A Day in the Life

Today the hanging rod in my closet broke.

You see, our house is a sweet little cottage-style house built in the mid-50's, and all the rods in the closets are made of wood.  Our rod has been showing signs of distress for a while now, sagging way down in the middle from the weight of all of our clothes.  It was in a closet that's about 4 feet wide, and 2.5 feet deep, that serves both my sweet husband and I.  So, taking into account all the clothes collected from the last 5-6 years, adding in the collection in the back from thinner days or shopping times of wishful thinking, there were a LOT of clothes in that closet.

And they all came flooding out of my closet this morning at around 10:15 this morning.

Okay, this is what happened.  David was still home, waiting in high anticipation for the mail carrier to come, because he was expecting his replacement Aggie Ring to come in the mail today- another long story for different day.

The ring arrived around 9:45 or so, and brought much jubilation and glee along with it.  Then, wonderful David began hustling and bustling getting ready for work.  Which included showering, then jumping out of skin in fright when he opened the shower curtain to get out and found me right outside the tub peering up at him.  Hee hee hee.  Hiccup. (I get the hiccups whenI get too tickled to breathe.)

So, then we went back down the hall to the bedroom together, and I sat on the bed, and began daydreaming and thinking about what to do with my day while David was at work. Then, this is what I heard:

"Hmmm, this rod looks like it's going to break soon under all this pressure.  It's even got a crack in it already!" Wiggle, wiggle, creak, creak, CRACK. CRACK. "Uh oh, it's breaking! It's breaking now! I need help, I need help honey!"

So, I ambled over in a curious manner, looking to see if the rod was really broken, or if wonderful husband was just being dramatic.  It was really broken.  And my super-strong husband was holding it up and together with all 3,000 pounds of clothes on it with his two bare hands.  He is amazing.

So, then is when the closet started barfing clothes.  I began scrambling quickly to grab 7 or 8 hangers of clothes at a time to lay on the bed, so that the frenzied light would begin to leave David's worried eyes.  I got all the clothes off, but then there was a new problem.  Our bed was covered in a 3-foot-high- spread of clothing.  And our bed is big.  Real big.  King-sized.  So that's a lot of clothes.  I wish I had thought to take pictures.

But at least David was no longer single-handedly holding our entire wardrobe.  Phew. Tragedy averted.

So, now there is a new problem.  There is a ginormous pile of clothes on my bed to be reckon'd with (as we say in the South), and there is no caffeine in our entire house.  All 1,000 square feet of it.  None.  This is a very big problem.  Especially with my workload I was planning on accomplishing today- including relaxing in my nice, comfy chair and writing a post on my quaint little blog here. As well as working on convincing my two cats not to eat each other.  And maybe doing some laundry, dishes, and watching Dr. Phil.  But now there are LOTS of clothes to be dealt with, and something broken.  This cannot go on.  Oh the HUMANITY!

So I, with my wonderful womanly wiles, sweet talk my way into a trip with my husband in our one car to the dollar store down the street for a few sodas before he leaves for work.  Hooray! Caffeine!  Then, my wonderful husband comes up with a plan for a patch-up job on the rod before he leaves for work.  He used a strip of metal and a little thing called duct-tape.  Then, I had the bright idea of, "Hey, let's get one of our empty plastic storage bins from the garage and go through our clothes and store the clothes that are too small that we don't want to get rid of, and sort some clothes out to donate as we put our clothes back in the closet so we don't have as many clothes to weigh down the patched-up rod!"  Hooray!

So, David ended up putting two shirts into storage, and one shirt into the donation pile, and the rest went back into the closet.  Which is a lot for him, seeing as how he had maybe 25 items hanging in the closet total.  The bulk of the sorting was up to me.  This required much self-honesty as I asked myself, "Am I keeping this because I can and still want to wear it?  Does this actually fit me right now?" and then putting them into the appropriate places.  I ended up storing about half of what I had hanging in the closet, and putting about a quarter of it into the donate pile.  This left me with about 20 items to hang back into the closet.  And the hanging rod is no longer stressed.  We might not have to worry the budget just yet to get a new one.  Hooray again!

So, this morning started with celebration, was jarred by crisis, and is back to celebration again.  I am actually kind of glad that this all happened because I have been meaning to go through the stuff in the closet for a while now, and this gave me the motivation to take care of it.