A strange sentimentality

one of the downsides of living in a 1900-era house is the lack of closets. we have no closets at all on the main floor, which is a bother when winter comes--there's nowhere to put boots, mittens, or heavy coats. Upstairs, each of the three bedrooms has one tiny closet. really tiny; in the computer room, the closet is the width of the door and only goes back about three feet.

so i, of course, have taken over two of the tiny closets and left doug one (but it's the biggest of the three). this means that every spring and fall, i have to move stuff around. i spent part of sunday taking my summer-weight clothes out of my main closet and stuffing them into my auxiliary closet, and liberating my winter clothes from my auxiliary closet and restoring them, front and center, to my main closet.

each time i do this, i hunt for things to get rid of. i have been blessed/cursed with staying pretty much the same size over the last seven or eight years, and so over time i have acquired a lot of clothes. i am my mother's daughter, though, and anything that fits--no matter how unflattering, ugly, or out of style--i tend to keep.

i also find it hard to get rid of clothes for another reason: i become oddly, sentimentally attached to them.

i have a pile of t-shirts that i never, ever wear, but i keep them nonetheless. they represent writing conferences i've attended, the magazine i used to work at, art fairs, vacations, the Woody Guthrie folk festival, trips up the north shore, my stint at the Thurber House, the time doug's paper won the pulitzer prize.... most of my adult life is represented by these t-shirts. so what if i never wear them? they're my history! so they live in the basement, in an old blue dresser, and twice a year i come across them and take them out and think about getting rid of them and then put them back.

in the upstairs hallway, in two drawers of the linen closet, i stash my sweatshirts. i have one from the duluth paper, one from the broomball team i played on in high school ("Mickey's Manglers"), one from my fellowship at duke university, two from the star tribune, and two from the university of minnesota. i almost never wear sweatshirts. still, i took them all out of their drawers, looked at them for a while, and then put them all back.

and then there are the clothes that my sister gave me. she died five years ago, and i don't feel like i can get rid of anything she gave me, even though she gave me a lot of things. and so i shift the yellow sweater with the pearl buttons and peter-pan collar from closet to closet, on seasonal schedule, even though i am not a pearl-button kind of girl. and the grey cardigan, and the blue and white checked Gap shirt, and the blue fleece top, and even the strange too-big cardigan with the lilac torso, blue sleeves, and the pocket on the back, right between the shoulder blades. i don't wear most of them. but they were from kristin! how could i possibly give them to goodwill?

i have a friend in duluth who felt this way about his hiking boots back when we were in high school. when they wore out, he didn't want to throw them away, so he built a frame for them and mounted them on the wall. i always liked that solution, and they looked very cool hanging there on display. i don't think that would be the solution for my dilemma, though; not only do we not have enough closets, but, given the volume of clothes i'm talking about here, we don't have enough wall space, either.