Oh, Uber, do I ever know what you mean. In my mother's house, Upstate, my former bedroom has remained pretty much intact, though I haven't lived there for a long, long time. There are clothes folded in the dresser drawers & hanging in the closet. They date back to my days working in law firms, thus, they are of good quality, were originally bought as "investment pieces" & were hard for me to get rid of, even when I was long past the point of fitting in them. Anyway, I had become a newspaper reporter & then a tech writer, back in the dot-com days, when dress codes at tech firms were pretty much nonexistent. (I mean, people kept titanium scooters in their office, wore flip-flops & brought their dogs to work. In such an atmosphere, silk designer blouses were pointless.) So the clothes remain, ghosts of a former self.

Well, when my father was dying of cancer, getting hospice care at home, as he said he wanted, I moved back into my old bedroom for the last two months of his life, so I could help care for him. And after he died, I rummaged in my old closet for a black dress. (Because one is hardly in the mood for a shopping spree after leaving the appointment with the funeral director early so that someone can be there when hospice arrives to pick up the hospital bed.)

I knew I had a really nice black dress, in a size 10. I could remember it being rather roomy on me, years ago, like it was a generous 10, and then outgrowing it completely, at a size 6. So I put on this size 10, being a contemporary size 10, thinking, "No problem. This dress was always a bit big." Oh my God. Yes it fit, but I had to take a needle & thread & sew it up to reinforce some of the buttons, fearing they'd burst open at an innoportune moment. Like, I didn't want my clothing to split wide open while I dropped down on the kneeler at the coffin ... not to get too black-humored, but you know what I mean.

The funeral was weird anyway. Lots of people hadn't seen New Thin Me till then. They didn't recognize me. Then they'd hug me, murmuring "I'm so sorry ...." (while I hoped those buttons held) and then a minute later, "God, you look great." Because, at funerals, people tend to get chatty & lapse back into real life & catch up with news of old friends whom they never see otherwise.

But yeah, that dress taught me all about vanity sizing. Which I knew about, of course, because I used to buy vintage clothes. But it's one thing to know it about clothes made in the 1910s-early 1960s & another thing to know it went on happening in one's own lifetime. So now I know that a size 10 in 1992 was nowhere near a size 10 in 2010.

Gosh-- nothing worse than being at your father's funeral AND busting out of your dress.:hug::hug: