Good Old Greenie

Today I wore my green dress to church. I’ve been wearing this dress since I was sixteen and every time I put it on it feels comfy and familiar, like having a long, meaningful conversation with an old best friend. My green dress technically wasn’t even mine until I moved away from home and officially stole it from my mom’s closet. It’s hard to sneak an outfit from your mother when you don’t come home at night to put it back. So, I stole the green dress and eventually mom gave up trying to get it back. Some teenage girls were boyfriend stealers. Maybe I was a bit of that too, but I mostly stuck to stealing dresses. Now I use much more civil methods—like begging—to obtain clothing from my mother’s closet. Mom is a stylish softie who loves to shop and loves to give me clothing hand-outs.

Someday I’ll have a little more money than I do now. Someday I won’t need my mother’s hand-outs (though I’m sure I’ll still want them). And I wonder if, when that someday comes, I’ll still wear my old green dress. I know that it’s not as stylish as it used to be, and some may even consider it ugly these days. The style gurus from “What Not to Wear” certainly would. They would take one look at it, scoff at me for still wearing something that I stole from my mom’s closet in high school and toss it directly in the second hand bin like an old VHS tape. I don’t really care what they would think. I hope that money doesn’t make me the kind of person who would stab my old green dress in the back. Besides, there’s got to be some kind of rule about how many times a hand-me-down can be handed down.