By guest author Monica Gebell of Writing the Open Road
Every six months or so, on the verge of a school vacation, I'm standing
in my 5' x 5' closet at a loss for what to wear. It's the kind of
stupor that makes me late for homeroom and makes me determined that I
will clean the closet and get organized.
Teachers, by nature,
are usually organized people. We know exactly where to locate a
well-maintained lesson planner we used three years ago, we keep files
like "Mockingbird: handouts" and "World Myth." We're supposed to know where our damn pants are.
My closet is especially tricky. It was a selling point when we were
looking at the house as a potential home: I saw it as a small refuge
with a beautiful, small, leaded-glass window reminiscent of the era of
the house's construction (1902), a hovel where I might store or sport
some things that make a little room a place of expression,
decompression even. But since it houses everything I can put
on my prenatal, postnatal, and non-natal body and feet throughout four
seasons, there's little room for the few trinkets and whatnots that
make it a room of my own.
So into the closet I'll go, boxes
ready and labeled for thrift stores and bags for stuff that ought to
have been tossed months ago: a shirt that hasn't fit since college but
I keep because it was once hip; a knit scarf that's unraveled itself
into threads; a pair of broken, worn-out sandals that helped me trek
through parts of India and South America.
There's a basket of
scarves that lives on top of the high shelf above the clothing rack I
rarely touch. I purchased the thin blue one when I was 15, next to a
night club in Tel Aviv where I had my first drink; another from a flea
market in Tuscany where a bunch of friends decided we'd laze for ten
days one summer (silk, apparently, can molt). A long, white kerchief
with coin tassels purchased for me by friends as we embarked upon a
belly dancing lesson prior to my bachelorette party. One, a remnant of
my mother's flirtation with psychedelic fashion in the '60s; another,
a thank-you gift for directing a play. I don't wear any of these.
I
keep another basket atop the dresser in my closet for things like
birthday cards I can't throw away, necklaces that need repair.
Scissors and sewing stuffs. A glass jar of buttons that never managed
to make it back onto the sweaters from which they've fallen (or were
plucked by my button-happy daughter). There are small, beaded purses
and floppy hats for whimsical evenings, belts, a
ball cap. Assorted perfumes I don't often wear. Everything
in here has a story. Everything in here, collectively, tells where
I've been and who and what I've loved. All in a 5 x 5 closet.
A friend of mine has made
a living of organizing people's homes (and lives). Part of
her philosophy of organization involves tossing out what you don't
need. Superfluous items are simply space-wasters. But for some
reason, I cannot part with the (now too-tight) sweater I wore on a
first date with my husband. I can't toss the beaded hemp necklace a
stranger gave me in Paris, even though I never wear it. And though
they're woolen, scratchy, and too big in all the wrong places, the
jackets my grandmother's uncle had made for her in Argentina will have
to find their way back up on the clothes rack.
Right after I find my pants.
