My mother didn’t like to discard clothes. Our house, built in the late 1940s, had a few small closets: one in my parents’ bedroom, one in my bedroom, and an alcove with a hanging rod at the top of the stairs. Off our downstairs hallway was a larger closet under the staircase, but this recess mainly housed my mother’s canned goods.
Many of our clothes were stored in dresser and bureau drawers. In her later years, my mother also kept clothes in foot lockers, wicker laundry baskets, and hung on a quilt rack.
One day, around 15 years ago, I told my mother we needed to weed out the clothes she didn’t wear anymore. Many of them likely wouldn’t fit her, I said, and we could donate them to a local thrift store. Earlier in 2006, after my father passed away, we had sorted through his clothes and donated them. But when I suggested we go through her clothes, she was resistant.
“Don’t get rid of clothes I could wear,” she said. “They’re still good.”
“I won’t,” I assured her. “You can look at them and decide what you want to keep.”
And so I began lugging clothes downstairs from the wicker baskets, as well as some from dressers in the downstairs bedrooms. We went through the pants and tops, finding a pair of white vertical-striped bell bottoms, bought at Sears in Asheville in 1967 before our Christmas trip to Fort Lauderdale. She and I both had worn these bell bottoms, and I was hesitant to discard them. I put them back for later consideration. After we had sorted through a pile of clothes, having picked out only a few items to donate, I decided the rest of the clothes might as well stay put.
She had kept many of my old clothes, too. In my old bedroom closet hung a high school cheerleading uniform, a prom dress, and my wedding dress and veil. These latter two items took up a lot of space on the hanging rod. She had these specially packaged after the wedding in 1973, and here they remained throughout the decades. Another item here was my black velvet dress with white lace at the collar and cuffs and pearl buttons down the front. In 1968, she had bought it for me to wear to a 7th grade Christmas party at my teacher’s house. It was the most beautiful dress I had ever seen.
Through the years, my mother had often talked about a favorite winter wool coat she wore during my childhood. She spoke of my paternal grandmother borrowing the coat one day to wear to the cemetery, where my grandfather, great-grandmother, and uncle were buried. I have a photograph of my grandmother taken that day at Pleasant Gardens Baptist Church Cemetery in Marion, wearing that sky blue coat.
My mother also told about a day in 1965, when she and my father were working at Broadway Hosiery Mill in Marion. On that day a fire broke out in the adjoining Seagle Feed and Seed Store. The fire spread quickly, and the mill workers were evacuated. The fire destroyed both businesses and left my parents unemployed for a while.
But what seemed to have hurt my mother most was a particular loss on that day.
“We seen bricks getting red-hot,” she said. “I grabbed the lunch I’d packed, but my pretty blue coat burned up.” How often she had told me about this incident, always lamenting the loss of the coat. She also added that someone had once told her the coat matched the color of her eyes, an observation which pleased her.
After my mother passed away, my brother and I went through her clothes, a sad and difficult task. As we sorted through the garments, they all brought back memories of her. We both kept a few special items we just couldn’t let go. And I kept my wedding dress and veil, my cheerleading uniform, and the black velvet dress.
But I wish destiny had allowed me to keep my mother’s favorite garment: a blue wool coat that matched the color of her eyes.