I finished the book, “Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul”. There is one short story that I can’t seem to get out of my mind, so I thought I would share it with you:

Spots of a Different Color

“Honey, someone left a coat in your mother’s closet,” I called to my husband. The faux-leopard jacket was tucked in the back of the closet  against the wall, out-of-place among the dark coats and sweaters. I wondered who would hide clothes in my mother-in-law’s closet. We were there to get a winter coat for her because she was coming home from the hospital, a week after being rushed to the emergency room.

“Coat? What coat?” My husband looked up from sorting the mail. I took out the jacket, holding it up in the light for him to see. “Oh, that jacket. Mom bought it years ago, when I was a kid…you know, when they were fashionable. She and pop even argued about getting it.”

I thought of the woman I’d known for 30 years. She bought her house dresses and polyester pantsuits at Kmart of Sears, kept her grey hair tightly confined in a hair net and chose the smallest piece of meat on the dinner platter when it was passed around the table. I knew she wasn’t the kind of flamboyant type who would own a faux-leopard print jacket.

“I can’t imagine Mom wearing this, ” I said to him.

“I don’t think she ever wore it outside the house,” my husband answered.

Removing the jacket from its padded hanger, I carried it to her bed and laid it on the white chenille bedspread. It seemed to sprawl like an exotic animal. My hands brushed the thick, plush fur, and the spots changed luster as my fingers sank into the pile.

My husband stood over at the door. “I used to see Mom run her fingers over the fur, just like you are,” he said.

As I slid my arm into the sleeves, the jacket released a perfume of gardenias and dreams. It swung loose from my shoulders, its high collar brushing my cheeks, the faux fur soft as velvet. It belonged to a glamorous, bygone era, the days of Lana Turner and Joan Crawford, but not in the closet of the practical 83-year-old woman I knew.

“Why didn’t you tell me mom had a leopard jacket?” I whispered, but my husband had left the room to water the plants.

If I’d been asked to make a list of items my mother-in-law would never want in her life, that jacket would have been near the top. Yet finding it changed our relationship. It made me realize how little I knew about this woman’s hopes and dreams. We took it to the hospital for her to wear home. She blushed when she saw it, and turned even rosier at the gentle teasing of the staff.

In our last three years together, I bought her gifts of perfume, lotion and makeup instead of sensible underwear and slippers. We had a lunch date once a week, where she wore her jacket, and she began to curl her hair so it would be fluffy and glamorous for our date. We spent time looking at her photo album, and I finally began to see the young woman there, with the Cupid’s bow mouth.

Faux fur has come back into fashion. It appears in shop windows on the street. Every time I catch a glimpse of it, I’m reminded of my mother-in-law’s jacket, and that all of us have a secret self that needs to be encouraged and shared with those we love.

~ Grazina Smith

What secret self might you have hiding in the back of your closet? Is it a faux-fur jacket that you are too worried about what others will think of you to actually wear? Is it your good China that you only pull out once a year because it is only for special occasions?? Get out there, and as my sister-in-law says, “Let your freak flag fly!!” That is the spice of life and what makes us all unique, interesting, and WONDERFUL!!! This is advice that I can apply to myself!

Have a FABULOUS evening!