My Labor Day of love left me too excited to sleep. Thank you, nice flea market lady, for letting me dig through a barn loft with you and haul off a carload of 30's-50's dress in various states of neglect, disrepair, and glory. I'm so very happy. Yes, yes, they're just clothes. Still, they're very pretty, and they're old, and I like them. I suppose I'll have to sell off a few to keep my man from putting me on notice, or, worse, using this as an excuse to never throw out another empty milk jug, but most of these babies are living happily ever after with me.

The stuff had been stashed ages hence by some nice old lady in Lakeside who never saw a newspaper clipping she didn't like. I pulled out trunks and bags and boxes and suitcases, some full of tax records or empty bologna packages, others of antique encyclopedias with marbled endpapers or late victorian nightgowns with hand tatted yokes. Pretty much all the dresses smell of old hay, and some have seen the worst of weather and mildew and time. Some were packed away gorgeous starched crisp and department store new. I think she liked colors and prints. Some were worn and faded almost out of all recognition, patched, stitched, barely held together by the intersecting lines of a quick determined hand and cheap coarse cotton thread. One had been altered at the neck to accommodate the slumped spine of a gardening grandmother. I think I've figured out why they were all there. The faded frocks most mended, those held together most by force of will, the ugliest, are from the late 30's and early 40's. Depression dames made do and mended. No wonder she saved bologna bags and pickling salt. There's some sweet story, I think, in the bright hawaiian Nelly Don 50's flounces packed up one trunk above the dingy 30's rayon rags that barely still hint at paisley. I feel stronger when I wear her dresses.