Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Sorting Shirts and Junking Jackets

   If you have no packrat tendencies or do not deal with someone who does, read no further. If you do, stay with me. Not that I can help you. I can't. But you will feel better about yourself and your packrat friend. Like the dismissed Men's Warehouse founder, 'I guarantee it'. You will re-evaluate the dimensions of 'packrattedness'.
   Those who have followed me for the past year have shared my emotional roller coaster as I watched the love of my life succumb to leukemia. It has been eighty short days; it has been eighty long days; it has been eighty chaotic days. But I have begun the physically laborious task, the emotionally draining chore of sorting his 'things'. I realize 'things' is an insipid term.
   Insipid-- that's how I feel.  Perhaps that is the proper feeling for sorting 'things'. I began with his closet. I had a plan. Sort by category --shirts, shoes, jackets, etc. Sort by condition - what to keep, what to throw away, what to donate. Sounded do-able. His closet, unlike mine, is organized. Shirts together, pants together, jackets --you get the picture.
   I began with shirts. After tossing the nearly cheese cloth ones, removing two that I could not part with, I had forty for donation. Forty shirts, some of which I had not seen for thirty or more years. The jackets proved a more daunting task. Most of his jackets I made; he refused to say 'made'; he said 'I tailored them'. Two I could not put in the donation box, the two which, according to him, fit so well no one could have tailored them better. The donation boxes have been hauled away. Next I tackle pants and sweaters.

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