“I used to have one like that,” my children have said more than once when passing the window of the local charity shop.
Most recently, it was an almost perfect Lego construction I had liberated from a dusty corner of the house while its owner was safely out at school. It was an attractive set, but had been ignored for months, if not years, thus safely entering the realm of clutter.
Decluttering it, before it returned to a pile of bricks, and while a charity could still get some value from it, was the natural next step. The only problem was that this made it very recognisable to its pre-owner when it re-emerged, sparkling clean, in the window display at the local Saint Vincent de Paul charity shop.
“That’s a coincidence,” I muttered non-committedly, happily getting away with the subterfuge one more time.
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A friend tells of being less successful a while ago when her small son spotted his donated but still-loved teddies at the bottom of a bargain basket and tearfully insisted they be re-bought. They’re now safely back in his bedroom, never to be outgrown in his mind.
‘Emotional’
The thing is: charity shops are emotional places. This manifests in different ways – often in the lightness that flows from decluttering, but sometimes in something a bit deeper.
This year in our house, we had the end of our affair with Communion outfits and for the first time, it was “the dress”. Anybody who has chosen to go through this rite of passage knows well that it is a business full of sentiment – and accessories. Many, many accessories.
These beautiful dresses shine like beacons out of small wardrobes in the small bedrooms of small girls at the best of times, but this phase lasted longer during the uncertainty of Covid, when ceremony dates came and went more than once.
In the end, our dream dress (and the shoes, the veil, the gloves, the handbag, the cardigan and the frilly socks – we stopped short of the parasol) were worn for a total of about three hours before being carefully removed in favour of leggings. The outfit was pristine and it was perfect and then it went back into the small wardrobe, immediately starting the journey of no return towards clutterville.
The options were stark: acknowledge the deep and sincere feelings exuding from that white gown and pack it away for future generations, or get rid of it pronto. The situation required delicate treatment, but given my own memories of weeping when my Communion dress was passed on to another family without my knowledge, I knew the owner of this one needed to be consulted.
Together, we went through a flowchart of the dress’s future. We could keep it and it would take up space for a while before turning yellow and becoming useless – not a great option. We could sell it and give a portion of the income to charity (maybe), or we could donate the whole show to our local Vincent’s and make life a lot easier for another family while raising a little bit for the SVP in the process. The latter step was sweetened by a promise of being allowed to pick out something in the charity shop as compensation when we dropped it in, a commitment that got it over the line.
On the day, the procession into the shop was almost ceremonial, the dress just short of entering on a decorated live elephant. A couple of fabulous ladies in the back room, where the magical unpacking happens, were brilliantly appreciative of this glorious garment that had just been presented to them – “ah, would you look, Mary!”.
They held up the shoes to coo, admired the handbag and delicately stroked the veil (even the bit I had burned in a foolhardy pre-ceremony adventure with the iron). I lingered for a while to soak it up, while the actual owner of the dress was immediately distracted by the pink paperweight for €1.50 that was to become her reward, and may well once have been somebody else’s treasure.
The time when the decluttering experience really becomes something raw and powerful is when the owner of the items being donated is a person who is no longer alive. I know of a loving daughter distributing a late parent’s clothes across shops located miles from home, so that the surviving spouse might be spared possibly seeing them in a window of a charity outlet in their local area. It’s not an easy thing.
My own brief but intense experience of this came when I was asked to donate a small package of shirts that had been owned by my Tyrone father, who had recently died. Lingering for a browse in the Dublin charity shop, I saw them being lifted from the bag in that mythical back room and hung on a high railing.
They had been washed and ironed, just as they had been when he was alive, and there they were, all alone in the back of a random building hundreds of miles from his home and in the hands of strangers. They were short-sleeved and each one had the little pocket he liked because it allowed him to store his reading glasses for easy access.
I must have looked strange there, rooted in the middle of the shop, staring at these shirts, perhaps waiting for some heavenly choir to burst into song in celebration of his life and his shirts, soon to be somebody else’s shirts. But there was no music and the shirts stayed behind on their hangers, their checks and stripes packed with the kind of emotion that can’t be decluttered and that powers so much of the quiet and lovely work of your local charity shop.
