Back when the kids were tiny we visited the shop at Woodend, at the National Audubon Society. I found a teal sweatshirt on sale that I thought was fun. It was too big for me, but sweatshirts can be, right?

What I liked about it was that it had animal paw prints on the front and a legend on the back. Whenever I wore it I got fun comments. When Andrew was young he once tried to figure out real animal prints using the shirt and guide.

Another time, I think Andrew was trying to see if a pair of scissors worked and he cut a hole in the front of the sweatshirt. After that I only wore it in the house. In the several few years, as it began fraying at the neckline and getting holes in the cuffs of the sleeves, I only wore it to keep warm when I got up in the morning.

Dean’s made some disparaging remarks about that sweatshirt and a couple of other tops lately, so when I found a couple of Amazon Basics sweatshirts that looked cozy on Amazon during Prime Days I decided to buy those and planned on tossing two sweatshirts, including the teal animal paw print one.

The morning after my new sweatshirts arrived, I donned one of them, then held a goodbye ceremony for the old sweatshirt.

I also threw my hand-me-down-from-Dean Carnegie Tech sweatshirt and my old Moosewood tee-shirt away. Dean bought me the Moosewood tee-shirt for my birthday when we visited the restaurant when the kids were very young. It had seen its day and was probably 30 years old.