On the organization of closets and the interior
How cleaning a closet is an incarnation of ordering this soul
When my father married my mother, he noticed a stark difference in their cleaning styles: he cleaned the way his own family did: by throwing everything into a closet. My mother cleaned by taking everything out of the closets! I follow my mother in that regard: I clean—deep clean—by emptying and organizing closets and storage spaces. I don’t know any other way to do this: it’s just how I roll.
In the old farmhouse we live in, there are only two closets. When we built the addition, we added one more between the two bedrooms over there. None of the bedrooms in the old section have closets, so my children have either wardrobes or a rack screwed into the wall: my clothing closet is in the living room. Which makes cleaning it a somewhat public event.
I usually clean my clothing closet during the turn of the year: as a schoolteacher, the end of the school year is what heralds the changing of the seasons for me. As I’ve mentioned before, I also keep wearing my winter wardrobe through Lent, so Easter break is when I do a partial cleaning. But this year’s spring was cold and even on the first of June, as I type this I am shivering in the early morning. So my sweaters and jeans and socks have stayed for a much longer time than usual in my drawers. And I felt my own inner agitation as I rushed from one end-of-the-year event to another, in between piling clothes in my closet that I had no time to hang up. I began to panic: we have four cats and a toddler, and if one of the felines discovered the door cracked and a nice heap of fabric, they might very well decide to camp out for long-term naps hidden from the rampaging baby, or worse, use it as a litterbox…
Finally yesterday, a blessed window of nothing opened in my morning, and I began tearing all the clothes I owned out of the closet and stacking them everywhere I could, feeling the stress drain away as I unleashed all the fabrician potential onto the living room in a tumble of blacks, whites, browns, grays, and splashes of color.
Then after having the usual existential dread of the piles of clothing—do I really own this much material sludge? How can I possibly be detached from worldly goods when I managed to stuff this much baggage into this square footage?, etc.—I plunged into ordering chaos in the physical world around me once again.
This meant first sorting into tops, bottoms, and dresses, hanging up most of the pile as I did so, and starting a rudimentary purging. I had my giveaway and laundry baskets next to me, so I could easily toss garments into either one. Winter garments to be packed away went on one pile, current season garments onto another.
Fortunately Fashionista Daughter was home and fortified with tea. I begged her to come and help me go through the stacks. My personal parameters for clothing include that I may not keep more clothes than can fit into my dresser and storage boxes. Therefore, I had to get rid of at least one-fifth or more of what I was sorting.
I never say no when people offer me used clothing, because I make a practice of sorting quickly, so I can go through a stuffed trash bag of clothing in less than 10 minutes, usually five. Having tight parameters—I know what I like and what I will wear—makes the process easier. (Maybe I’ll write an article on this soon.) And since all my friends had apparently done their seasonal cleans before mine, I had already added quite a few things to my wardrobe from giveaway bags, plus we had just finished the fashion show, and one perk of doing fashion shows is getting free togs. So I had those—plus I had just been to a wedding, graduations, and other events that needed nicer garb, so those garments were in the pile as well.
My daughter is willing to be brutally honest when the need arises, and so I began to put on clothes to see if they passed muster: “No. That makes you look square and stubby and you are not. Next.” “That color muddies your complexion: you need something more clear.” “Sorry, but that top overwhelms you and you’re going to need to expend effort to make it work for you.”
Sometimes I argued back: most of the time I caved because the fact is, she’s usually right. My fashion sense is always off kilter by a hair which makes me wear things that don’t always suit. Fortunately I know myself better now that I’m older, so I argued, in the case of the last item, that I will indeed expend the effort to make the chiffon orange-and-teal field-of-sunflowers-round-the-neckline top work—in this case, by wearing it with jeans to tone down its statement. (It’s a fun piece!)
It wasn’t all negative: going through the past months’ clothing inevitably brought up pieces finely styled and fraught with memories. We examined care labels and exclaimed over fiber content. “Seriously? I thought this was microfiber but it’s actually a cotton-viscose blend. No wonder it’s so soft!” “Love, love, love that color on you and everywhere.” “You either have to get the color, the fit, or the essence right, and this dress gets two out of three, so keep it.” “Ann Taylor. Of course. You can’t go wrong with Ann.” We reminisced over outfits, made discoveries, fell in love all over again with that cotton blouse that always looks good with everything, that blazer that makes me cheerful each time I see it, that sweater perfect for beach vacations, that go-to standby Sunday outfit.
The fashion show had left in its glorious wake a rack that made this process easier: when a garment passed muster, it was hung on its proper colored hanger and racked for re-entry to the closet.
I should maybe mention I use a hanger system. You see, I shop at thrift stores most of the time, including for housewares, and for years, I could not afford to buy new hangers. Instead I would buy packs of used plastic hangers of various colors out of bins for $.50 a pack, and this drove me crazy because a) I hate plastic and b) nothing matched!
But somewhere along the line, it occurred to me (I think it was my guardian angel, who is very kind to me in these dilemmas) that I should utilize this reality in my favor. So I began to put my white clothes on white hangers, my black clothes on black hangers, and my colored clothes on hangers that nearly matched their colors.
What began as OCD (because unmatching colors are my personal purgatory) became a useful system. My closet is a sometimes-walk-in. If it’s clean, I can step into it, but many times I have to reach in and grab. So identifying clothes by the hanger is a useful marker. Of course, the system constantly breaks down because when I’m in a rush I just hang clothes on whatever is available. Thus the seasonal sorting restores the system to order and we can begin again.
It has reconciled me to plastic because after all, it’s in a closet and I don’t have to look at it all the time, and I adjusted my parameters long ago to include plastic for storage boxes. In an ideal world I’d have wooden hangers dyed to color (I dislike the felted ones now in vogue) and a sliding-door-closet—and also a bedroom addition that could include a closet!—but for now, plastic is quite workable and since in my grab-and-go system, I need garments to slide easily of the hanger (one reason I don’t care for felting), plastic works. And who wants an ideal world outside of heaven anyhow?
And speaking of storage boxes, I finally found some I love, on Amazon. These are not the tuff rugged storage boxes one puts in the garage. No, these are elegant Asian storage boxes, light and refined and not suitable for stuffing but for display. (Although I would never use them in a living space the way they do in the Amazon commercials.) These collapsible multifunction storage boxes open on top and on all three sides with magnetic closures, which again means they can’t be stuffed, but they store properly folded clothes, and they have these cool rounded castle windows on them. Since I have to look at them every time I walk in my closet, they make me happy and are much better than the mismatched bins I had there before. So yes, I do recommend them if your needs are similar to mine. Probably too flimsy for children’s storage, but they work for me.
Men organize necessities: women organize potential, which is arguably more difficult. At least it takes more effort and brain function for me—and when my potential is physically disorganized, I feel more disorganized, scattered, and chaotic, like the clothing piled in my closet, even if to the outside world I seem put together and on task. As I’ve said elsewhere, women tend to collect lots of things so we can be ready for anything. We lay many foundations to see what will eventually get built on. And that means organizing more things. Which means a seasonal re-ordering.
The catechesis here—in defense of cleaning house by organizing closets—is that in the end, it really is the interior that matters for the Catholic. The outward show of a dusted and vacuumed home is not enough: the dust and grime needs to be wiped from the interior crevices and cobwebby corners that no one but God will see. And He does see, as He made clear on earth with some pointed words about whited sepulchers.
Maybe this is why interior storage is important to me: having coodinating storage boxes in the depths of my closet that no one ever opens but me helps me stay organized, much as it helped my mother before me, whose public rooms could be chaotic but whose closet was a treasure of orderly beauty. In a similar way, I feel free to be broad-minded on prudential and cultural issues, but my core beliefs about Our Lord and utlimate realities are in order, and organized, thanks to Mother Church and her beautiful theologies which keep these earth-shattering and momentous and potentially destructive ideas in place, alive and breathing and giving us life, much as our woodstove contains and domesticates the fire.
So I stand in defense of my mother’s method of cleaning house, and now that my clothing is purged and ordered and folded or hung or mended, I feel the sweet breath of serenity as I face the challenge of the summer’s housekeeping. Plus I have more information to mull over about my bone structure and my coloring and style essences and what to wear when, thanks to Fashionista Daughter. My potential is more aligned. Or at least I hope it is. If I need reassurance, I can see it when I open my closet.
And I’m looking forward to wearing that light-as-air embroidered cotton blouse again. Probably with the beachy paisley skirt gifted to me by my ever-thoughtful Fashionista Daughter. She knows my colors and my style essence, after all.
