10 Things I Learned While Cleaning Out the Coat Closet

1. I am living my life in an entirely different income bracket than my children. They have Blundstones and Uggs and Sorels.  I have only one pair of winter boots.  I have been wearing them since my youngest was in diapers. They were on sale at Sears. They are brown.
2. I do not exercise enough. Found my gym sneakers on a shelf at the back of the closet. They were dusty. My Fitbit was in one of them.
3. I need to stop buying scarves.
4. A grape will not necessarily wither into a raisin. I have no idea how a single grape made its way into the coat closet or how long it has been there, but I do know that it is now fuzzy. Very fuzzy. And smelly. Very smelly. But it has not withered in the least. Go figure.
5. My husband doesn’t know how to hang up a coat. Is this something you need to teach a person? I am amazed a task this simple can actually be done “wrong”.
6. I am missing 7 left hand mittens… 7! It is extraordinary. At this very moment there are 7 right hand mittens piled up on my kitchen table, waiting for me to decide their fate. Do I throw them out? Because you know the second they are gone, 7 left hand mittens will materialize somewhere in my house. Do I save them? For what purpose? What are the odds that wearing a single mitten (on your right hand) will suddenly become fashionable?
7. All of my umbrellas are broken. What is the life expectancy of your average umbrella? Because mine last about 10 minutes, although this clearly does not deter me from buying more umbrellas or from saving the broken ones. And why do I keep all those weird little pouches umbrellas come in? Does anyone ever use those things?
8. My family owns too many black coats. Just sayin’.
9. The hat basket is a mysterious place. There is a basket labelled “hats” in my coat closet. Inside it I found 3 lip balms, 2 house keys, a flattened granola bar, an unopened roll of peppermint menthos, a small cosmetics bag filled with hair scrunchies, and a Santa hat. It was the only hat in the basket.
10. Closet fresheners can actually go stale. There may have been a time when the gooey gel inside the closet air freshener smelled like a “Hawaiian Breeze” but that time has long since passed. Now, it gives off a strange scent that makes me think of nursing homes, or sleeping bags that have been packed away for too long.

The good news is that after an hour of hard work, the coat closet is looking much better. The bad news is that my kitchen table is covered in mittens and broken umbrellas, there’s a funky odor in the hallway, and I lost that fuzzy grape somewhere. Sigh…