One of the last upstairs rooms which I cleaned was the old lady’s bedroom. I had to work up some gumption to clear out some of those things, though after I started, I realized the room was relatively easy to clear out, being clogged primarily with cardboard boxes.
The old dresses from the closet were perhaps the biggest challenge, though I had already carried out and either sorted or burned almost inumerable boxes of clothes.
During this process, I learned some interesting things about the old lady…such as that, apparently, she never bought into the sanitary napkin fad. She kept to the old ways and tore up worn-out clothes instead, thank you very much.
Talk about surprise packages.
She also didn’t seem to have much sense of personal style. I can find absolutely no correlation between her clothes and personality, as they come in several sizes, virtually all colors and patterns, and were mostly sent mail-order from at least a dozen manufacturers. Moreover, she seems to have quit buying clothes during the late 1960′s or early 1970′s.
That’s not saying there aren’t some very pretty things. A black 1920′s style hat, for instance – new in the wrapper and still in the original box. Even the face veil hadn’t been removed from it’s original sack.
Or how about some flirty little kitchen aprons, done up in ginham, strawberry prints, and sunshiny yellows? I think I may keep a few of those, though they’re not exactly brand spanking new.
There are so many accessories and belts and such that I am hopeless of ever sorting them out with the right dresses. Afterall, I wound up with one closet (in the future music room) absolutely stuffed with boxes of clothes which may be salvageable to a collector, doll-dress maker, or housewife, and another eight-foot space of closet cram-packed with hanging dresses.
Those from this stack continued to deteriorate in transit, due to having plaster and dirt rained down on them from the roof leaklast summer…
…but I’ll let someone more knowledgeable than I make the decision on whether to try to salvage and sell them. I’m thinking Will’s cousin Roxan is a good candidate.
