Village life: Ghost lived in my closet

On the other hand, who wants to see a white ghost every time you open the closet door, reminding you of failure?

It was my first wedding dress, after all.

I've been on a campaign to travel lighter in the world.

Last winter, fighting off a messy malaise, I shucked off pounds of fat. As spring hit, all the other heaviness in my life - the stuff I didn't like, the stuff I never use, the broken stuff I held onto thinking I'd fix it, the stuff that didn't fit, the stuff that reminded me of bad times - it all began to make me mad.

Maybe I finally came out of the delusion that my stuff was wealth - proof I mattered on this orb. As it turns out, there's imprisonment in it too. Enough is enough and too much is aplenty, an old friend asserts.

We're not the only victims to the myth of plenty.

In the Kingdom of Tonga, where I spent two years, they think a lot of flesh is beautiful. Respect and honor manifests with immense planks of food at feasts - more lobster, more whole pigs, more giant yams, more gold teeth.

Maybe there's something in all of us that says, more, more, more - just in case. Just in case there's that plague, that famine, that run of bad luck. But then it's too much.

I think I finally get it. Sometimes stuff just brings you down, like you've been rooked into it, dragging all this wearisome baggage into your life.

As a friend says, "that ain't right."

It's like the way they used to call tuberculosis "consumption" - a disease you get and get and get and suddenly, one day, you can't find the AA batteries in the junk drawer, can't find that one good pair of jeans in the raggedy heap, can't find yourself in the haystack of tired history.

So, my dream of potlatch.

According to the Free Online Dictionary, it is "A ceremonial feast among certain Native American peoples of the northwest Pacific coast, as in celebration of a marriage or accession, at which the host distributes gifts according to each guest's rank or status. Between rival groups the potlatch could involve extravagant or competitive giving and destruction by the host of valued items as a display of superior wealth."

Competitive destruction of valued items? Incinerating one's wealth (without bailout, stock market or Bernie Madoff) seems thrillingly un-American.

And crazy - "I'd-like-to-flirt-with-being-crazy-like-that" crazy.

In my fury for awhile I couldn't stand an overstuffed drawer - a blouse I hadn't worn, a pile of letters from people only my mother knew. I threw away old dishes (black and white), old jackets, pants that didn't fit, bowls I disliked, candles that made me sneeze, silverware with loose joints, sweaters sloppy with pill, mugs from places I went when I was miserable.

I turned to my laptop, where my inbox had bloated to more than 6,000 messages. It took me three solid nights of Wheel of Fortune and Law and Order reruns to do it, but furiously deleting, I slashed down to a trim 100.

I confess I skipped the bonfire. It's hard to pull off a proper conflagration on our quiet block. I've only got so much chutzpah. Instead I piled my backward pillage into rows of black plastic bags and carted them to the street.

I felt guilty about my mother's high school diploma and sheaves of her curlicue scrawling. I hoped the trash truck got there before I could change my mind. But I was tired of carrying even her disappointed life around with my own. When the truck with that bag crushed inside it finally rumbled away down Maxine, I felt my day expand like an April tulip.

So my potlatch turned into something bigger than I thought - not just getting rid of stuff I no longer wear, or eat from, or look at. It turned into clearing a path through daily life with room for fresh starts. It was about claiming myself, unburdening the heart of its detritus.

And the wedding dress - ah, that wedding dress. It was one of the last things to go. What pride I had on buying it at Hudson's. How sweet it felt to slip its sexy silk over my head and get somebody else to zip it up the back. I thought that dress, that marriage, would make me whole. I didn't know it would take years of bruising life lessons and - let's face it - another mate, another whole sea change, to make that happen.

I'd looked at that dress dangling from an old padded hanger, a hundred, a thousand times since the only time I wore it. That dress went with me, always hanging, always hanging on, waiting for something.

It never said "time to let go, time to move on." It always said, "you hopeless dope. Look what you screwed up."

I guess I finally used up that voice. Enough already. It's over.

I didn't really throw the dress away. I took it to Goodwill. I hope whoever gets it next will wear it lightly and have a happy day.

Driving back down Court I still twinged a little in my heart. Moving on from a potlatch can be a little shocking.

But at home, the place feels more like me. The post-potlatch me, surveying my tidy shelves and ghost-free closets - and smiling at what I chose to keep.

Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981 and prides herself on increasing crankiness. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available.

You can find many other examples of her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.html.

She teaches writing at UM-Flint.