Coat Racks

Coat Rack. Party Dress.

Coat racks are good and necessary things; especially when you live in an old house with one (only one!) closet on the first floor, and that single closet doubles as 1) the shipping department for my business where all the bubble wrap is stashed, 2) the wine cellar; and 3) the place where the vacuum cleaner, ironing board, and tool box reside.

I’ve always lived with a coat rack in the corner by the front door and find that it’s one of those things in my house that is both essential and invisible like curtain rods and bookshelves and electrical outlets. Without thinking, season by season, I toss hats up top, hang coats and slickers and dusters on old, heavy wooden hangers from church rummage, and occasionally display a party dress that I’m not wearing (and perhaps will never wear) but want to look at just the same.

The dress pictured here came from a barn/antique shop in Maine. I thought it would change my life and imagined wearing it with a billowing underskirt around my workroom or on a late afternoon walk by the harbor with my sister or perhaps to the supermarket. (Strangely, a party never entered my mind.) So after taking the dress to a tailor, who lifted the hem and tucked in the shoulders, I had every intention of allowing it to work its magic.

I wore it once. Nothing was right: it was tight at the waist, big at the shoulders, and too bare around the neck. I tried a little shirt under it and shook my head…all wrong. I decided I liked two things about this dress: the sound it made when I walked and the way it looked on the coat rack.

So here it hangs. It has not changed my life, but every time I go upstairs, I see it and have a glimpse of the dream behind it: I am gloriously sweeping down the produce aisle, skirts rustling, eyes clear, intention in my step…headed for Venice that very afternoon.