I suppose this story needs a set-up. So, please follow me through two different lines of thought.

1. You know my previous post which talks about pictures that I love? It’s the one with my daughter, Carrie, running in the garden. I love that picture. I print it out every once in a while to make test prints for other projects, and I can never stop looking at it. It’s one of those photos that captures something that probably could never be captured again, even if I tried.

2. You know that classic (cliched?) scene from movies that shows a person running in slow motion? He’s obviously distressed and looks like he’s swimming through the air. He’s also screaming, “Nooooooooo!” but his screaming sounds more like a blue whale in heat, because the audio is slowed down, too.

I’m slowly swimming through the air, screaming, because I shrunk the coat that Carrie is wearing in the aforementioned picture. What really makes this so traumatic is that the coat that she’s wearing used to be my coat, when I was a little girl. My mom found it in her storage and gave it to me. I put it away for a while. Then I found it in my storage and gave it to Carrie. It had such adorable, classic details: A-line silhouette, double-breasted closure, two rows of contrasting black buttons. It was also a small link between generations. I was planning on saving it as a keepsake for a good long time. I washed it, put it into the dryer, and now it’s perfectly sized for a poodle.

Nooooooooo!

Who knew that nylon from the late 1970′s couldn’t be dried in the dryer? That’s a rhetorical question for those of you about to answer, “Everyone knows.”