Reverse Culture Shock

As I gazed at a wedding photo on our mantle last night, I realized that I hadn’t seen my dress in a while.

In fact, I couldn’t remember pulling it out of one of the 90 boxes that we shipped from London.

I searched the house — we still have several boxes we haven’t unpacked (true, we’ve been in the house for more than a month, but when you start out with 90, having about five we haven’t gotten to yet doesn’t seem so bad).

I couldn’t find it. We checked the movers’ inventory list of the all boxes and their contents, and didn’t see it listed.

It’s been in a big box for the four and a half years since the wedding. In our London flat, it was parked rather inconveniently behind our couch. We didn’t have any other space for it.

Ironically, now that we have the space to store, or even take it out of the box and lie it out, it’s missing.

We can only surmise that it’s sitting in the closet in the flat where we lived for six months before we moved here. At least I hope it is. While the dress isn’t something I wear often, or even think about, I’d like to think it’s in the house. Or even the country.

I wonder, if someone found it in our old rental flat, would they wear it? Or throw it away, to make way for their own bulky items that don’t fit elsewhere in the flat?

I had hoped that my daughter might one day look at my wedding dress. Maybe even wear it. But then, not a single one of my friends wore their moms’ wedding dresses on their big day. They all wanted their own.

And both of my sisters-in-law say that theirs disintegrated over the years, despite their best efforts to keep them pristine.

But all my friends and nieces at least looked at their mom’s dresses. None of them said that their mom had misplaced her dress during an international move.