When School Starts

Over the school year my mom and I have had the pleasure of doing one of our favorite pastimes...shopping. An activity we seem to enjoy way too much, way too often. It's hard to explain, but there's something about the mall that makes me instantly relieved. As if once you enter the premises the concerns that once worried you get thrown away. Even if just for a few short hours. I guess in some cases shopping could be related to therapy. I've tried to figure it out, the secret formula the mall dumps in all our water to make us believe we need all this materialistic items. I came to a conclusion... it's the smell. When you walk in and smell all that new leather pouring out of Salvatore Ferragamo and Bottega Veneta. Oh how I love that leather. Or after you buy a nice piece of clothing and wear it for the first time how you never smell like the deterget the rest of the family uses, you smell new. It brought us all back.

But now that the ecomomy is looming above rock bottom I get to shop at a more intimate place, my closet. All eighth grade year ( and countless years before that) my closet always seemed like a foreign place to me. Monday through Friday I opened a single drawer containing itchy polyester uniforms. Then on weekends I would go shopping, wear my new clothes, and put them away in my closet waiting for the cycle to repeat. Along came High School. Redemption to my soul. Finally getting to wear what I want all seven days of the week.

I finally needed to open the closet door. It took a long while to take a through look inside. When I finished though I realized that I didn't want any of these clothes. Either they didn't fit, or they were no longer put under the Hayley Umbrella of Good Fashion. What happened? I had been subject to the world of wasting money on a lot of clothes I didn't even need. Something had to change.

The next few weeks I took all the unloved clothes ( some with the tags still on them) and put them in old shopping bags in the garage. A month later we had our annual neighborhood yard sale. I ended up selling most of the new Abercrombie shirts, Juicy Couture tops, and Lacoste polos for two quarters each. I ended up with a meager twenty seven dollars and a lesson well learned.