So this isn’t the first time I’ve told this story but there is a bit of an update to it now.

The morning of The Commander’s funeral visitation was pretty crazy. She died in February 2012 and although that was one of the warmest winters on record (flowering trees in Ann Arbor bloomed in March that year), the day of her funeral home visitation there was a blasted snowstorm up in Sault Ste. Siberia. With an eye to getting her house emptied out so we could put it on the market, that morning we bundled up all of her clothing except her underwear and took it down to Sally Ann for donation. I dunno exactly why but that was a really surreal memory for me.

We made a number of northward trips in the ensuing months, triaging The Comm’s stuff. What to donate. What to keep. What one of her grandchildren might want. The GG became intimately familiar with the local Habitat for Humanity and, because they accepted mattresses there, at one point we even hauled a couple up from the Planet Ann Arbor and dropped them off. And terlets? Need a terlet? They have a whole yard full of terlets.

On one of those trips, the GG innocently enough asked me to bag up The Comm’s underwear so we could drop that off for donation. Um. 👀👀👀. No! We are NOT donating my mother’s underwear!!! For a few reasons: 1) I knew that my moom would’ve been mortified by the idea of someone else wearing her used undies 2) Clothing donation centers do NOT accept underwear 3) I was incensed by the idea.

I bagged up my moom’s underwear and put it in the trash.

Fast forward. A beach urchin has alerted me that nowadays you can in fact actually donate used underwear. Knickey.com will re*cycle*, not re*use* your crappy (sorry) old underwear. I was wondering if they required the undies to be clean and couldn’t find (on a quick trip through Knickeys) anything about that. I personally would NEVER send used undies to a donation center unless they had been laundered.

I know that my mother would not want her underwear to be used by another person but I think she would have approved of this kind of effort to keep textiles out of our landfills.

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