Total give aways
Click to enlarge
A magazine, Alive, asked to do an article about my year of giving away and wanted to do a photo. Unfortunately it’s hard to take a photo of what’s no longer in our home. I wondered if we would need to “stage” it to suggest the kinds of things that I gave away but no longer had. Since I had a month to consider this, I put a hold on things I would have normally passed on to others and saved them for the photo. Voila! I was surprised at how many additional things I had collected, just waiting to be given away. The night before the photo I did a new sweep of my clothes closet and hung those items in our basement and added these to the other items I had collected.
This has taught me several things:
- I’ve become accustomed to putting stuff in a corner just waiting to collect enough to warrant a give away trip. A habit like this does not end in a year.
- Even after two sweeps through my clothes closet, there were still clothes that were not painful to give away. In fact, I can already see that given a little more grieving time, there are even more items that it would not hurt me to lose. If this is true for a person like me who is not particularly a slave to fashion (trust me my daughter will attest to that :-?) then there are a lot more clothes waiting for someone to wear them.
- It is a bit embarrassing that I still have so many things to give away. I’m far from done, but sometimes it takes time to be willing to part with clothing I like but hardly ever wear.
- It helps that I work at home and the kids are sprung. The active parenting phase of life requires saving a bit more stuff.
Just the clothes
I’ll comment on the other things I collected for this photo in future blog entries but for this week I’ll just focus on the clothes:
- 2 dresses
- 1 suit
- 1 skirt
- 2 pairs of slacks
- 2 blouses
- 4 jackets
- 1 white beach cover up that I thought I could wear at a resort of if I ever went on a cruise. Seeing as I’ve never been on a cruise and don’t intend to go on one, it was only fulfilling a fantasy hanging in my closet.
Question: Are you in the stage of life of accumulating clothes for work or in a position where “professional attire” is no longer important? How much of a difference does it make in what clothing you buy and what you keep in your closet?
