Because I have the best boyfriend ever, we now have a new armoire in the unfinished master bath in which we can keep all of our towels. So my project this morning was to move all of our towels from our old armoire (in the bedroom) to the new one. (Have you guessed by now that this house doesn't have a linen closet?) Trauma city. Moving in together was the first of the towel trauma. We both had a lot of towels, me more than Adam, and we were both reluctant to throw any away. I think most of Adam's did get tossed when we did the big towel combine, because few of his matched and mine were in better shape overall, but we still have a huge jumble of mismatched towels. And now - much to my dismay - they're all on display through the glass front of the new armoire. (In fact, I'm planning to go to the fabric store to buy fabric to line the inside of the glass doors, just can't stand it!) I don't know why I'm obsessed with keeping towels - I have towels way older than any of the clothes in my closet. I have a Sesame Street towel that I think my dad brought me back from Japan when I was a kid. I have a towel from my dorm room freshman year - black, like my mood that year. I have towels from my Oak Park apartment in 1993 - pastel stripes, because I was trying to be cheerful and pretend that I liked living there. I have a whole set of towels from my marriage to Bryon- white Frette towels we bought in Italy on our honeymoon. They're really beautiful but completely impractical, because they're the waffle-weave cloth and don't absorb much of anything, but I refuse to part with them because they screamed domestic elegance to me at the time and I think deep down I still aspire to that kind of elegance, even though we're living in a semi-rundown, cluttered clown house.... And then I have towels from my first NYC apartment, blue and lavender, but the lavender faded to pink somehow. But because they match the striped towels from 1993, they're still around, a very nice matched set now. Well, threadbare and some are sorta holey, but matched. And they work, unlike the Frette towels, so they stay in the armoire. And then there are our current towels, bright laughing orange; we found them at the Ocean State Job Lot (Adam's most favorite store) and they matched our office which is close to the bathroom, so now we have an orange-themed bathroom. Nevermind the big stack of washcloths that I've accumulated, despite the fact that I don't use washcloths and neither does Adam. Until recently I just assumed that when one bought a new set of towels one had to buy matching washcloths, even if one doesn't really know what one might possibly use them for when a bar of soap works just fine. So there's a bunch of those, matching every era of towels, which have been hanging out at the back of every linen closet and armoire forever. Though it pains me greatly, I have managed to segment out about three bath-size towels, two or three hand towels and a couple of washcloths that I am now instructing Millie (our fantastic cleaning lady) can be used for rags. It will hurt to see the royal blue hand towel (from my Chicago loft, I think) used as a floor scrubber but I think I can manage it. UPDATE: When I went to try and throw out two of the bath-size towels, Adam pulled them back, insisting that they're "gym towels," whatever that means, and that we keep them. Apparently this is even more traumatic for him than it is for me.