You own a dry cleaning store. The clothes tell stories.

After years you have become adept at decoding their whispers…

Grass stains that tell of backyard adventures, hilarity from five year olds and harmless wrestling in the sunshine…grass stains that are evidence of a loss of innocence found while forced to your knees. One set of stains much harder to remove.

Sweat patches formed in underarm seams of police uniforms during promotion winning presentations, smell different to those earned during hostage negotiations.

The poem in Nanna’s winter coat pocket that tells of love lost, yearns for reunification with a note secretly left in a man’s jacket pocket years earlier with no result.

The receipt in a formal suit pocket for a cheap motel room. Airline boarding pass stubs, a folded graduation program, the torn flap of instructions from a pregnancy test kit – the detritus forgotten in pockets tell me about big moments and small – the receipt for two flat whites from a holiday town, a post-it note shopping list, a partly completed sudoku puzzle ripped from the weekend paper.

What do six matching dresses sizes 8-18 mean – I can tell you. I know why I see 10 times more wedding dresses than graduation gowns even though both sexes graduate. I know why we get wetsuits on Wednesdays and turbans on Tuesdays… but a dry cleaner never tells, in that way (and many others), we’re better than priests. Now the robes of religious men, the tales they can tell…