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Since the comment someone made that I should lighten up has struck me hard, I have spent many hours pondering. I pondered into all the years growing into myself. Yes, there are really good days and really awful ones, but I will expand on good ones and leave the bad ones to your imagination.

I want you to know that in all of the aging categories, we share good, not so good, and bad days. What I have come to know is that you CAN make your not so good days into good days, and perhaps you bad days into not so bad days. Now I sound like a babbling idiot, so what! If you get the point, good for you and if you don’t, I’ll take heed.

In order to get moving they say do the hard things first. So, I swallow a small cup of coffee from our needy coffee maker, chugalug down my recommended dosages of medications to keep the workings of my body greased, which are all not hard things. Then, I comb my hair, a hard thing. The hair issue follows me from childhood. Then, the next hard thing is getting dressed. I have two choices, I can pull on yesterday’s clothes at the foot of the bed, easy, or I can dress up fancy, hard. So I choose the hard thing. I dress as if I am going to a formal wedding. I find pretty dress up dresses, hang them in a row. Some of these lace and chiffon apparel have no place in my real life.

I must make them a part of my life or give them to the charity shop, so I put one of them on and start the vacuuming, dusting, canning, and set up house for dinner guests. I start cooking, my passion, easy and hard. You would think I would save the pretty little frocks for company, Of course not. Do you think I am daft? They would call the lunatic ward in the nearest hospital. No, no, no, the fancy dress is for doing the hard things.

When hard things are done. I pull on the clothes at the foot of my bed and rest awhile.

The reason I write is to uplift my past, down beat aging protests and also to bring you to a recent discovery and desire to beat the state of affairs in my closets.

I decided to count the hangers holding items of clothing, skipped the scarves. I added each closet’s contents and came up with 812 items. How can that be? I know many items are from the distant past and I can prove it. Some I tagged from my 50th birthday party. To say I am sentimental about my clothes hanging on the hangars is putting it mildly. What is my point? Here it is plain and simple, how many outfits can I make, mixing and matching items on the hangars? The math is mind boggling for me, but I am willing to make a wager that I will not be living long enough to wear each of the multitude of outfits. You want to know what I am saying. I am saying politely, that, if I buy something else, I have to throw two in the charity bin. If I do not, slap me.

Just saying….

How many hangars do you have? Please count and get back to me with the numbers of outfits you can make. Bet you can’t do the math, I know I can’t even begin to fathom such a project. I just know intuitively, I cannot outlive my clothes. Depressing thought. Or is it?

A Closet Story # 2:  I heard tell…

I heard tell that you should ALWAYS buy a good pair of shoes and a good bed because if you are not in one of them you are in the other.

The above telling makes such good sense to me now that I have begun in earnest to clean out my flipping’ closets once and for all.  I begin with the shoes. They were all good shoes at one time or another, but time and wear take their toll. I have to decide which shoes are good to keep and which ones will someone else be happy to have? This little nagging voice in the back of my head says, ‘It’s never gonna happen. You are not going to throw out much today.’  It is not going to happen because I cannot part with any of them. They have given good service. Is that what we do with a good pair of shoes that has given us comfort year in and year out? Throw them out? Maybe? We’ll see.

I also cannot part with the little black blouse I wore under the suit, which is long gone to our daughter’s wedding umpteen years ago. Her first one, may I add. I also cannot part with the suede shirt Skip bought me 10 years ago because he said it looked nice on me It still is not my style and makes me sweat and look large, but still in hangs among the others that have the same qualities. I still think that someday, just someday I will wear the travel skirts I bought, still fit into, over twenty-five years ago.  Oh Gawd. I have looked through some travel purchases and just have to stamp my foot and shake my head. The embroidered vest and skirt from the Ukraine looked spiffy on the ship that night for dinner as did the Peruvian shawl and the Thai pants and jacket. The Norwegian sweater makes me look thin, that’s why I bought it, but it is too darned hot for Southern California weather anytime, ever. More

Going through drawers.

I went through several dresser drawers to clean them out and came across many treasures. It was amazing and rather fantastic to hold things in my hands I thought were so beautiful and had been hidden from me for so long. I gathered the pins, bracelets, necklaces, rings, and recaptured the items in old wallets from way by gone days, tapes, letters, cards, money, (not as much as I would have liked) scarves, hair pins, a magnifying glass, an antique mirror my grandmother had given to me. Shined up it looks like a million bucks.

I felt like I was going through a drawer of someone who had died and was cleaning it up after her. It was nice to know it was I there and not my kids or someone else. It was a thrill to see my own stuff again. I put the new/old pins on jackets and cleaned up tarnished pendants, put on gold earrings I hadn’t seen in eons. Oh what a fun afternoon. Why not go through some of your drawers. It might surprise you and besides it is very good therapy. Remember you don’t have to wait until you die and let someone else do it. You can be that someone else delighting in finding new/old treasures.