a diva in the house

True Confessions:
I shop at garage sales. And I love it. If I don't get a garage sale fix, say in the middle of winter, I NEED to go to Goodwill (Value Village is too pricey :). If I'm feeling really extravagant, I'll go to the outlet mall, but only if there are deep discounts on the already reduced prices.

Sometimes my clothes reflect this post-post-Depression era mentality (my mother grew up in the Depression). I have lots of clothes -- some very nice -- but there's a, shall we say, disconnect in my attempts at ensembles.

I also shop at garage sales for my kids, though boys' stuff is harder to locate -- knees are worn through long before they are outgrown. But girls clothes are easy -- one nearby yearly sale puts out Talbot's For Kids, Gap, Frannie Flowers, and Next, all of them really nice "outfits."

A, at almost 7, is starting to take an interest in clothes. In the morning, she asks me to get her an outfit, which inevitably gets nixed, and I send her upstairs to put something together for herself. Sometimes, she is really inventive and puts things together I'd never think of, though there's usually something eccentrically "cool" about the get-ups. One morning, though, she must have experienced creative block, because I found her in her room, in front of the "altar" -- the open drawer of her dresser -- flopping around on the hardwoord floor like a dead fish, and weeping: I have nothing to wear. I have nothing to wear.

This familiar refrain -- at least to most females -- can be countered by that Bible verse about His clothing of the sparrows.

But it wasn't something to remind her of that morning -- when sorrow is her goal, words such as those are fuel for a literal but imaginative mind, turning "nothing to wear" into "wear nothing" and proceed out of doors clothed in, well, what the birds wear.

So, instead, I left her to sob and figure it out on her own.