Thoughts on a Day of Closetry
As the wind howls and horizontal snow flies, I clean what the realtors call The Primary Bedroom WIC. Closets like this have layers, like the wardrobe that’s the passage to Narnia. I begin by pushing into Layer One: office work clothes. I fully retired in 2019 but anguish over putting anything expensive in the giveaway pile, like a thirteen-year-old teal jacket, now too large, as if it must depreciate fully before I can cast it out. The Ann Taylor boyfriend blazer from 2003 is back in style, so it stays, a possible companion to jeans. Pantsuits, like Hillary Clinton’s. Beautiful knits, from the era when I traveled a lot. Most go, a few stay. Utterly arbitrary.
Layer Two: Scarves, many my mother’s. She died in 1988, and I’ve never worn them. In the giveaway box they finally go.
Layer Three: T shirts. I throw away ten. I keep a recent gift from a writer friend honoring my next writing project. I decide to put it on. In this gloomy weather, with two rejections of my short story collection manuscript in my Inbox, I wish to dream a little about that project. The T shirt says “La PORTE INDIANA/ IT’S WHERE MY STORY BEGINS.”
The current manuscript chains me to the past, like the contents of The Primary Bedroom WIC. Don’t misunderstand: The characters in its stories are treasured old friends. Although many of the stories have been published in literary journals, I want so much to find a publisher who will love these characters tangled up together in one book, a publisher who will appreciate their call-and-response. They rest in the manuscript pages, waiting, like I am.
Wearing my new T shirt, I push through the back of The Primary Bedroom WIC into the Narnia of a new project, one about La Porte, one I’ve barely outlined but can feel in my fingertips, have presaged in two stories in the current manuscript. It feels like a mosaic where I know what some, but not all, of its shiny pieces will be: a through-line about weather, stories from the midcentury era to rediscover. I have so much to learn to make it all work. I’m reclaiming my home town in my own writerly way.
I’m lucky to have been accepted to a writing residency in La Porte in July on a beautiful farm outside of town. My summer Narnia will begin on that farm in northwest Indiana with a few other artists, maybe listening to cicadas and smelling mown hay from my workspace, maybe being just a little too warm and thinking about an iced tea. Maybe wearing my T shirt.
But first I have to find a home for the current manuscript, for Jan Wheeler and Nadine and Miss Ida and Teal and Grandpa Walt. And especially for Judy Mitchell, the heroine of a novelette who lives in 40 pages of the book. Still, it won’t betray them to put that T shirt on now and again, push into my private Narnia, do a little research, take a few notes, get the chill off. Then I’ll be ready when the time comes.