OUT OF THE CLOSET

live in a teeny-tiny house, one of several in a row, built more than 130 years ago for the workers of a nearby piano factory. (In an odd twist of fate I actually own one of those pianos, built by someone who lived in my house. I like that.) These are thrifty, odd little houses, and everything about them and even the street I live on tells a story about what things used to be like here. For example, nobody has a driveway (because nobody owned a car) and yet the street is twice as wide as all the others in the neighborhood because there used to be a dairy nearby and the horse-drawn milk wagons needed room to turn. My little house sits right at the sidewalk, with only a few square meters for a front garden, and over the years the whole house has increasingly begun to list toward the light post. (I’m almost afraid to look into that.) The history of this place and its odd little quirks give this house a set of charms that you won’t find in a new house in a modern suburb, although I admit that I do occasionally (and by “occasionally” you understand that I mean “pretty often”) envy those dwellers something. While I love my claw-foot tub, I sometimes think about what it would be like to have water pipes big enough to grant sufficient water pressure for a shower, and while my friends in newer homes can plug something in without a thought, I live with electrical wiring that seems to have been installed by M. C. Escher and scares the living snot out of every electrician I hire to try and make sense of it. While it was charming, and even knitterly, to discover that parts of my home are insulated with newspaper and wool, in the February of the Canadian winter I consider nothing but the dead sexy nature of modern and efficient insulation. There is much that I have pined for, but if I had to drill it down to one thing I have always wanted, always wished that this little house had, it’s something I bet you never thought about taking for granted. It’s closets.

Oh, as the mother of three daughters, how I have longed for closets. At the turn of the century, when this house was built, closets weren’t at all in vogue. People owned very few clothes and when they did hang them up, it was on hooks, not hangers, so closets were hardly an efficient use of space. As a result, the closets in Victorian homes are often sparse, and tiny, and without a rod to hang hangers on. If you do install a rod in your tiny little closet, the closet itself is hardly deep enough to accommodate hangers—many of us end up choosing between having hangers and having doors on our closets. My entire house has (brace yourself) two closets. Two. Two tiny closets so small that one of those plastic storage bins—the ones that are about two and a half feet long, and about one and a half feet deep—barely fits. That’s small. There is no coat closet (we have hooks by the door), no linen closet (we have a wardrobe for towels and sheets), and most importantly, and I’m sure you can feel me here, nowhere to shove the mess if someone is coming over and you really need to hide all the dirty laundry. There is no closet big enough to be a proper hide-and-seek spot, and the phrase “come out of the closet” held no meaning for my children until they were old enough to grasp it as a metaphor, because if you told them someone should come out of the closet they would stare blankly at you wondering why, or actually how, whoever it was got in there.

Now all of this, this closet talk, is important here, not just because closets are great places to keep yarn—I’ve developed all kinds of entirely radical and innovative yarn storage skills as a result of my closet shortage—but because of what that means. No closets means that the yarn habit can’t be in the closet, and so the people who live here have to get down with my yarn situation pretty quickly, because it is impossible to live in a closetless house with a knitter and have the yarn be a secret. It just doesn’t work, and that extends to all of your belongings, no matter what you tend to hoard. Having no closets breeds a certain sort of openness and honesty about your stuff and how much of it you have. If you can’t hide things, if you can’t just decide not to decide if you have to have them and stick them in a tiny room with a door and no light created in your home just for the purpose of holding things, then you have to start deciding about what you’re going to keep and what you’re not. If space is at a premium—and you don’t know at what sort of a premium closet space is until you’ve lived with three teenage girls, a knitter, and a man who has kept (he’s very sentimental) every item he’s ever owned—and you have only two closets, then you have to make crazy, harsh, and deliberate decisions about two things. You need to know what—in a culture that says you should have more and new stuff all the time—is exactly worth having, and you need to embrace the idea of sharing that space and negotiating what is important to each of those five people, given that all of you will be competing with Olympic vigor for said limited space.

Over the years that we’ve lived like this, it’s the last point that we’ve struggled with the most. Sure, it’s hard to prune our belongings down to reasonable levels and to fight the wave of consumerism that tells us we should have a lot more stuff than what fits in those closets, but it is the ranking system that gives all of us the most grief. When the girls were little it was easier. Homes with little children are more dictatorships than democracies, and it was up to me to decide what the girls owned, how much of it got kept, and what was important. Extensive Barbie stashes were kept reined in by periodic nocturnal abductions, and from time to time a kid looked at us suspiciously when a vast collection of rocks from a neighborhood park simply vanished while they were out. But by far and away, the dictators dictated what stayed and what didn’t, and the closet space was shared the way we thought it should be. As the girls have grown older, this has gotten more challenging. For starters, they sleep less, giving me far less opportunity to rifle a closet and collect things that I don’t approve of, and it’s been my experience that they have way stronger feelings about waking up to discover you squatting on the floor in the dark, tossing out half their collection of outgrown T-shirts into a bag for charity. (For the life of me, I cannot understand why you would have an emotional attachment to an outgrown, plain T-shirt that has to drive your mother to abscond with it in the night. It’s not like it’s from a U2 tour in the ’80s, which is my husband’s excuse for his.)

Now that my daughters are young women, I have come to realize that I need to make my closet points with logic and common sense. A box of books that you don’t love enough to have on a shelf for re-reading? Sell or donate. You won’t forget what you’ve read, and if you won’t re-read it, it has no purpose here. Clothing that you will never, ever wear again? Sell or donate. Toys that aren’t fun anymore? Out. The charger for a cell phone that you had four years ago that got lost but might come in handy if you ever find the phone? (Which, I’d like to point out, is super unlikely if your room is always a sty like that… but I digress.) Gone. Twelve green T-shirts? No duplicating. Pare it down. Seven binders from grade eight French? Nobody’s testing you on that again. Moving on. The skanky tank top I don’t want you to wear at home, never mind in public, and I keep stuffing behind the board games so you can’t find it? Give it up. Bottom line rule: If an item is not going to be used by us, then it doesn’t get to use our space.

Gradually, as the girls have grown old enough to be included in our ranking system, and to be respected (mostly) for their personal choices and what they would like to keep, they have also grown old enough to challenge the things that my husband and I have in those closets. While I thought this was pretty fun when they were suggesting that Joe didn’t really need a box of sailing magazines from the summer he was sixteen (I have long believed the same, and was thrilled that they had grown into young women of such common sense), the rollicking good time that is judging the choices your mate makes and holding them accountable for it stopped being all that much fun when that same keen eye was turned toward the stash. When a family is gathered in front of a closet, jockeying for enough room for a snowboard and two pairs of inline skates (that no one ever uses, that’s all I’m saying) everybody’s stuff is suspected of being useless and taking up valuable space. The next thing I knew, we had finally and entirely moved from a dictatorship to a democracy, and my kids were asking me to justify the yarn-based use of a closet.

The ladies had several arguments and were so well organized that they resembled the debate equivalent of a yarn stash black ops strike force. If clothes they will not be wearing had to go, they suggested, then why not yarn I will not knit? Some of that yarn, they argued, has been in that closet since we moved here. In a stunning example of turning my own logic against me, they suggested that if I had not used it in ten years, then I maybe wasn’t going to. Wasn’t that what I said to Meg about the bead making kit she’s been saving since her eighth birthday, just in case there’s some sort of crazed emergency that demands handmade beads? Besides, Sam proffered strategically, hadn’t I told her that saving an extra radio was ridiculous, since there was little chance that she would need it, and it could be easily replaced if there was a need? Didn’t that, she cannily noted, apply to merino? From there, things went downhill, as Joe spotted the opportunity for a little sport.

“We don’t store duplicates,” Joe said, “and thirty skeins of sock yarn are all sock yarn. That’s duplicating.” His eyes practically twinkled. “If I can’t have five caulking guns, then you can’t have thirty skeins of sock yarn.” Now he was playing with me. He knew damn well that there was a snowflake’s chance in hell that even one of the skeins was leaving; he was just enjoying watching me justify it. All I could think was “Keep laughing, buddy, because the ‘resistor collection’ that you’re saving ‘just in case’ and is practically all duplicates is next, and I’m going after the five amplifiers after that.”

“He’s right,” said Megan, but she didn’t seem very sporting. “This closet is family space, and the other day when you were in here, you said that you couldn’t imagine what you were thinking when you bought those five skeins of linen. If that’s true, then shouldn’t they be sold or donated?”

The kid had a point. They all had a point, but the longer I stood there, the more convinced I became that I wasn’t wrong. How would I explain to them how the stash was different? That their things didn’t deserve to be here, but mine did? How did I find a place where taking this much space for my stuff was more worthy and valid than whatever stuff they were attached to? They were right about a few things. I do have a lot of yarn. That much I can’t argue. A lot of that yarn might never get knit, and if I got rid of the yarn, I could always get more—easily, even. I stood there and tried to come up with my justification. I thought about telling them that knitting is not just my stuff; it’s me. I thought about telling them that none of it was really replaceable. I thought about telling them this: That the stash was not just stuff taking up our meager closet (and shelf) space. The beauty and the necessity of it all was that every skein of it was pure potential and inspiration. Where Sam certainly wasn’t going to use the outgrown T-shirts (and I certainly wasn’t going to let her use the skanky one), I might use the stash. Maybe, and that “maybe” made all the difference. I could haul off and knit all that sock yarn, every skein of it, and they aren’t duplicates. They’re all different and unique and most of them are handpaints and that, my friends, that fact makes them unique all by itself. They’re art, and they haven’t even been knit yet. Do people ask you why you have art in your house, even though it’s unnecessary? Do people question painting your walls a color, even though having white walls serves the same purpose? Did people ask Renoir why he was keeping all those canvases around? No sirree, they did not, and if his family had gotten all uppity about the paint in the closet, he would have told them all that there were lots of paintings inside those paints, and that all he did was release them, and therefore it stands to reason that he needs all those paints and canvases because the art couldn’t exist otherwise. Well, that’s how I feel about the sock yarn. All those skeins are larval sock art, and while we’re at it, this family is standing here in front of the closet all looking pretty damn smug, going after the stash that put those cozy handknit socks right on their feet. Do you—I thought about saying—do you wanna slap a pair of crappy store-bought socks on your feet before you challenge me on this, you bunch of ingrates?

Those are all things that I thought about saying, but in the end I went another way. I stood up, wiped any look of shame off of my face, plunked down my box of yarn in its rightful space, turned to face my kids, and said the most important thing.

I own the closet. You’re screwed.