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Dresses

December 6th, 2010

Recently I felt moved to do a bit of closet cleaning. I’ve gotten into the habit of not putting away the neatly folded laundry, and it began to pile up. Our hundred-plus year old house is skimpy on closet space and it was a challenge to get everything put away. I also tend to be a mixture of a sentimentalist and an optimist so it’s hard to let go of an old shirt long out of fashion, or that pair of jeans that would fit again if I only lost a few pounds. So when it came to cleaning out the closet, I had to be quick and ruthless. Soon I had a big bag of clothes to donate to the thrift store.

Then I got to the back of the closet where the dresses were hanging. I’m not much of one to wear dresses; I prefer comfy jeans and cozy sweaters or t-shirts. But the romantic in me loves dresses and I had a small collection built up from the need to be properly attired for various weddings and funerals, and warm summer days. Oh, the memories attached to those dresses. The blue plaid one I wore in college in the bar with friends, secretly holding Eric’s hand under the table because no one knew we were a couple yet. The sexy, navy blue one that was so short I never actually had the guts to wear it. The pink, vaguely 1920′s style one that I wore to my friend Kathleen’s wedding. The pale yellow silky one I wore to my friend Will’s wedding and the black one with little flowers that I wore to his funeral when he died less than a year later. The yellow one with the scooped neckline and full skirt, covered with big pink roses that I wore to the dinner before my wedding, where our relatives of many different backgrounds came together and talked and laughed and ate. There was the long blue dress I bought on my first day of vacation one day in June, not yet knowing that my mother had died that same day. That dress I put away, too sad to wear it, until the day my older brother and I attended a ceremony where the US Census Bureau presented us with a flag in her honor.

All these dresses, sitting on padded hangers, the longer ones with a fringe of cat fur along the hem from the cats who slipped in for a nap at the back of the closet. A few I kept, the rest I cleaned and packed off to the thrift store. Let them start a new life with someone who needs a dress for a wedding, a funeral, or just to dress up their scarecrow, with no idea of where that dress has been.

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