20210703 Coatrack
In the hall, above the shoe rack, we have an old coat and hat rack that used to belong to my wife’s grandparents. It is from solid oak and it looks as if it is from the 1930s. We’re all fond of it. The only issue we have with this coatrack is that it has just 4 hooks. We have a lot of coats, so there always is more than one coat on every hook and we’re used to searching the right coat in between a bulging pile of coats. You would think that you could easily remove the winter coats in spring and then remove the summer coats in October and bring back the winter coats. That way there would always be enough space on those hooks. But life is not that simple. There seems to be a discrepancy here between myself and my wife and kids. They are always cold and can still wear a thick winter coat when I already go outside in a t-shirt. So in practice the window of opportunity to decrease the number of coats is rather small for the coats of my wife and kids and in practice it’s mainly about my own coats. What also doesn’t help is fashion and the urge to be able to wear another coat every day. Old coats remain popular and if I get the feeling that they remain untouched for a long time and ask them if I can remove that coat, I usually get the answer that I can’t, because they are still fond of that coat and they might wear it again someday. So, we should probably get a coatrack with more hooks, but that would mean getting rid of that old coatrack that we all love and that reminds my wife of her grandparents and all those visits to their house when she was a child. So we know that we’ll never get a new coatrack and we know that we’ll have to live with the issue of not being able to find the right coat right-away. Life is full of compromises.