My Dowry

I've written about my "dowry" in a couple of places and quoted both of them in a piece published today. It has occurred to me I never really gave a detailed inventory of what all I had and decided I would like to do that.

I'm the baby of the family -- the youngest of three children -- and my parents bought a three bedroom, one and a half bath house the summer I turned three when my father retired from the military.  I nominally got the smallest of the three bedrooms but really shared a room with my older sister initially.

Our parents used the family room with attached half bath as their master bedroom and my sister got the largest of the actual three bedrooms. I took it over after she got her own apartment in college.

It had a wall with an entrance door and a closet door and maybe six feet or so between those two doors. When I was sixteen, I was given a desk probably for my birthday and it went on that wall. I had some kind of chair to go with it and someone eventually bought me shelves one Christmas which got screwed into the wall and left behind when my parents decided to pay me for the shelves rather than have me tear up their wall only to have a landlord say "You can't install them in MY rental, no."

There was window on the side of the house near the closet and a window on the front of the house opposite the wall with the two doors. There was a fourth wall with no doors or windows but you had to leave space for the entrance door to open.

The fourth wall got filled with three matching wall units that actually got left with my sister when I went to Germany and retrieved when I moved to California and she opted to gift me a bedroom set that army moved free along with my wall units in the excuse we were retrieving MY furniture left behind some years earlier.

My father paid a local carpenter to make me a piece to go on top of one of the wall units to maximize storage. These wall units plus a hand me down couch and matching armchair were my initial living room furniture in my first two one bedroom apartments.

I had a queen sized bed and an uncle who was the same Sun sign as me had a knack for buying me things I liked. I had several sets of sheets by the time I moved out, but my favorite was a gift from this uncle and it was predominantly peach with a lot of pastels and depicted wild flowers of some sort. I paired it with a peach colored king sized comforter that kept me warm and draped to the floor like a bedspread.

I had loads of towels from a combination of gifts and stuff my mother brought home from her job cleaning apartments people had moved out of. My favorite set was predominantly purple and I believe was a gift.

I had a small bookshelf that fit under the window on the side of the house and was not too deep, so it allowed me to access my closet. My mother was BIG on sewing me clothes and buying me clothes and my closet was eventually customized with some homemade and some store bought organizers to maximize use of the space AND ultimately I had TWO extenders on the door itself for hanging more clothes, one pointing in each direction.

So my closet door got permanently propped open and I only hung short things, like tops, above the desk and longer things in front of the window after moving my show organizer into the closet once my clothes collection outgrew the closet in spite of an extra hanging bar my father created himself to nearly double the amount of hanging space inside the closet.

I had a walk-in closet worth of clothes without the walk-in closet. And then parts of the wall units got used for storing folded clothes, like socks, underwear and knit tops.

My mother randomly one day brought home a funky little sideboard on wheels with two shelves, two drawers of different sizes and one cabinet, plus a countertop style top that was safe to put drinks and things on. It served as my nightstand in that bedroom and had various functions over many years in various homes as I moved around as a military wife.

In Kansas, it actually in fact got put in the dining room with a microwave on top, microwave safe dishes and microwave meals in the shelves so my kids had some food independence.

At some point, I painted the fronts of the drawers and cabinet door black, matching the black top, because I had acquired a lot of black furniture. Most of this furniture was a medium brown or dark blonde type color.

In my first apartment, one relative bought me a folding table with four folding chairs and other than it not being stable enough as a table, it was one of my favorite dining room sets and allowed me to close it up to open up floor space for my kids to play in some apartments and I actually used the dining room in our two bedroom apartment as a third bedroom after my second child was born anytime my husband was gone.

At least until he got the army to supply him a "proper" dining room set for free because we were in military quarters and his gaming hobby mattered more than his kids, as usual.

I carefully measured that bedroom in my teens and it was maxed out on furnishings while still being usable by the time I moved out. The wall units filled as much of the wall as possible without interfering with opening the bedroom door and the bookcase got moved under the window when my mother randomly upgraded my "nightstand" to this funky sideboard because it was on sale and the same wood tone as most of my furniture (the wall units and desk).

The top of my closet has boxes with multiples of towels, shower curtains and assorted kitchen items. Some of it was cheap aluminum cookware that I soon replaced with something better but I needed very little to completely outfit my first one bedroom apartment when I acquired a part-time job and moved out of my parental home while my husband was in basic training.

I don't actually regret marrying him and it got me away from my hometown, which was a goal, but I sometimes wistfully look back on how I was able to fully furnish my first apartment entirely on my own and walk to work and pay rent etc and live on my own income briefly while he was in basic training and halfheartedly wish I had understood how good I was at managing my life myself.

In spite of me sending him presents regularly in basic training out of my wages, ALL of the money he earned in basic training was in the bank other than what we pissed away to buy his father's dream truck as our first vehicle.

It had four wheel drive and a bed liner and he didn't even hunt or whatever. Four wheel drive came in handy exactly once that I recall, when we were failing to find the actual road up to a castle we wanted to visit in Germany and we drove up a goat trail.