The clothes that my brother and I wore as children, growing up in Eugene, Oregon, were typically hand-me-downs or from Goodwill. The parents of an older girl named Sarah Summers—the very name still carries a shiver of excitement—gave me her old clothes from time to time, in washed, folded stacks that were permeated with a middle-class laundry fragrance, the smell of another world, better than my own. (We were hippies: weird soap, everything line-dried, dingy, stiff.) There was a pink hooded raincoat with a softly flocked lining that I cherished. It made me feel like “Sarah Summers,” a person of whom I strangely have no actual memory, except that she was my brother’s friend and later moved away. If my brother or I requested some specific garment that we could not find used—I remember him wanting a “disco shirt” for the junior-high dance—our mother would propose that she get the pattern and sew it. We sewed our own pajamas on her Singer Featherweight, and mine had one leg that was narrow and the other wide.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter