Warm and Fuzzy

“…in 2002, fur sales leapt 11%, to $1.7 billion, according to the Fur Information Council of America.” (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 27, 2004, A11)

Memory 1945

The space underneath Grandpa’s dining table is a palace. I am seated among six pillars, thick, knobby, mahogany legs, with my paper dolls, the royal family. It is snowing fur in their kingdom. I watch the bits of fluff fall off beside Mommy’s legs. Some are tufts attached to quilted, gold, satin lining.

Grandma died last spring. Daddy is in the Army. We are living here, my mother, baby brother, and I, until he comes back again. It is snowing outside. Ladies on the radio are singing “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

Mama is making Grandma’s fur coat into a jacket she can wear when we go out. I have a thick dark red snowsuit with a peaked cap. I hate it because I can hardly move in it. It’s good for making angels, that’s all. I like to go out by myself in the dark and lie down in the front yard and look at the stars and watch for the northern lights. I think about Daddy in the snow in Japan, the white lumps in the brown pictures he sent us. I think about Grandma, now an angel, standing on white, fluffy clouds. I think about her in the back seat of Grandpa’s green Dodge, with me lying down with my head in her lap, on the soft fur of her coat. I can see the stars out the back window, so far away, and yet so much a part of my everyday life.

Memory 1985

Old Brompton Road was almost empty on early Saturday morning. By ten, shoppers would be carrying their net bags to the “high quality butchers” and the greengrocer’s at the corner. I was heading towards Knightsbridge, where by noon women wrapped in sensational perfumes would be pushing through the brass-handled doors of that great Victorian emporium, Harrod’s. My destination was only to that corner, and back along the same route to our flat in Gledhow Gardens. The sun was beginning to show through a thin layer of cloud. The shadows lifted on Hans Place where the towers and cupolas of the department store announced its importance to people of prosperity.

Something was different on this day. A huge banner hung across the store’s façade, lettered in dripping red. It said “Fur kills.” Later that week I saw the anti-fur campaign billboard on the wall of the tube station platform: a lovely pair of legs with the hem of a fur coat dragging behind them leaving a trail of blood.

What are your memories of fur coats?

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