“What’s with you? You trying to be fashionable?”  Dave Winston  asked Cliff Murray the other morning as he pointed to a three-cornered tear in Cliff’s jeans when they sat down at Mabel’s Grill for breakfast.
    “No,” Cliff laughed nervously, “I just caught my pants on a spring that was sticking through the seat of my truck on the way into town this morning.”
    “No kidding,” smirked Dave,  peeking sideways at George Mackenzie as they both tried not to laugh out loud, since the state of Cliff’s old truck was a regular topic of their shared conversations. “Oh well, at least with holey jeans you’ll be right in style these days.”
    “I don’t know about that,” said Cliff. “I haven’t seen many people with jeans with holes lately. How about it, Molly,” he asked Molly Whiteside as she poured their coffee.
    “Oh I don’t know,” said Molly, “Mabel would never let us wear worn jeans in here.” She looked straight at the guys. “It would look like she didn’t pay well enough – or we had cheap customers who didn’t tip well.”
    “Well I see according to the internet,” said Dave, who had pulled out his phone and was studying it, “that Generation Z’ers are wearing ripped jeans.”
    “What the heck is a Generation Z?” George wondered.
    “That’s people born between 1997 to 2012,” said Molly.
    “I can’t keep up,” sighed George. “I mean at that age they’re practically kids anyway. How can they be setting fashion?”
    “I’m glad my daughter was born after that,” said Molly as she headed for the kitchen. “Maybe her generation will get back to ‘unimproved’ clothes.”
    “I guess my older brother would have been right in style,” said George. “I remember he worked for a farmer who had round bales – the small ones, not the big ones we have now – and they used to use their knees to help lift the bales onto the wagon, which wore holes in their pants. My mother used to despair. Who knew that if she’d kept those pants and not patched them, she could have sold them for a fortune!”
    Molly who had put back her coffee pot and returned to take their orders, scribbled her notes and prepared to leave but Dave’s story stopped her.
    “I nearly hit a groundhog on the way in this morning,” he said, stopping Molly in her tracks.
    “Oh I hope you missed him,” she said, her voice full of concern.
    “Barely,” answered Dave. “He was sunning himself in the middle of the road then made a run for the left ditch when he heard me coming and was almost there but turned around and ran into the right ditch!”
    “Too bad,” grumbled George. “The world can always use one less groundhog.”
    “I remember a guy in high school,” chuckled Molly. “He tried to dodge to hit a groundhog with his family’s car – and ended smashing into a tree. I’d like to have heard him explain that to his parents!”
    “My wife would have agreed with Molly,” said George as Molly took their orders back to Mabel. “She saw me getting my rifle out to shoot a groundhog in my pasture field that had dug a hole that a heifer stepped in and hurt herself, and she got downright grumpy. Of course then a groundhog ate off all the lettuce in her garden and she sounded like a different woman,” he chuckled.
    “Do you still have cattle on pasture?” Cliff wondered. “The weather’s been so dry around our place that the pastures are really burnt off and I’ve been putting out hay for my sheep.”
    “Yeah, my beans aren’t looking good either,” said Dave. “We’ve had lots of days when it looks like rain but we can never squeeze much moisture out of those clouds.”
    Cliff sighed. “It’s got to be that the most useless thing I have on the farm is my rain gauge.”
    “Humph,” grumbled George. “My wife claims the most useless thing on our farm is me.” ◊