When my nephew was two or so he hated to get new clothes. He would cry like he was broken-hearted if he thought you were trying to put something new on him. Of course he was growing and needed new things so his mom would have to sneak anything she bought into his drawer and put it on him without mentioning that it was new. I thought it was pretty funny at the time but he may have come into it more honestly than I knew.
My sister was here visiting this week and she brought a DVD that she had recently had transferred from some video that we shot at her house in 1998 during Thanksgiving weekend. It was wonderful to watch everybody talking and laughing and playing games. We almost all had a lot more hair and a few less pounds. It was interesting to see how much everyone had changed. Then, all of a sudden, I noticed something that was exactly then as it is now. I was wearing a sweatshirt, the one with the cat on it, that is still hanging in my closet and I wore just this week. In 2012.
It was the second jolt about my wardrobe I had had in a few days. Hayley, our ten year old granddaughter, just asked me about the loafers I was wearing last week-end. "Not new," I told her. "These are actually older than Miranda (she's seven) I bought them in St. Louis about the time you were born." It is hard for me to find shoes I like so when I purchased these I got them in black, brown, navy and burgundy. They can last four times as long that way, although I admit that the black ones are looking a little bit worse for wear, and maybe the brown ones too. But the navy and burgundy, you would hardly know came along not too long after we were celebrating that we survived Y2K.
I know admitting it puts my Girl Card in jeopardy, but I just really don't like to shop for new clothes. For one thing if I do I have to admit that I'm still buying the size I swore I would never be in again every New Year's resolution for the last twenty years. Besides, there is history in some of these things. Another of my favorite shirts that I still wear (cats are on it too, come to think of it. There may be a theme here) is one that our kids bought me for Mother's Day when they lived in Wichita. It was the late nineties. Speaking of Wichita, I bought one of the few dresses I own, a red one, there when we were visiting them for a week-end and the temperature got up to 108 degrees and none of the clothes I had packed were even still dry.
I have one more dress, a yellow one. We refer to it as my "wedding dress" because I have worn it to all the family weddings since I got it when Josh & Jerilyn first moved to Kansas City. That was right after college graduation so it must have been 1996 or so. I bought it to wear to the symphony there but since then it has only gone to weddings and church on Easter. Every year. You will probably recognize it this Easter. Naturally it is still in good shape. It has only been worn twice a year, well, yeah, for sixteen years, but still...
My favorite red sweater, and I will admit it is beginning to look a little bit too loved, I got when I was selling furniture in Oklahoma City. There was a kind of quirky store around the corner and you had to dig through a lot to get to the good stuff. You could spend your lunch hour there, not that I often got one. I think of that store each time I wear it. I still have two pants suits that I wore when I worked at the furniture store, they have good pockets to hold tape measures and pens and stuff. I left there in '95, so you can do the math. There are the pants I bought when we first moved to St. Louis because somebody thought I needed to look more like a "Corporate Wife." (It didn't help)
Goodwill buying doesn't count, of course. It is cool to shop there because they have out of date things to go with the out of date stuff I already have in my closet. They probably have great epics to go with them and then they were abandoned, so I rescue them and start new memories with them.
Okay, every thing I own is older than Miranda, except the pajamas I was forced to buy a couple of years ago when I was going to be in the hospital all those times. They got their history pretty fast, kind of the Reader's Digest version.
I think I'm going to clean out my closet soon and donate a lot of clothes that I haven't worn in a couple of years. It will be hard because most of them are like old friends. See, if you just go out and buy clothes when the seasons change or because you have the money in the budget, you miss out on all the nostalgia each time you wear them. I think I'm with my nephew, Jack. New clothes just don't have the history that old ones do
At least I'm not still wearing my maternity clothes. Now, there were some memories!
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