Diamonds (and other things I found cleaning my closet out this week)
Living in the present.
I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon being bullied by my two 20-something daughters in my bedroom.
They'd been hot for me to clean out my closet -- its level of disorder had reached a new stage -- and decided that yesterday was the day to make it happen. By the time I got upstairs, the oldest had started pulling things off shelves and making piles on my floor and bed.
"Start throwing things away," she said as I picked my way towards her.
My younger daughter and I stood for a minute in the roomy walk-in closet, surveying the piles of old boxes on a round ottoman in the center and the rods full of hanging tops and dresses. "You can never get remarried," she said, looking at the sweaters hanging off shelves. "He wouldn't have anywhere to put his stuff."
Thus began a great reckoning as I do not separate from items lightly, including body parts. I have an assortment of teeth -- mine as well as the children's -- as well as some scraps of hair in ziploc bags. There were five pairs of snow boots, four nearly identical straw hats and boxes and bags from gifts and purchases that just seemed too nice to part with (see photo above). I opened up one of the attractive Mark & Graham boxes to inspect the interior and began fondling the tissue and musing aloud that it might be reused as wrapping paper.
"Mom, you're a hoarder," said the youngest, pointing to the black contractor's bag she'd brought up for the job. "Throw it out."
Luckily, we had started looking inside anything getting tossed as that is how I found:
A: the charger for our drill inside a Hunter rain boot;
B: the two knit hats from 10 years ago, when I thought I had lost one and immediately ran out to replace it and some how, a decade later, I only now realize I never lost the first one.
C: a diamond necklace I haven't seen in like three years I thought for sure had either been stolen or accidentally thrown away.
And I almost did throw it away as I began picking through the lucite tray where a lot of my both real and costume jewelry lay jumbled together. A couple of leather pouches were tangled up in it all -- leftovers from a 50th birthday present now almost four years ago that I could not part with -- and I started to toss them in the trash until my daughter suggested I make sure they were empty, et voila!
"I'd been wondering whatever happened to that," she said, and when we reported our find a few minutes later to her older sister, she said she'd wondered the same.
Initially, I was reluctant to say good bye to anything, especially all the shoes I've amassed. We've had, like, relationships. The steep fuschia wedges I wore for my 40th birthday party. The mauve leather wooden heeled beauties with dainty bows and delicate cutouts I teetered around in one weekend post-divorce in Manhattan. The brown leather Frye thong sandals I traipsed around Greece's Dodecanese Islands one summer, discovering too late how slippery they'd be when I got to the smooth marble steps at the top of the Acropolis.
The problem with the shoe situation was twofold: number one, my feet no longer work in high heels. The good lord has decided my big toes can't bend anymore, making it impossible to walk in a shoe that depends on one's toes' ability to flex upward. And number two, fuschia wedges are a part of a former life, one that included beach club cocktail parties and fancy New Years Eve parties.
I sat caressing the pebble brown Frye boots that have a sexy 70s vibe and high wooden heel, which had been a staple of my dating wardrobe early on, when my younger daughter pointed to the giveaway pile.
"You've had a great life and you will have a lot more adventures," she said, and I quickly agreed and threw a straw beach hat I'd been clinging to into the Goodwill pile.
"You're right," I said, "but I'm not ready to let go of the boots."
In the end, we filled three big contractors bag, a couple of kitchen garbage bags and my closet now even has an empty shelf after I purged many of the handbags and tote bags I'd been hanging onto for years. And that was just accessories -- shoes, bags, jewelry, belts. We haven't even touched all the clothes, including the Size 2 white eyelet dress I wore to that 40th birthday party, which now looks child sized.
I told my friend Dan about all this during my workout with him this morning. "Sounds like you're making room for a new life," he said, and I told him I liked the sound of that.
I've been hanging onto so many things from the past, as if I needed evidence of a life well lived. But that's all ancient history.
I started watching the show "Dickinson" on Apple TV (see trailer below), which is a very modern reimagining of the Nineteenth Century poet Emily Dickinson's life. Think: rap music, twerking and Wiz Khalifa playing the role of "Death" (who literally stops for her). One episode finds Emily going off to Walden Pond to visit Henry David Thoreau, and it's got me thinking a lot about the Transcendentalist's writing and thinking, especially during quarantine. Our very own trip to the woods.
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave," he wrote, "find your eternity in each moment."
A closet purged of torturous footwear and empty boxes seems like a good start.
xoAmy
