The Turquoise Kitchen Didn’t Make Her Betty Crocker

He closed the door to her home, she closed the door to her heart. It sounds like a country music two stepping tune but it was more like a one step tango. She taught dance and after she danced her way into his heart she took hold of his wallet. That is putting it mildly.

     I am blessed. I have several children, a close-knit family with lots of siblings,

both of my parents are living, and we all live within a small radius of each other. We take care of each other when necessary and since there are doctors and lawyers we straighten each other out when it is appropriate. Together we spend holidays and vacations, celebrate birthdays

and anniversaries. But not every family is like that. Perhaps I grew up feeling a little bit lucky.

When I cleaned out the cabinets in the laundry room of the house in Starmount Country Club I found some little boys clothes.  There was almost a ton of clothing that had already been removed from the home prior to my involvement, and I myself had already cleaned out several carloads of clothing from the 5,000 sq ft home. But I had not seen any sign of anything childlike until I came across these cabinets. The clothing, from the 1950s and 1960s had been washed and ironed and folded inside out and stored neatly inside boxes. There were cute plaid cotton shirts, pressed whites with detachable bow ties, Davy Crockett westernwear, Rob Roy gabardine windjackets, Health Tex knits, Buster Brown shorts sets, suits, and tiny skinny ties. There were several of these boxes, and they stored clothing that fit boys up to a young teen age. Then there was nothing. No other sign that boys had inhabited this home. These boys would be about the same age as me.

My first thought was how cute the clothing was

and how someone like myself would love to dress their boys in such swanky vintage clothing. Then I started to question the origin of the clothing.  I found out a few things about this woman who I thought had lived alone.

Mildred had become a compulsive shopper and eventually she had lost her ability to do anything else, as she filled her home from floor to ceiling. She had purchased day dresses, sportswear, and party clothes, along with shoes hats scarves and purses. I could date her clothing as far back as about 1950, but most of her clothing was from a period of 1965 to 1975. This would have been the time that her two sons were coming of age. This is about when they walked away from her. They obviously had all they could of her, and her obsessive compulsive  shopping habit, and that drove them away. Just as she drove herself from store to store

in her blue cadillac searching for the next sale.

During that time there were sales at stores such as Laurie’s, Thalhimer’s, Rosenthal’s Bootery, Prago Guyes, Brownhill’s, and Belk’s. Mildred’s turquoise kitchen

was barely used. The cake pans and the mixers were pristine, no signs of ever having made a chocolate layer birthday cake. Betty Crocker she was not. Shopping a sale became an obsession for which she did not seek help, it grew and grew. Her husband moved away first, and then her sons. 

The compulsion prevailed, and as Mildred aged her compulsion expanded to include appliances and home accessories, Christmas decorations and cooking supplies. It was during the nineties that Mildred was eventually reduced to sleeping on half of a mattress in the basement, while her beautiful home was packed so full that she could barely find space in which to walk, and the only remaining spare areas were half of a bed and a narrow walk to the front door and the tiny guest bathroom.

This woman, who had once been impeccably dressed, with her beehived hairdo and her tiny feet, and her purses that matched her shoes and slips to match her dresses, had begun slowly and quietly. She would slip around town during school hours. At first she filled her large master bedroom closet so full that the clothes rack collapsed and it shut the bi-fold doors from the inside. That was about the time her husband left. She hadn’t opened the doors since then, she just moved to another area of the home. When I pried the doors open I found a time capsule of clothing that had been hung so tightly together that the pert collars and accordion pleats were still pressed as if they had just been placed there fresh from her ironing board.

The large basement, with its original dance floor, was full of collapsible clothing racks and when the racks were full she had piled more clothing on top of the racks. Often there were multiples of an item. I suppose she thought that if the dress fit why not buy it in every color offered, and if the blender came in harvest gold, orange, and avocado green, she must get them all.

Mildred alienated everyone who loved her, and in the end she fell on the basement steps and cracked her knee. She was found by her former lover, when he couldn’t get her to answer the phone. He was the lover who paid her bills but she never allowed him past the threshold. He closed up her home, and placed her in a nursing facility, and there she died, with a suitcase of nightclothes and underwear, and one baby blue bathrobe. Mildred, who had enough clothing to possibly outfit every woman in the state of North Carolina, had died with nothing more than a suitcase of clothing beside her bed. No family came to visit, they had been replaced long ago with sales tickets and shopping bags. Her specials involved a shopping center

and those who had once been special to her had long since left. Mildred had loved Sears more than her sons, and had used her lover, for his line of credit.

The last few years have found many of us in tough situations. The recession has caused some of us to lose our jobs and our homes and give up our possessions. Some of us have been lucky enough to have families to take us in, and to help us get through these difficult times. If there is a lesson to learn from this it is that love and family have nothing to do with what you look like. It has nothing to do with the clothing on your back, or the hat on your head, but it has everything in the world to do with what is inside your heart. A shopping trip or a sale is worthless, compared to time spent together, which is priceless.

 

*Digging around to get my design archives inventory has produced stories based on my imagination and on true experiences, but names locations and facts have been altered and any resemblance to a person or persons is purely coincidental.