- December 20, 2024
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When I lose my mom in a pile of clothes, I think that means it’s time to get rid of a few things.
I’m not lying when I say an actual tornado roared through my bedroom this past weekend. Except instead of containing cows and small houses like in the movie “Twister,” old sweaters, bell bottom jeans and stained t-shirts spiraled out of this one.
It was Friday night and like most Friday nights I was struggling to find something to wear for the evening. I could literally feel my biceps getting a workout from pushing through what felt like hundreds
of shirts squeezed so tightly into my closet. After finally locating the top I was looking for, I had to use both arms to pull it out from the tightly griped claws of my walk-in closet. Things were clearly out of hand.
I called my mom to recruit some help and she agreed to drive up the next day to help me sort through the mess. When she arrived, I had already started making a pile of giveaways, which may or may not have contained exclusively clothes she bought me.
“There’s no way you can get rid of this,” she cried while holding up a shirt with a tiger on it that was clearly meant for a 12-year-old. I tried to explain to her that I had simply grown out of promoting
large zoo animals on my shirts and that is wasn’t cool anymore. But she waved me off, threw the shirt back into the keep pile and smirked “you don’t even know what cool is.”
Tensions rose throughout the rest of the afternoon as we both kept tossing shirts back and forth from pile to pile. Both of us were clearly convinced that the other just had no clue how to dress. Eventually, the attitudes changed after I foolishly tried on a pair of skinny jeans I had held onto since ninth grade. There’s nothing like laughing at a muffin top to bring to bring mother and daughter back together.
Once we got my walk-in closet cleared enough to where you could actually walk into it, we took the giveaway pile back to my moms house to spread the wealth. My dad, seeing us lug in overly packed trash bags, suddenly had a game of golf to play.
We divided up the treasure into three different piles: the nice stuff would go to my brother’s girlfriend or one of my cousins, the okay stuff we would try to sell to a resale shop and the stained stuff would be donated to goodwill. Those three piles got dividend into more and more piles until we eventually had 15 piles spread throughout the house ready for their new closet homes. Then we made the calls.
Old high school buds, my mom’s thrifty friends and my middle-school aged cousin marched through our living room that had quickly transformed into a consignment shop. My dad returned to see all the ladies and suddenly had to go out for a beer.
My younger cousin was the last customer left and she awed over a t-shirt she had just found. One look at my mom’s face and I knew my cousin had grabbed the tiger t-shirt I sneaked back into the giveaway pile. Because I was right, it was for 12 year olds.
