Dear Stockinged,
They are making now, with their super-high-tech-plastic textile stuffs, stockings that do not run. The Brits call them ‘ladder resist,’ and I wonder if I will need to start to hoard the old kind, the kind that run, the kind that hold a record of wearing. Of course hosiery is fragile, and short-lived, but isn't this part of what we love about it? Would we have them 'wear like iron'?
The run in the stocking is the sexy near-end of a pair of hose- and let's pause here, to think of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s vermillion hose....
A woman, a girl, always works a bit to hide the early runs- with a longer skirt or boots, and often just the tiniest section of a run will show as a person turns, or leans. The run is a line that leads someplace you cannot see, and it is the most titillating part of stockings, and it is also the very end of them, the most precious last wearings. The run is especially lovely in black stockings, because it is the most visible. The wearer sometimes puts a daub of nail polish on the runs, the ladders, to stop them, and it might show as a red or pink dot on the stockings.
The thing I am considering here, as I so often do, are the traces of time's fleetness, the ineffable marks of wear, and the very nature of being. May the mundane and short-lived continue to endure!
PS
A place you can go to plan or make manifest your hoard.
