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| Street clothes. Mobile, Alabama. June 2022. Credit: Mzuriana. |
Regretfully, insecurely housed or homeless people in my temporary towns are not unusual.
But it's in Mobile that I've noticed the assortment of clothing released to the wild by the daily wanderers.
On one hand, the shedding of no-longer-wanted clothes is just litter, adding to the existing detritus of discarded water bottles, soda cups and straws, beer cans, liquor bottles, sandwich wrappers, cigarette boxes, and the beaded remains of Mardi Gras' past.
On the other hand, the shedding of the clothes seems organic. A natural molting of a skin. An undershirt's penultimate life stage that began from a cotton seed in a field somewhere close or far, fashioned into an undershirt, bought new, then perhaps donated to a thrift store - once or twice or even three times - passing through a different person's arms and over the shoulders - until the last person, who wore it until it no longer served, thus returned the undershirt to the earth, laid to rest in a place close or far from whence its threads sprouted.
The final disposition of the clothing? Perhaps eaten and then excreted, in part, by insects. Said excrement to be consumed by another category of insects.
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| Insects that eat clothing. Source: The Spruce |
Here is the debut of a cumulative collection of clothing released to the wild:
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