Order

Yesterday my "organizer" arrived for the first time, and we spent four hours on the closet in my bedroom.  Hitherto I have had closets in Cambridge and Hull Massachusetts and New York City which I had the silly notion I could collapse into one rather large space here in Sarasota.  In the process I did little or no winnowing out, well, a little obvious bit, but still ending up with maybe twenty suit jackets, seven identical pairs of kakhi pants, shoes, and more shoes that upon the fifth wearing proved improper for my feet and were discarded.  But not given away.  That is key to understanding the dynamics of yesterday.  I am as rational as the next guy, but somehow when it comes to discarding clothing, I always think in the back of my mind, that there will come a time when obscure items relegated to the dusty corners of the closet will once again reassert their primacy, their importance, and I will feel regret.  My organizer was therefore meant to be an umpire.  She arrived with a wonderful impartiality, but still a surprising sympathy.  First off, she advised me to feel the fabric of anything I was thinking of tossing and consider how it "speaks" to me.  Funnily enough, it was a marvelous way to get in touch with my real feelings and thereafter I moved with confidence in my rejections and acceptances. But she also stayed my hand as I was about to discard a jacket in an improbable green.  "You'll never see that color again.  Worth  keeping just for that reason," said she. Most of all she got me to understand that living in Florida in an informal resort area was a challenge to my traditional wardrobe.  We filled something like five large plastic bags for Goodwill.  As I went through the maneuver of the discarding, she stood by my side, actually performing for me, and over riding my welling regret as I watched one after another of recognized "favorites" (which truth be told had not been on my body in easily a decade) slipped into the waiting plastic bag. She gave me permission.   Next week we will tackle the contents of all the drawers in the large vanity in my bathroom--bottles and tubes of so many different creams and lotions that various women friends have told me would "work" for me, too. And then we'll have a go at the dog eared dust covered "scholarly" books out of which I taught for forty two years.  My husband, the retired chair of a high school language department, has sharpened his wits in retirement reading mostly recently almost all twenty four books--sixteen thousand lines--of the Iliad in the original Greek. More power to him! Me, I doubt I could do more than the opening lines at this date.  I had the good sense to throw out all my lecture notes twenty years ago when I quit.  Now it's time for the books to go.