I worked for an environmental group in Riverdale, and everyday I would visit with the women who volunteer at the nearby Brother store and the women who work at the Goodwill and they set aside things I'd like and together we would invent one another and enjoy ourselves. I'll take almost anything hand sewn or wildly extravagant. "Here you are - at last - hello! - I've put something aside for you. Didn't even put it on the rack - you wait here.And a velvet curtain came in yesterday.Did you decide to get that ribbon? It's so expensive in the stores..."

Yes, yes, I'll take the ribbon." Who am I kidding? I should have just bought it yesterday. Yes, this dress is perfect I'm sure it will fit. Yes, the stitching is beautiful.

I rush home and put on the dress and conjure the woman who wore it.I imagine she's putting it on for the first time and she's...apprehensive? I feel my hand become clammy. No, she's disappointed. The dress has been sewn by a friend and its not quite right, She's had to get pins - here, see? - to try to make it fit. The pins spoil the line of the dress, but I would never take them out to sew a seam. I'd lose her, you see. Even though she's pure speculation.

I have a collection of hopelessly out of place clothes - out of place for any time or space and these delight me most as I try to imagine the women who wore them confidently, perhaps knowing, perhaps not, that nowhere and no time in our culture could this have been flattering.Or maybe the women who wore them weren't at all confident in wearing them. They hated them. They wore these outfits just once, perhaps, out of obligation. Every moment was uncomfortable.

I love excessive party clothes.A nd I imagine the parties.Success, failure? On whose terms? And what story is implied by that gorgeous red dress -- pure 1950's -- only now appearing at the Goodwill store? In wearing many of these clothes I feel, [danger understood], that I am dressed in stories. Anything laboured over, deliberately ripped, calls to me.'Beautiful' clothes suggest the least. I routinely feel so sorry for clothes probably despised in their own time and unlikely to find modern day purchasers, that I must welcome them.

I have eleven hand sewn silk dresses with matching day capes (perhaps beautiful) that could only have come from the same woman's closet.Almost all the same style.  Was She told once that the style was so thoroughly flattering that She should only wear dresses like that?Did She sew uncreatively with difficulty?Did She have a lover, perhaps, working towards a certificate?

Cultural archaeology.Only in this instance it doesn't matter if the thoughts I uncover are partly or even ever 'true'.Always I delight in multiple explanations for the appearance of this item on my shelves.

Sometimes the clothes I find suggest stories that if let loose would haunt everything in the world. Wearing them burdens me. Getting rid of them - tearing them, burning them slowly in a summer fire gives me the chance to keep ahead of random misfortunes. Without rituals, the imagination is a dangerous thing.Even with talismans and occasions of lengthy lucidity, collecting pieces of other people's intimate lives has curious effects.

My body itself is reduced to the smallest size in my closet. More curious still, even my feet seem to be smaller - although I don't know for sure whether the sensible black shoes I like to imagine were worn by a nun or an impossibly precise soldier had anything to do with this implausible subtraction. I had to stop buying children's clothes for fear of subconsciously shrinking away...

I know exactly what has happened (?) to clothes that are tiny but adult; the ones that I can barely fit into, especially beautifully tailored clothes: the owner has died. The owner simply outgrew them.And kept them in the closet twenty years or so before sending them off. I wish sometimes that inside the beautifully rolled hem of a sleeve I'd find the name of the person who I could imagine...

loved her old clothes and hung onto them for maybe too many years given the inordinate amount of space they took up in her small apartment -

[this, of course, after the children had moved away and the house sold] (nowhere she had looked really had closet space.it's only reasonable to let the material past sail away. But now as she gets older she passes with regret the two beautiful hall chairs that only remind her of the table she gave, even then reluctantly, to the niece she never much liked...)

...so that I could contact them and tell them that whatever was happening with the other items (and people?) they had loved and discarded, the dress (the jacket, that coat) was very much appreciated and giving it away was really, after all, the right thing to do - but if they ever wanted it back (if they saw me on the street, for instance, and the dress reminded them again of a hot September and broiled salmon and walking most of the way into the ocean but coming back to shore...) I'd gladly take it off: I'm just borrowing part of your life, I'd tell them, I don't pretend to own it.