#2 of 92: My Closet as a Life Puzzle

The genie grants you a wish. What is it?

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Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Nope. I’m not fool enough to wish for that.

If a genie appeared right here, danced with its velvet slippers across my keyboard – K – W – Z – Q – smiled at me coyly and put his hand to his ear to listen to my request, well, I’d ask for something truly life changing.

A closet makeover.

My closet makes me crazy. So does the swaddling chair unwisely placed too close to the closet so it receives all the overflow, of which there is much on most days.

For a long time, my mother’s purple velvet wedding dress hung in my closet. She made the dress herself in 1937, leaving some of the inside seams unfinished, uncharacteristic of her sewing so I think she might have been rushed to get the dress ready to wear. So the dress hung for years in my closet as sort of an artifact of something, a memorial, and then I decided to put it in box and then seal the box with grey duct tape as if it was going to be sent to the other side of the world and get handled by a dozen rough and uncaring hands.

I put the box in the attic. On the top, I labeled it with ‘my mother’s name and wedding dress’, sort of how a museum curator might classify butterflies. After a while, well, a few days ago, it started to worry me that the dress could disintegrate in its box in the attic or the mice could get at it (you know how they are with duct tape) and I should retrieve it from the attic and hang it back up in my closet.

It occurs to me that my closet may be another metaphor. It is overstuffed, as is my life. It is well-organized but so chock full of garments that the organization can’t be discerned, and it is full of things I have been unable to jettison despite their lack of relevance or utility.

A few examples: hanging in my closet is my doctoral hood and a lingerie set that my first husband’s uncle who was a lingerie salesman who traveled the Midwest with a clothes rack full of see-through nightgowns and gauzy robes in his car gave me as a wedding present in 1969. Like ‘For sale, baby shoes, never worn,’ neither was the lingerie set.

My closet is this weekend’s Rubiks Cube.