowboys, learning to become wildland firefighters. We all wore tall black boots before we'd earned the right to scuff them. The instructors taught in stories as much as lectures. Some of the men made jokes that were often less than amusing, though I laughed at enough of them anyway. At the end of the day, I'd peel off dusty jeans and pull my pink flowy pants back on. They reminded me there were parts of myself that didn't need to disappear just because I'd chosen a profession built around smoke, chainsaws, and Nomex.

Soon enough, I traded my pink flowy pants for green fireproof ones.

For twenty-one days at a time, the pink flowy pants waited in my 2012 Mazda hatchback with Alaska plates while I lived inside Nomex. They sat among forgotten perishable food I'd neglected to throw away, climbing gear, sleeping bags, and whatever else had accumulated before the next roll. By the time I returned, the hatchback smelled like overripe kombucha, campfire smoke, and damp socks. It wasn't glamorous, but for a while it was home.

After every roll, the blackened Nomex pants would come off, stiff with ash, sweat, and smoke, and the pink pants would slide back over my legs. I never appreciated how soft they were until then. Silk against skin that had forgotten softness. Air around legs that had spent weeks wrapped in heavy fabric. We had three days together before another three weeks apart. One day for chores, one day for rest, one day for play, in no particular order.

As the summer wore on, the pants fit a little looser. The extra parts of my body quietly slipped away, turning into calluses, bruises, muscle, and tan lines. The pink became dust-colored, and the blue turned to slate from months without a proper washing machine while living out of a Mazda hatchback. But the fabric remained silky against my skin, offering relief from the stiff, unbreathable pants stamped with the name "Nomex."

The strange thing about living that way is that you hardly notice you're changing while it's happening. You simply put the pink pants on when you're home, the green pants on when you're working, and somewhere in that exchange an entire summer passes.

Like all things, summer ends. Temperatures drop, humidity returns, and the people wearing yellow shirts and green pants begin to rest.

The pink flowy pants saw more of me, and eventually we grew tired of each other. They were no longer a relief from Nomex; they were simply another pair of pants with a peculiar smell. They sat in a donation bag in the back of a closet for eighteen months, waiting for the Goodwill trip that was always going to happen tomorrow.

When I finally found them again, I pulled them back out. They're washed now. The pink is pink again instead of dusty. The blue is blue again instead of slate. They've traded the smell of a western fire season for the smell of hanging on a clothesline during a Minnesota summer. The hole in the left leg is still there. The knots are still tied where they've always been.

The hatchback sits outside as we write this, it's no longer packed with everything I own, but it still feels like a place of refuge, and I think fondly of the time it was our home.

Speaking for both the pink flowy pants and myself, though, I think we like having a closet now.

The blue gets to stay blue instead of fading to slate. The pants spend more time hanging than traveling. They no longer witness twenty-one-day absences or thousands of highway miles. Instead, they witness quiet mornings like this one, where I wake after ten hours of sleep and realize these soft, pink pants have quietly remembered every version of me long enough for me to remember her too.