Beanstalk Brood

Just finished wading through six large boxes of clothes, a process I want to commemorate in the chronicles of our family history, to preserve and pull out for a day when any member of my beanstalk brood might possibly deign to doubt my love for them. These six plastic boxes are chock full of clothes that we had stored away in the cavernous recesses of our garage, clothes that used to fit Abby, and now Essie’s growing into or soon will. What a task. I think of all the jobs I have to do as a parent, this oddly is the most overwhelming; good thing it only happens four times a year, with each changing season.

What it entails is, first, a weather change. When the cooler weather hits, for example, warmer clothes are obviously a necessity. For Abby there is one less step in the process since almost all of the clothes she wears have to be purchased with the onset of new weather. There are exceptions to this, however, as some of her birthday and Christmas gifts include clothes she hasn’t managed to fit into yet; those clothes get stored in a special “A” box as Abby’s grow-into clothes. Essie has this very same box, brand new clothes that are gifted to her that she has yet to grow into, the “E” box.

In digging out new-season clothes for the hand-me-down kid, however, the process is more complicated. First, I go through her drawers and closet (I do this with Abby as well), and I weed out all of the cool-weather clothes, for example, sorting them into two piles, the maybe-this-will-fit-in-the-spring pile and the this-is-definitely-the-last-time-she’ll-fit-into-this pile. The clothes that may still fit come next season, I load into a plastic tub and hand off to my husband to put up in the garage (his one job in all of this). The clothes that have seen their last wear, I load into a large cardboard diaper box and decide their fate – off to cousin Riley, if the in-laws are visiting and can haul them the 17 hours back to Portland; off to future garage sale if not; or – no, they’re pretty hideous – off to the goodwill.

After this initial sorting process, I then begin the process of pulling out Abby’s old clothes from the garage and sorting through them. Some are spring clothes that are too cool to wear now, so I sort those into their own pile in the hopes that maybe Esther will get a few wears out of them come spring – that is, if she doesn’t grow much between now and then – and some are clothes that she can wear now, which will go into a hit-the-washing-machine pile. Once they go through the wash, or, for fancy dresses, the dry cleaners, they can now make their way into her freshly cleaned-out drawers and closet area. In this process of making it into this cut, I will glean from those pieces that still have their original match, top and bottom, or at least from those pieces that can still be paired with jeans or some other generic-enough item of clothing.

In addition to this very bland, arduous process of clothes wading, I keep two drawers in their closet to continually go through their shoes and clothes during the season we’re currently in and tuck away the ones that are now too small.

Once spring peeks around the corner, this exciting process begins all over again. It’s at least a one-week enterprise from start to finish. When we reach the precipice of each season, their crammed drawers cry out to me, and I can’t avoid a feeling of having eaten too much or of not being able to breathe. This is when I know it’s wading time.

If, in the future, any of my beanstalks have any doubt of my loyalty to them, let this process alone warrant my genuine ardor.