Closets, Expanding over Time

The house on Prescott Street, Halifax

When we were young and barely getting by, we moved across the country a couple of times. Canada is not a small country. It takes days, sometimes weeks to drive across, depending on how many stops are made along the way. When we finally made it to Nova Scotia, we had to set up a household from scratch. There had been no room for furniture in the back of the Dodge Fargo.

We moved through a few places during that stay back east. The last place we hung our hats was an old house on Prescott Street just off of Robie. It looked small from the outside but made use of all the space with bedrooms with sloping ceilings under the roof. There were cupboards tucked under the eaves but closet space was minimal.

When it came to furnishing the bedrooms, my partner remembered that there were a pair of iron bedframes languishing in an abandoned farmhouse belonging to his family. So, we drove the truck out to the farm in Antigonish. It was abandoned alright; the fields were so overgrown that the house was hard to see from the road. There was still furniture inside and the roof held so the furniture was in good shape. I expected there to be individual bedrooms but upstairs under the roof was one big open space containing a couple of beds and not much else. What struck me was that there were no closets, just a single nail to act as a hook for clothes beside each bed. I pointed that out to my partner and he said that they would have had just one change of clothes. Somehow the meager closets in the Prescott Street house didn't look so bad after that.

I hadn't thought back to those times or those skimpy closets for a long time, not until I took a course on Future Learn called Fashion's Future: The Sustainable Goals, which made me think about the clothes that now fill my walk-in closet. Times have changed, the closets are no longer skimpy but that is not a good or sustainable thing. Perhaps the world was better off when we only had one change of clothes, or at least, few enough clothes that they would fit in one skimpy closet.