My mother and I couldn’t share clothes. Not exactly. We each moved in and out of a range of weights, but there was also—you know—the thirty-some years between us. Closer to the end of her life our sizes and choices found some overlap in a lumpy Venn diagram. Squint, and you could make us meet in the middle.

I didn’t take much from her closet after she was gone. What I did take felt obvious. A long sweater, no fasteners, in a deep teal. Deep and dark, a fantasy of tropical water. It wasn’t soft exactly. I think it scratched a little, maybe a wool blend. But that color was something we shared. One of the few that could show up on purpose in either of our wardrobes.

I don’t remember my mother wearing anything tight. Maybe it was the time, in my memory of her, the 90s and those t-shirts everyone wore baggy. Everyone? That can’t be right, but here we are. She could’ve worn smaller sizes and didn’t. She wanted to be smaller sizes and wasn’t. What I took from her was baggy on me, too. I thought since I was taller than she’d been, the dimensions would work out, that some visual averaging would just happen when I put her clothes on my body. It didn’t, but I wrapped the sweater around myself like a security blanket for a few years before I let it go. It didn’t fit me. I wasn’t her. It wasn’t me. And she wasn’t the sweater. I sent it away in a paper HyVee bag for someone else to wrap up in.

Our feet were never the same size, either. I took her old snow boots when they started snow-birding. The lining was sliding out of them, anyway, but she wanted to offer them to me before she tossed them. “They’re not in the best shape,” she said, “but they’d only be for throwing on when you’re going out to scoop for a few minutes.” She had these visions of me for me. For a long time, I took the visions as facts. She was my mother: she knew things I couldn’t know yet. We both wanted things to be useful. We wanted them to fit, even when they didn’t.

We landed on scarves in my 20s, she could always get me a scarf for my birthday or Christmas. They always seemed to work, in that cloudy segment where sometimes my tastes and her ideas of me overlapped. Once we were out shopping together, at a Kohl’s or a department store, and I saw a thin scarf with the cheerful variety of a rainbow. Pinks and white, some light blue and orange and this sparkling silver thread woven throughout. “Isn’t this cute?” I reported as we came in and out of the racks. “Are you getting that?” she asked. I heard it the other way, in the “Are you really leaving the house like that?” way. It caught my breath. What she meant was that she couldn’t let me buy it. “I already got that for you for Christmas,” she said in a quick almost-whisper.

I loved that moment. Who doesn’t want clothing for Christmas gone right? We didn’t mean for any of it to happen the way it did, but now she knew what I thought of my gift. But she was embarrassed or felt the gift spoiled now the surprise had been removed. She had wanted a different moment, later, so she didn’t love this one. It fell outside that sliver where our circles came together.

I should have just kept the teal sweater, I sometimes think. It was a scratchy, rich talisman of my mother. One should keep things that don’t quite fit because the not-fitting gives them their weight. Wouldn’t that have proven something? I love you. I shall carry around this sweater that was yours and now is mine and is therefore ours. I think she believed things like that. I don’t think she believed it about stuff, exactly, but bonds and memories and what one ought to do. What is it like inside a belief? Wrap it around your shoulders, feel the pull on your neck. Take a look in the mirror and wonder about who you’re seeing.

---