A Closet Full of Memories

A Closet Full of Memories

I come from a long, proud line of wedding-napkin-saving sentimentalists and have an uncanny memory for details everybody else knows better to discard.

Yesterday, these two factors did not bode well when I decided to purge my closet and myself of all excess, Alexander Supertramp-style. You see, every piece of clothing in there was more tightly woven with a story, an emotion and — sorry to say this — a smell than the very fibers that bound it.

Since we’re here, I might as well go ahead and tell you some of the things I had in my closet (although Extreme Makeover’s satellites are sure to start pointing in my direction once I do): the zebra-striped skirt I was wearing when, at 15, I walked into church and encountered a quiet, enigmatic man named Randy P-something-or-other who would — seven years later — become my husband. In my closet I had the paisley pants with a large patch on the back from where — at the 2003 Fourth of July picnic, trying to draw the attention away from a woman who was trying to capture Randy’s — I scaled a six foot fence in heeled sandals, fell, and about shredded my behind to ribbons and, more importantly, my favorite pants.

Neatly folded beside these, I had the peppermint-striped pajama bottoms I borrowed years ago from my best friend and never returned. In college, I wore them to bed almost every night while she was home battling cancer; that thread-bare flannel against my skin made me feel closer to her, somehow. I also had the cargo kakis, Kentucky Organ Donation Awareness T-shirt , and fleece blanket of Madison’s: staple items of her wardrobe and dorm room in the far-too-few years I knew her. After Madison’s sudden death at 21, her mother gave these things to me. Later that night, at a cabin with my family and Randy, I donned the clothing, pulled the blanket taut over my head, breathed in her scent of citrus and spice, and cried like I had a whole year’s worth of tears to shed.

If I really stop to think about it (and yesterday, while sorting through everything, I sure had the time), I know all these items will never see the racks of Goodwill just like I know I’ll never smear my scars with Vitamin E oil in hopes of erasing them; the pictures in my albums will never be tossed into the dumpster regardless of how mortifying they may be; and my journals, short stories, and poems documenting my adolescence — though rife with he said/she said drama and salted with more adjectives than a pinto pot — will never be burned. They’re all pieces of who I was. They have bore witness to tragedies and triumphs both minute and life-changing, and — because of this — they’ve also created who I am.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had purging fests before and filled bins with mementos not worth remembering. I’ve also destroyed letters, pictures, and journal entries with every element available to man. (But mostly fire; I’m a pyromaniac.)

I think if we’re not careful we can lug around all this weight from our pasts — be it physical or emotional — and it keeps us from moving into our futures. Also, some things were meant to be buried, and if we dig them up and crack them open, we’re pulled into a world we’re no longer meant to inhabit; and usually this world is nesting another and another and another, like those Russian dolls tucked inside larger versions of themselves.

Figuring out what pieces in our proverbial closet need to be discarded and which need to be held on to is truly a difficult thing. The main test, for me, is if those pieces are needed to complete the puzzle of my life. If without them I cannot recall the tragedies and triumphs God has brought me through, I keep every piece. Otherwise, I store everything in a box, seal it up, and cast it aside. Never to be opened again.