Well, we've passed both the Annunciation and Laetare Sunday, and all that lies before us for the next while is: unrelieved Lent. Not that I'm having such a very hard one, since I didn't embrace particularly painful penances. Still, there's a kind of mind game the calendar plays every year with the positioning of feasts ---especially when they fall on a Friday --- in the whole scheme of Lent. Late Lents like this one get the fun out of the way as fast as they can, and I can't decide whether that's harder or easier than having to wait for it till almost the end, or not having it at all, as when the Annunciation might happen to fall on Good Friday or Easter Sunday. I guess it's a psych every year in one way or another, which is funny when you consider that Lent in the Western Church really isn't that much of a hardship to begin with. At least, that's what the Orthodox have every right to say.
Anyway, here we are. The feasts are all over till the big one. We have this week and next week and Holy Week, and then there we are, which really isn't that much time at all --- time, which picks up speed every day of it that I live. In thirteen days, for example --- right on the cusp of Holy Week --- I'll be a whole hundred days into this no-buy year, and honestly, it's felt like nothing. Maybe that's because I've granted myself exceptions, but underwear isn't that exciting, and it's not like I've been buying up everything else in the universe all the time, to make up for not buying clothes. In fact, I find that I pause and think a lot more, even when the thing I propose to buy, like another set of grow-bags for the garden, is something I never considered not buying. It was just clothes I wasn't going to buy, that's all, with some key exceptions. I am actually going to buy the grow bags, because I'm going to need them for all the things I plan to plant. On the other hand, I still haven't pulled the trigger on the hiking boots I was absolutely going to let myself buy. Instead I've just worn thinner socks with my old Vasque boots, and my feet haven't hurt so much. Meanwhile, the days have flown. They have winged by, these horses yanking Time's chariot behind them. Soon I'll have only 265 days left in this year, and I really don't imagine that they're going to plod. Before I know it, it'll be my birthday, AGAIN, and Christmas, and then another great turn of the wheel.
But now it's Monday. My husband is off to work with a late night ahead of him. I've been doing the Monday laundry and pecking at the day's poem, before I settle down to some poetry-editor work. I'm also still reading Wilkie Collins, since I gave up Ngaio Marsh for Lent, and could see becoming an authority on the Victorian novel, at least as a springtime occupation. Last year it was Trollope. This year, Wilkie Collins. I've read The Moonstone, Poor Miss Finch, and The Woman in White so far: now I'm embarked on No-Name, a kind of activist novel taking on England's 19th-century illegitimacy laws in the story of two girls disinherited because their parents weren't legally married until four months before their untimely deaths days apart. Their last-minute marriage, performed almost the minute the father's unknown first wife dies, invalidates the generous will the father had made. Much suffering and intrigue lies ahead. Collins was good at comedy, but he was also good at melodrama, as The Woman in White demonstrates. Buckling up for the adventures of young Magdalen Vanstone, which promise to be harrowing.
Wearing today:
My old cheap cotton t-shirt dress, featuring as a straight short skirt with this secondhand grape merino tee, Snag Silver Lining merino tights, thrifted Athleta cotton cardigan, and thrifted Birk Madeiras. I'll probably lose the tights later on, and possibly at least one of the top layers, but for now, with temps in the low 50s, I'm pretty comfortable, sitting outside in a flood of Vitamin D. I hope I'm not making too many typos --- it's very hard to see my laptop screen in the sunshine.
I like this outfit. Sometimes I want a less A-line dress or skirt, and the narrower, straighter silhouette this little dress provides is really doing it for me. I like the layered grays with the touch of grape for my Lenten purple. I left the t-shirt unknotted and pulled it up a little at the waist for a ruched effect. I had tried my new darker-gray Snag merino tights --- I can't remember the name, but they're a VERY dark charcoal --- and felt that they were too dark against the lighter grays, almost black, too much of a contrast. Even these tights, which are much lighter, feel noticeably dark with the other shades of gray, but I think it's okay. Tan shoes would provide more of a frame, but I don't have tan shoes that aren't either sandals or boots, so these darker-brown Madeiras it is. Basic ponytail hair, out of the way.
Just heard the washing machine stop, so I guess I'll go switch the laundry over.
LATER: So I guess some stuff happened at the Oscars? I don't think I've watched the Oscars since 1978, and I don't know what the movies are or who most of the people are, though I do know who both the people are in the incident people are talking about today, so I guess that's something. This has been my contribution to that discourse. As you were.