How Large Is Your Closet?

 

The Lay of the Land

By Lyn Messersmith

5/13/2015

How Large Is Your Closet?

            It’s time to put away winter wraps and get out summer wear. That’s probably what got me thinking about closets and what they reveal about our values and lifestyle choices.

            My mother, dad, and I shared one closet until we moved into the new house, six months before I left home. The closet was roughly three by four feet; standard for those times, and yes, it was crowded, but none of us had many clothes to put in it. A shelf above the clothes rod was stacked with extra bedding and whatever we didn’t need on a daily basis. Boxes on the closet floor held shoes and coats, and everything else was in boxes under the beds.

The house the folks built in 1959 was luxurious by comparison. The master bedroom and basement bedroom have double closets, with a standard one in the guest room, and even a coat closet in the living room. Mom managed to stuff them all in short order, but since that home became mine none of the closets have been filled to capacity.

Bruce and I live in a conglomeration of houses that his family cobbled together under one roof, over several decades. There’s a closet about like the one I grew up with, but not in the master bedroom. Other bedrooms for the large family had a rod in one corner with a curtain around it and a shelf above; pretty common for homes of that era. When we moved in after the death of Bruce’s parents, one of his aunts said to him, “Well, I hope you build your wife a closet. Your mom always wanted one and never got it!”

We didn’t do a lot to the house structurally but I have a closet. It’s exactly the size of the area which used to have a curtain and shelf, but at least there are doors. I’m ambivalent about that choice; the closet took quite a chunk out of a room never designed for a queen bed. Being reasonably sized people, we could revert to a double bed, but there’s the matter of the dog…

We have the leftover rods and shelves in the den and sunroom where coats are hung, but it’s hard to keep track of just which rod holds which coat. Of course, if we didn’t have so many coats, it wouldn’t be an issue.

One of us, who shall remain unnamed, has way more clothes and shoes than the other. One of us, who shall remain unnamed, can hardly bear to discard the shirt with no collar left, the jacket that the other partner has never seen worn, or the half embroidered pillow cases from fifty years ago. Consequently our closets are stuffed, and the out of season items often migrate to the home with double closets that are half full.

Unless someone is building a new home, visitors aren’t generally invited to view closet space, but according to the latest house plans in magazines walk in closets are pretty standard for a master bedroom. I wonder what that says about the expectations of today’s homeowners. Do people really have that many clothes, or have we simply become a nation of hoarders? If they have so many outfits, why do they wear their pajamas to the grocery store?

My grandparents likely only had about three changes of clothes, so one closet was plenty. I probably have about half as much clothing as most of my friends, but if I never bought another stitch until I died, I still wouldn’t need to wear my pajamas to the store.

So what is it that our generation puts in all those closets? Oh, I know; all the stuff that won’t fit in the storage unit.