GENTLY USED

/ janpriddyoregon

The tiny closet of our condo is already stuffed with clothing I rarely wear. I need to purge. This is the story of our times. We focus on gathering until we run out of room and have to wonder: Why do I need this?

This raven came closer to me than any corvid (I originally typed “covid”—which is also true). She landed on a drift log right in front of me and then took off before landing here again.
: GENTLY USED

A recent article at Apartment Therapy details how a woman vowed to buy no new clothing for a year except shoes, socks, and underwear. Turns out she did fine in 2020 and then has gone right on not-buying ever since. She couldn’t find what she wanted so she did buy and sell on a wedding dress (congratulations!) and she rented clothing for special occasions and holidays.

If I bought nothing but underwear, socks, and shoes, I would still have enough clothing to wear for the next ten years (and probably for the rest of my life), regardless of my location or the season. I suspect many women do. (I’ve watched the purging programs and seen the massive heaps of clothing some women store in their closets. When I Kondoed my closet, my mound was smaller but still ridiculous.) Rent clothing for a special occasion? I see the logic, but it’s not remotely necessary. I was married in a vintage (now antique) Bedouin wedding dress that I plan to wear on my 50th wedding anniversary in a couple of years. It still fits. I have rayon challis pants that I wore 40 years ago when I was substitute teaching and are oddly fashionable.

I have an Eileen Fisher smokey violet velvet dress I probably bought in the mid-1980s that I wore to our older son’s high school graduation and our younger son’s wedding ten years later. I bought it from Nordstrom, marked down twice. I loved it when I first saw it, and I’ve loved it ever since. I bring it out for special occasions and will continue to do that until I die. That dress stands as the model for my ideal clothing purchases.

When I retired from teaching high school and college classes, I had a closet of school-appropriate clothing. Despite a concerted effort to divest, I don’t feel like enough of it has gone away, and it’s perfectly stylish and wearable since it’s mostly simple Eileen-Fisherish, classic, and purchased gently used or on sale.

Then I lost the forty pounds. That effort began two years ago when I looked at myself and the Covid risk factors and decided I should do what I could. Today I weigh what I did before my first child was born, what I weighed when I was coaching cross country, and within a few pounds of what I weighed in high school and college.

Last month I ran the Columbia Bridge Crossing 10k. I was 70 years old the next week. Yeah, it’s true. I am bragging.

I run every other day, but I am also serious about divesting. The author of the article I read is headed in the right direction, doing what she can to counter the current fast clothing glut. The American obsession with new clothing make a castrophic pile of trash. More than 85% of our used clothing becomes waste, “roughly 13 million tonnes in 2017—are either dumped into landfill or burned. The average American has been estimated to throw away around 37kg of clothes every year.”

My wedding dress, black and with mostly red embroidery, was worn by a woman I never knew. I suspect several women wore parts of that dress. Close examination reveals that some of the work is older than the rest, that velvet on the shoulders and likely several other embroidered pieces, especially on the chest have been brought forward from older garments. I have always been able to wear it and I could have trotted it out every week since I was married, as western American brides did in the nineteenth century wear the dress from their weddings to church every Sunday until it fell off them, then took it apart and made surviving pieces into something else. My wedding dress has already been through a lot of lives.

I still have things that no longer fit and things I do not love enough to keep. The struggle will be to not replace them with things that do fit and I do not need, will never wear out, and which I should resist.

And that’s just the clothing. My whole house is like this, in need of deep sorting. We’re working on that. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the mean time, it’s November today and last month I worked hard on a couple of stories, submitted work to literary magazines, ran a total of 35 miles including that 10k (6.2 miles), finally finished the scarf warp (why do I forget how much I dislike weaving narrow?), presented “How to Teach Writing Without Making Your Eyes Bleed” for the Oregon Council of Teachers of English (OCTE) and they invited me to come back next year, bought 14 pounds of fire-roasted chilies at the Portland Farmers Market and seeded and stemmed and packed away or ate them, fussed a good deal about our budget, and mailed off my ballot.

After I retired and Gary and I could walk the beach every morning, we collected trash and put it into our trash. We did not make “art” out of it, or find a way to recycle bits of styrofoam the size of pennies, but threw it into our own garbage can. Once time we pulled so much plastic foam off the beach we had to pay extra to have it carted away, but then we only have pick-up every other week. We’d always carried lightbulbs and syringes off the sand—anything that seemed dangerous. Bic lighters. Windows. We continued to do that during the pandemic, but we stopped picking up the rest of the trash.

Today I began picking up trash on the beach again.

Mostly poly-styrene foam in tiny pieces, but the one discolored plastic bottle, some fishing line, cigarette filters and the stubs of those phony little cigars, many plastic bottle caps, plastic rope, take-out food containers, and various bits of broken plastic that might once have been useful. I stopped collecting beach trash in March 2020 because of the pandemic and because no one was too certain about how it was passed. During 2019, I’d estimated we gathered at least a half ton of trash from the beach. The pandemic brought less trash so I might have been wrong in assuming it mostly came from fishers off the coast. It would be nice if people cleaned the beach in front of their home, but most ocean-front homes are not occupied at all, but are rentals.

19 thoughts on “GENTLY USED”

  1. I know I only speak for myself when I say and with all dude respect that I can only ric roll in certain attire so there is no way I can part with my vintage velour custom made briefs–I mean, come on people, I am not a clothes hound but things like this just cannot be replaced even by Bbaying—so I am never gunna give them up—ha ha!—just —come on Eileen Fisher. you know what I mean—I’ll let you know when I get a bingo—happy novembre

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  2. I pick up beach debris when we’re in Seaside. I’ve found plastic sand toys, beach blankets (found two in the dunes on Friday), and empties. Over spring break, I made about 3 dollars from beach empties. Fourth of July was the worst, though. Don’t get me started there.

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  3. I love a particular store’s style of clothing and I told them so last time I was there. But I also mentioned the quality of their clothing was extremely poor. They said they were aware, the philosophy of their management was so that their customers would have to replace their clothing often. True story!

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    • Yes, that doesn’t surprise me. It’s sad, isn’t it? And that is what people do—buy new stuff all the time.

      EF is very well made but I can’t afford it except used. After Mom’s death I scoured Ebay for Eileen Fisher clothing at a few dollars each. I recently found a pair of my favorite pants at EF’s Renew listed “good as new” and they are plain and black and just what I used to wear every day to work. I dug through my stashed EF to find garments I’d loved too much to give away when I was too big to wear them. Triumph. A red silk satin shell. One in lovely tweedy linen. A sleeveless scarlet velvet dress I bought because it was so cheap on Ebay that I could not resist—cheaper than the cost of the fabric, so I figured I’d cut up for the cloth, but it now fits. I have to wear something over it because it’s sleeveless, but that might be my holiday dress for the rest of my life.

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  4. Thank you for taking time to clean the beaches. Every fall and spring, I walk up and down my neighborhood streets and pick up garbage along the roads. On some days my grandkids help me. They love the garbage grabbers. We can all make a difference one person at a time. I live very close to Lake Superior. My goals are to make my neighborhood look better, to help garbage from getting into the waterway, and to help protect wildlife from garbage.

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    • Yes, all of that! Thank you, Vicki! When we are in Portland, I see a group sometimes, picking up trash in our neighborhood there. Most of what I find at the beach is tiny, smashed by waves and rocks before I get to it. A dear friend sent me a grabber, but it doesn’t work for picking up bits of plastic smaller than postage stamps—ha! I figure I get a workout bending over a few hundred times.

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  5. yesterday JustPorchIt picked up two large bags of cast-offs–clothing, purses, hangers, daughter’s baby shoes. This organization takes all items and figures out ways to reuse and keep out of the landfills. They’ll take anything that isn’t wet or moldy.

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  7. I have such an odd assortment of clothes in my closet. Some are a couple of decades old, some just several months. Every so often I feel like going through a purge, but over the years I’ve given up quite a few clothes that I wish I still had. So … as long as everything fits in one closet. My drawers are another story … lol.

    I had a reality check in July when my sister died and we went to NY for the services. I had already given up most of my work clothes by then. I managed to throw together a black ensemble for the wake and wore a dark blue dress for the funeral and burial. Thank goodness I hadn’t given up that dress because I was tempted. But when we got home, I gave up the black ensemble. It had been a favorite arrangement of a sheer top (with a colorful camisole underneath) with a flouncy black skirt. But now I’ll always associate the clothes with my sister’s death so … I’m keeping the dark blue dress but I gave up the rest.

    I still pick up trash in my neighborhood pretty regularly, at least a couple of times a week. Sometimes when I get ready for a morning walk, I’ll think, “this time I’m leaving my gripper home. I just want to walk!” But I always take my gripper because I know if I see trash and I can’t safely pick it up, I’ll be angry with myself. So, there we go.

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