Complementary Colors

The thermometer hit 90 degrees this afternoon, reason enough to stay inside. I attempted to tackle a little pile of mending, but was stymied by the lack of denim-colored thread, and there is no place on our side of town to buy anything like that. I also need large safety pins. My little notions box has an extraordinary amount of those tiny brass safety pins, and they are all fastened together in a chain. It's possible, if this came from my mother's house, that I was the perpetrator--I remember the fun of linking endless paper clips or safety pins to each other, and I remember how that used to annoy the adults. That would have been 75 years ago, give or take. It's also possible that my son worked through this pile over fifty years ago. We'll never know who did it, and I will never ever figure out how to use this many tiny pins. And I still need big safety pins to hold up my jeans because, remember, I didn't have the right thread. The pile of mending is never going away, and I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't just toss it all.