The Dress

This week I am at Camp Widow West (Woop!).

Since I’m at camp I’ll save my typing (on my phone) and will spill the beans next week about my experience at camp.

This week I want to share something I have been thinking about.

For Camp Widow I HAD to have an amazing dress.. well in my head I thought I had to have the perfect dress. 

With limited funds and a sense of panic, an amazing person came to my rescue. 

I was given a dress that had never been worn.

This wasn't just a dress. It was THE dress. 

This dress was more amazing then I envisioned. When I put it on, I carefully did a little twirl, skip and a hop.

This dress made me feel.. Important.

When I sent it in to be altered I had extreme anxiety about it.

What if they mess up my dress? What if I have to find another dress right before camp? What if? What if?

It dawned on me I had more anxiety over my Camp Widow dress getting altered then I did my wedding dress.

Me enjoying my wedding dress - 2005

Why? I don’t know. I guess because if my wedding dress was wrong, I was still getting married either way.. even if I had to wear pajama’s.

But my Camp Widow dress? I couldn't just show up in my pajama’s… 

well they would have accepted me no matter what I was wearing, but in my head, this was (is) a huge event.

I've been thinking about how some of my favorite memories involve me wearing a big fancy dress. Prom, my wedding and now.. camp widow.

I realized I very rarely get to wear a fancy dress. There are very few occasions to wear one to.

There are very few occasions where dancing the night away in a fancy dress is a given.

So now I get to brag and show off my dress!!

Tada!! Aren't you amazed? Yah I know, me too!!

Okay, I am done bragging.

To the person that donated this dress to me… thank you for the bottom of my soul. The dress has become a part of me. Every time I see it hanging up in my closet I will always remember the amazing memories made at Camp Widow. I promise you, one day I will pay it forward. 

I will help a widow in need, even if it means passing this dress on. So Thank You!!

Immovable Objects vs The Business of Change

The Business of Change that I started back in mid-September continues on. There’s just so much stuff to go through and just so little willpower on my part. Despite all the difficult work packing her 118 pair of shoes into boxes, only one box has made it to a new home. (I remind myself that one is better than none – and even one is still a change.) That one box full of Adventures Not Taken was dropped off yesterday. I’m sure the nice lady at Safe Place found it odd that “Do you need a receipt?” was a reason to burst into tears. But I took the receipt, tried to drive straight and by the time I was half-way home I had stopped crying. That’s a real improvement.

Two weekends ago, I attacked a different part of the house, the back closet, where I uncovered landmines I didn’t expect. You’d think that things that have gone untouched (even unseen!) since Maggie and I moved into this big house would be way easier to sort through than, say, shoes. This was the closet where Maggie and I stuffed things we carried with us when we moved in but didn’t want to throw away. We’ve all got such a place filled with random stuff. Yes, you know the place.

Eventually it looked as though the closet had thrown up on the living room floor. I unpacked Halloween costumes from all the years we were together. I found her memory boxes full of newspaper articles she had saved, letters from old boyfriends, report cards, school reports, and even a picture portfolio from high school when she was trying to make it as a model. I even found the piece of paper on which I wrote her phone number for our first phone call and, just to the side of that, her address so I could pick her up for our first date. And this is just the stuff I saw. I didn’t dig but there a number of boxes I haven’t even opened yet.

Two things kicked me in the heart more than everything else that day. The first was an unusually large, unmarked white box that stuck out because of its size and the way it was carefully taped shut. Curious, I cut it open. Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Inside the sealed bag was a wedding dress. And in an instant, like a flash of insight, I also realized that the big bundle of frilly stuff I kept moving around the living room was her wedding headdress, complete with hair clip that I hadn’t even noticed until that very moment. Instant, painful clarity.

The second kick in the heart was in discovering the contents of a simple duffle bag. It definitely wasn’t something of mine. It was old but in very nice condition; it had obviously been well cared for. I pondered not opening it but I had to know what such a bag could possibly hold. After unzipping the zipper, I noticed two pink ribbons tied neatly in bows. The ribbons were carefully wrapped around a very soft, worn pink blanket that was rolled up perfectly into a neat roll. I couldn’t imagine what it could be. It was old but soft, fluffy and pink, kind of like the one someone would use as a …. A baby blanket, a very old baby blanket, I’d guess right around 36 years old.

…..

As of today, the Halloween costumes are gone; I took them to Goodwill this morning. This past weekend, I threw away a full trashcan of nonsense stuff that, as I did, I wondered what the heck we were saving this crap for anyway. But still sitting in my living room are several boxes of papers, folder, trinkets and knick-knacks, most of which the significance is only known to Maggie. Most notably there sits one large, nondescript white box that’s been recently re-taped. Beside that sits an old, simple, well-kept duffle bag.

The Business of Change meets the immovable objects.