I have a closet full of clothes.  Some of them I wear almost every week. Some of them I haven’t worn for a long time but I have memories of them as favorites, or I have memories of how much I paid for them that keep me from giving them away.  Since I am engaged in the long term project of downsizing, today I decided to wear a dress and make a decision. Does it go or does it stay?

This has been a good day to wear a dress because I intended to stay inside and write.  A dress is good for writing.  There isn’t a lot else to be done in a dress, comfortably.  I often wonder how our pioneer ancestors walked across the country in dresses, not to speak of all the things they usually wore under their dresses to complicate things. I know some of them probably put on a pair of pants if they could find some to fit, but I’m also thinking that pants might not have been all that great back then either.

So, in my dress, which I bought at a garage sale a couple years ago, I sat and wrote all morning.  The writing was productive and the dress kept me from getting distracted and going outside. But I gradually got the “knowing” feeling. The dress was not “me”. I took it off and put it in the box to go to Goodwill. It was a useful exercise in paring down.