Follow the Dirt Road in Your Soul to Humbug Mountain

The Skeleton in my Closet Wears Mink

By Carol Mell, 5-01-07

	The skeleton in my closet is quite unconcerned about the fact that minks died to make this garment.

“One day all this will be yours,” Grandma once said, sweeping her saggy arm before rows and rows of china teacups and saucers.

I was speechless.

No one I knew in the whole wide western world drank tea except Grandma, her twin sister and their lilac-powdered friends, ladies with silver curls who ate cucumber sandwiches and kept their lace hankies ironed.

Grandma grew up in our small town, was a one-room schoolteacher who married a poor wood hauler and homesteader, my Grandpa. Grandma felt the call of destiny in the big city so they left their country bumpkin life and went over the mountains. Once she got there she got a hankering for a mink stole.

A bit of mink, to her, meant prosperity. For Grandpa, it meant more hours at the cement burial vault factory.

After Grandma’s death, the teacups were sold with my blessing but my brothers sent me her mink. I’m sure they didn’t know what to do with it. Who does? I was living on the Navajo reservation, hardly opera or theater country. After a few years, we moved to a hot Arizona town once described as just a screen door away from Hell. Not many creatures wearing fur could stand it there which explains why so many people had turtles for pets instead of dogs. In New Mexico where greens outnumber red and blues put together, if I ever wore that dusty fur, somebody would scream “murderer” and pour ketchup over my head.

I’ve lugged that mink through hollow lands and hilly lands for two decades so I decided to trade it for a camera. I still felt some guilt about selling Grandma’s prize possession but with her safe in her cement burial vault, I figured I could still sleep nights if I had a whiz bang camera, with bells and whistles enough to make my neighbor’s drool.
So, I went to Ebay.com to see what kind of real money I could get for an old (ahem, vintage) mink that only needed a little cleaning and a new silk lining.

“At least someone will get some use out of it,” I thought, “someone far, far away, say Minneapolis.”

All I would get, I learned was about five dollars, hardly enough for postage.

To think that Grandma’s pride and Grandpa’s work amounted to only a few bucks. Now, in addition to feeling guilty about those dead-for-nothing minks I felt the futility of all human striving, especially mine. All we do, all we desire in life, except maybe a camera, is little more than dandelion seeds blown into a horse pasture on a Saturday.

Prom night this year was chilly so I offered the mink stole to my youngest who wore a sparkly chocolate-colored gown. She looked stunning wrapped in mink the color of her mahogany hair.

“What if someone calls me a murderer?” she worried.

“Tell them it’s a fake,” I said, feeling the ground shift as Grandma tried to bust out of her cement vault. “If we’re lucky someone will steal it.”

You are danged if you do and danged if you don’t so do you wear the mink and risk the ketchup or keep on keeping it in the closet until the hairs fall out?

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.