Why I Feel At Home in Thrift Stores
Every article of clothing, every tchotchke, conjures a memory, a story.
I feel the scratch of worsted wool in my hands. The sweater smells of mothballs and wooden chests in attics. I’m back in the basement of a cafeteria in the Bronx, where the mailroom holds compact discs from Columbia House for a penny, glossy catalogs of preened college students in cabins and on lakes, swaddled in their rollneck sweaters and goose jackets. Handwritten letters from home when stamps were 29 cents.
It is 1995.
I slip my hands through the sleeves and there I am, 19, a Snapple-drinking college sophomore thumbing through a J. Crew catalog. Ordering a wool sweater in charcoal grey. And when it arrived wrapped in plastic, I pulled it over my head and felt its warmth. It smelled of full-body hugs, autumn in New England, apples and cider, crackling fires and scorched marshmallows.
In a Salvation Army in Bakersfield, California, I’m reminded of a brief moment when life was filled with so much possibility. A moment before cell phones and the internet, before planes crashed into buildings. Before electronic bill pay, student loan debt, and ten vacation days a year. Before we circled back on that email and touched base on that conference call. Before you voted for who? created a fissure…
