By Elizabeth Jones

Home. It has always been the dearest spot on Earth to me. First thing I did when Mrs. Parton taught third grade math in Midland, Texas, was calculate how many hours that woman was keeping me away from home. Seven hours at school, 15 minutes walking distance there and back. After snacks, that left me roughly eight waking hours at home to re-organize my hope chest, re-style my bookcases, alphabetize and line up every canned good in our harvest gold pantry, and clean out the family fridge. And when you grow up in a house/sitcom with a single mom and both your grandparents, you know it takes exactly seven minutes to eat 1/31^st of the 31-flavor Baskin-Robbins sampler pack with your grandfather, 57 minutes to inlay 300 of the tiniest mosaic tiles into a boring wooden box with your never-boring grandmother, an hour for “Love Boat,” and 47 minutes to stay awake and watch your mom sleep just to make sure she’s still breathing.

The only other time I’ve felt that at home was the day I drove through Fort Worth for the first time. It was 2002. And I remember it like it was yesterday. You never forget that feeling — the precise moment your soul clicks into its rails and can finally relax. I’ll be back, I told it. A few months later, I moved into the most adorable second floor apartment in Arlington Heights. It had a balcony overlooking downtown. And it had my heart. I didn’t know yet that professional organizing was a thing. And a couple of years later, I left that amazing apartment to take a job out of state. I left everything I owned in storage. And as I closed that corrugated metal door, I whispered, “I’ll be back.”

Seven years later, I would be back. Eight doors up, to be exact. Renovating a cottage with my recently widowed mother and redesigning our 1927-era closets to make them work for the year 2012. By now, I’d met the love of my life: professional organizing. Turns out, speed-sorting toiletries in a guest bath is frowned upon at dinner parties. But not at all when it’s your job.

So what makes my neighborhood so special? It’s the closets. It was a closet where I first laid hands upon Carol’s calendar from 1969 and discovered she and Richie had their first date the night of the moon landing. I also know what she wore on the date. She wrote it down. If there was ever a fire, I would risk my life to run into that house and save those calendars. I’d save Carol and Richie, too, of course. As soon as I grabbed the calendars. 

It was a closet where Emmy Lou hired me — a still unknown organizer — and gave me free rein to make her Hermès scarf collection look like an art installation. That was the first time I ever worked with a general contractor. He was somewhat of a celebrity in construction circles and at least a foot taller than I am. He looked like a movie star and, I swear, when he smiled, it made the faintest sound. Like the chime that tells you it’s time to turn the page in a children’s book. I somehow managed to tell him I needed 27 scarf rods, spaced 6 inches apart. And magically, the drawing in my sketchbook became a real thing. 

Every good thing, every darling dog and cat, every person I now can’t imagine having once lived my life without, and every important life lesson, has come to me by way of a closet. It was a closet that led me to Carter Bowden on Camp Bowie Boulevard — and Bob and Sally — who once made me laugh so hard I almost un-endowed a fertility statue. It was a closet that led me to my kindred spirits at The Welman Project on West Vickery Boulevard. And it’s been in every closet that I discovered the one thing that binds us all together: that instruction manual for the cordless phone you donated in 2007. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t need it anymore. 

It was in a client’s closet where I got the call at 7:30 a.m. on May 9, 2022, that I had a brain tumor. And a closet that introduced me to the client who would sit by my bedside all night in ICU so my mom could go home and sleep. And it was in a closet where my beloved Kari at Shampoo on Birchman Avenue stored the hair wraps she would use to protect my incision until it finally healed.

If you ask me, the most magical thing about my neighborhood is the closets. Now I don’t have to count the hours until I get home. I’m always there.