Other Women's Dressers

One of the things that fascinates me about women is their dressers and what's on them. My mother in law has a vast assortment of cosmetics, jewelry and perfumes scattered and piled up everywhere. There are tubes of lipsticks with no tops, powders and blushes open everywhere. You can't see what the dresser is made out of because it is covered with product. There is nothing on there that belongs to my father in law. Which is really funny to me, because my m-i-l doesn't appear to actually wear any of that--at all. Her dresser is absolutely covered with it, but it's the opposite of her personality. It looks very high dollar and high drama, which she is very NOT any of those things. It's ludicrously contradictory.

My mother's dresser, on the other hand, is very formal and clean. She has a bottle of perfume and her jewelry box along with some artfully placed pieces of JW propaganda and a fake flower arrangement. Usually her purse is set on the dresser, a piece of furniture which is *enormous* and made out of cedar. She has a dish that holds whatever jewelry she might take off. It is very structured and very formal, just like her. Of course, this is the same woman who had a dual picture frame with my sister's picture in one side and the generic picture that comes with the frame in the other side until I pointed out what interesting relatives we must have; and then she stuck my picture in there. She kept the generic picture in "my" side for years. Her dresser makes perfect sense to me.

My dresser has a sort of his & hers side, which I haven't noticed on most dressers, with a "neutral" middle ground. El Hijo's side is usually piled up with books and magazines, which used to bother me initially, but now it seems like a regular part of the house. We also have a dry erase board where we keep our money goals and track what we need to save money for, so we don't spend it all on eating out or something else. The middle has a pitcher for flowers and a little dish with paper things in it--Derby tickets, phone numbers, a credit card so I won't use it, Dante's picture pin that I wore to basketball games (Go #5, woot). Every now and then it has spillover of a lipstick or jewelry, if I get in a rush. I have pictures on my dresser--one of me and El Hijo in front of the Biltmore House when we were newly married, and one of Dante and his little step sister when they were younger. I also have seven little Buddhas because they were cute and gathering dust among El Hijo's things. I have multiple bottles of perfume, because I love perfume. I also have a little piggy bank in the shape of a house, to remind me of what my long term financial goal is. My grandmother's sewing machine sits underneath my dresser. Me & El Hijo reupholstered the little bench seat together (with a piece of expensive fabric and a staple gun, lol), and I used to sit on it, but now it's a stand for one of my favorite pieces of art that I bought for myself over a decade ago and for a book that El Hijo bought me for our wedding anniversary.

What's on your dresser?

-- DV