We’re a disposable culture, especially when it comes to clothes.

It used to be that our clothing collections expanded due to incredible offerings in department stores. The selection was a little more limited, but you could regularly come home with multiple items and set your bank account back a few hundred items.

Then came online shopping, where the potential selections have ballooned considerably via Amazon, eBay and individual specialty shops. One of my friends from my Chino Valley school days has a website that offers a lot of tempting clothing with rural and country themes. As a result, space for more clothes is at a premium.

Even though my sweetheart, Todd, is more impulsive than I am when it comes to buying clothes, I still find myself giving in at times when it comes to buying clothes, mostly shirts. My pants are mostly denim, and my underwear and socks tend to be solid black, so when it comes to clearing out the closet, it’s usually the shirts that get sent to the church rummage sale or to Goodwill.

All things considered, there is one piece of clothing that has avoided being torn, stained, or otherwise mutilated.  I have a black button-up shirt that I first bought in a Wisconsin Walmart over 20 years ago, and it still gets worn today.

For those who haven’t fainted from the sheer shock of the revelation, there’s a story to this.

I was still living in Arizona at the time, but it was the first time I’d visited family members who had moved up north. It was around the Christmas season, which meant that the stores were tinsel-ravaged war zones with the bodies of fallen shoppers who could not keep up with the mob.

There was a nice black shirt with silver stitching that made it stand out. I hadn’t seen a shirt like it at the Walmarts in Arizona, and I wanted it. The polyester feel stood out from the cotton feel of my usual attire, and on impulse, I decided to buy it.

The shirt is an extra-large, and you would think that somehow it would have stopped being usable when my body morphed into a 2XL size. That did not happen, though, as I wore it a few days ago to work. I still wear it on occasion and might wear it more as winter approaches, since the weather is getting chilly, and black is known to have a warming effect.

That also explains why I didn’t wear it at all this summer. With temperatures regularly in the 80s and 90s, having a shirt old enough to purchase alcohol roast me in my own juices just does not seem like an elegant way to die. Actually, it sounds like a horrible mystery novel.

You might wonder why it still sits in my closet after all of these years when I have newer shirts ready to be worn. I currently have an orange plaid shirt that gets more wears than the red and blue plaids I’d bought a couple of years ago. Among the T-shirts is the navy blue Jerome shirt that highlights the old mining town in Arizona I showed Todd on our vacation last December.

It’s hard to explain. Somehow, a simple shirt with no special design or pattern or highlights still exists in my wardrobe in a time where I’ve had to toss shirts that ripped or lost a battle with an exploding ink pen. Socks and underwear do not last forever, and even sturdy jeans eventually become quite holy—not church holy, air conditioned holy.

It’s not something that even hit me until recently. I regularly dig through the closet when it comes time for my church’s rummage sale and pick out the shirts I though were cool once upon a time and, just like a bad date, decided I don’t want to continue the relationship.

My last time wearing the black shirt got me wondering how I might feel once that shirt eventually falls apart. Will it be in the next year or two, or will it somehow survive another 20 years, possibly outliving me? The fact that it hasn’t met an untimely end is nothing short of amazing, and the fact that I still choose to wear it regularly is a miracle.

When it comes to clothing, I have a habit of loving and leaving them. Somehow, one shirt got past the guards and managed to weave itself into the tapestry of my life.