Closets

The signs of my leaving were clear.  Closets  were open in every location of the house where clothes could be stored, for gradually over the years, as each family member in turn left our house, they left not only a space in my heart, but also an extra closet for me to appropriate.

The front bedroom, which had been first Jodie’s room and then Chris’s—stepchildren now gone on to new lives—was now the guardian of my heavy winter coats, extra robes and the too-flamboyant clothes of my thirties.  In the basement closet of what had  formerly been a guest bedroom, then converted into my metalsmithing studio, I stored sizes 10 through twelve, suggestive lingerie from my past,  Halloween costumes and spring jackets.

My “fat” clothes, unfortunately, were presently residing  in the closets of the master bedroom–size 14 through 16 in my own closet, sizes 18 through 1X hanging like abandoned lives in “my” portion of Bob’s closet, his clothes having  been culled by five of his kids and their spouses and girlfriends who, just weeks ago, had gathered for his funeral. I wish I had taken a photo of them as they stood around the nearly empty TV room, each of them in a pair of his wild pants or one of his t-shirts or both, wearing their recently departed dad  or near-dad like a skin. He had been a wild dresser. Red suede sneakers, drawstring puffy-legged pants we’d had made from batik in Bali, Guatemalan shirts.

Now, beside his few remaining garments, hung mine. It was like a major filing system spread throughout the house. Unfortunately, clothes seemed to migrate from closet to closet–my hot pink suede cowboy boots walking over for a visit with my old office clothes or my winter capes winding up mysteriously amidst  teddies and feather boas.

So it was that closet doors all over the house stood open as I searched for items that would cover climatic necessities from thirty below zero to tropical.

The floor was covered by my big suitcase and my small suitcase, peeled open like bananas awaiting their stuffing.  Around the suitcases, the floor was littered by various personal items that had spilled out from a dropped cardboard box. I lay belly down now, my hand swinging out in arcs in search of the flashlight which had rolled under the bed when it tumbled from the box..  Like the Halloween  “body parts” game wherein in a darkened room a peeled grape became an eyeball and cold spaghetti  was reputed to be intestines, my hand skittered over various small objects.  A dust ball that felt like a small mouse, hairpins, paperclips, a missing black sock, before finally settling on the flashlight .

I tossed it into the front zippered  compartment of my canvas suitcase.  I believed in being prepared for any contingency in travel and so I carried a mini drugstore that would cover emergencies from scorpion bite to constipation as well as a small tool kit, flashlight, book light, alarm clock and mini umbrella all tucked into the front two zippered sections of my suitcase that I had dubbed my “utility” compartments.

“You won’t need all that stuff,” Jayson had told my as he surveyed my knitted muffler and mittens and winter coat. “Isn’t it pretty much hot all year round in Mexico?”

“Yes, but I have friends and relatives in Wyoming and Minnesota. I might visit them. Or take that trip up the west coast of Canada to the Northwest Passage that Bob and I always meant to take. No need to have to buy new clothes.  And the Mexico house has lots of closets, too.” 

Surreptitiously, I slipped Bob’s Mudcloth African shirt ornamented with the x-shaped metal studs into one of the boxes, along with a pair of Bali pants the daughters-in-law had overlooked, and his “Art Can’t Hurt You” T-shirt that I had thought would be cremated with him, but instead had arrived back intact with his ashes, along with his red suede sneakers, another pair of batik pants and his metal dental crown, complete with fake teeth. I packed them, too, setting aside his cremation urn, for which I had a special place. The family  would all come down to Mexico in the spring to help my spread his ashes in Lake Chapala. In the mountains above it was the beautiful domed house we had meant to make our retirement home, but we had waited too long to find it. Now I would soon start the long journey down to it, from Boulder Creek, CA to Mexico, where I would fill out the closets of a new home.

I folded my Mother’s Japanese cotton kimono jacket and slid it into the box. It had been an old man’s housejacket, my Japanese friend had told me, and please not to wear it when I met her family. But, my mother and I had loved it when we found it in Nobu, a Japanese shop in Santa Monica, and she had worn it for years before dying just three months before Bob and I left for Mexico to find a new home, buy it, and return to California to sell our home of 14 years. Two months later, although we had not sold the house, we had sold most of its contents. We had packed most of the van—mainly with books and tools, reserving packing our clothes to the very end, thinking we could perhaps stick them into the cracks between other items–– before discovering, during our last-minute medical check-ups, that he had cancer. He lived for three weeks.

So, I’d be moving alone to Mexico, but would always have the option to be surrounded by my dearly departed. My closets would be full of my own past and present selves, but one small portion of them would carry Bob and my mother with me as well.