Back-door shade garden with blooming hostas.
Yesterday, in the blazing heat, my husband began the garden-fence project:
That's the side where the grapevine will be trellised. I'm already excited about the finished product: more structure against which to grow things, both inside and outside this enclosure. He's happy because he doesn't like my existing log fence, and he wants to split those logs for more firewood, so this is a win overall. I've already figured that I can fit in up to ten more blackberry canes along the fence, and moving my container-growing blueberries to permanent spots along the outside of the fence will give me more container space inside. I'll probably move some of my potted flowers and herbs outside the enclosure as well, to make more room for more grow bags or other large containers for large flowers and vegetables and greens.
Dora and I have been for an extremely hot walk this morning and are now relaxing in air-conditioned comfort. She's not entirely happy to be in her crate, but if she weren't in the crate she would be climbing all over me, mouthing me, and barking to get me to play --- and really, like a toddler, she's overtired and needs to wind down. Quiet time it is, in the crate! I'm sitting with her, so that being in the crate doesn't mean being isolated and alone, though also I try to leave her alone some of the time, because that's good for her to be used to. I don't know how we survived thirteen years of a non-crate-trained dog, honestly . . . being crate-trained may be Dora's greatest consistent virtue, but it is a not-inconsiderable virtue.
Wearing today (in an attempt to branch out in my own closet):
This linen jumper/sundress which I last wore (checks notes) on Laetare Sunday, I believe. It was March 27, at any rate. I've had this dress for literally fifteen years, I'm pretty sure: I'm pretty sure I bought it in the spring of 2007, though it might have been 2008. Still, it is the item of clothing I've owned the longest. Over the last several years I've kept pondering getting rid of it, because I'm never sure how well it serves me. It is an item that repeatedly I find myself making myself wear, because I haven't chosen to wear it in forever.
Part of the problem, I think, is that I'm determined to wear it as a year-round dress, but I'm never quite happy with the way that works out. Winter looks involving this dress: in theory they should work, but they always end up feeling kind of meh. Not terrible, but not great. When I layer up this dress, I feel stuffed into it, or else just kind of frumpy. Often I'm actively trying to incorporate other things I don't wear as much, like the army-green tee I was wearing under the dress in that last shot, which really didn't work with the emerald cardigan, which really wasn't a great shape for the dress . . .
So I could solve this problem by being a little better at combinations with this dress. I do already know that it looks better with my taupe-ish "Sand Dollar" Snag merino tights (and wow, do merino tights feel like ancient history right now) than with the gray ones which for a long time were what I had to wear with it.
But overall, I like it better as a dress, on its own, than as a jumper. I've solved the deep-armhole thing by wearing a bamboo bralette with it, that's really more like a crop top, in a shade of pink that goes well with the background color of the dress fabric. I like it with sandals and bare legs and shoulders. It's cool and airy, as linen is, and feels better as a simple outfit, without any more moving parts.
It's a lot more body-skimming without extra layers under or over it. I'll probably put my hair up later, because it's hot, but even with it down, I don't feel dumpy or dragged down or overwhelmed by hair --- usually I do wear it up with this dress, or at least pulled back, because the dress reads kind of vintage, in that English-garden-party mode, and I like having vintage-feeling hair with it. But we're fine just as we come today.
Also, since I was going on about default colors yesterday . . . pinks are another good option for me. I have pink-toned skin, so most shades of pink, as long as they're not so glaringly bright that they overwhelm me, work reliably well with my coloring. This particular pink is almost peachy, though it's not quite as peachy as my other vintage linen dress. That one's really on the edge, but both dresses are just far enough on the pink side, rather than the orange side, to harmonize with my coloring.
Glamor shot, or else I'm waiting for somebody to deliver some terrible news. Anyway, you can kind of see how shades in the pattern of this dress pick up my lip color, for example. I find this way of looking at clothing and colors so much more helpful than all the seasons/warm-or-cool language that people use to talk about what shades suit them. I've always thought of my coloring as fairly cool, but then have looked like death in really chilly shades of pale mauve or lavender. So all of that gets confusing. It's a lot easier just to pay attention to the colors that I actually am, and to compare the color of an item of clothing with my skin, my lips, my eyes, my hair, to see whether it falls into the same range or else complements any or all of those colors. I don't know as much about color theory as I'd like to, but that basic rule of thumb has helped me make better choices, and have better control over the clothing choices I make, than I had had for a good forty years previously. Better late than never . . .
Also --- and I don't have a good answer for this --- shopping is hard because the lighting in stores is so frequently terrible. There you are, in the dressing room, under the fluorescent lights, trying to decide whether or not a color suits you, when your whole reality has shifted to another dimension in which no color, including your own natural colors, is what it is at all. Online shopping is no better, because then you're trying to gauge the accuracy of a color as it shows up on your screen, and you can't exactly hold it up to yourself to try it. It all gets to be a bit of a crap shoot. Again, I have no good answer for this. But if you know what you're essentially aiming for, and you've learned yourself to a reasonable degree, then at least you can eliminate some things without even having to ask whether you want them or not.
I have decided, once again, to hang onto this dress. I do like it, but I might just have to say to myself that it's a summer dress, full stop. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, honestly, and if it saves me making unfortunate cold-weather ensembles that then lead me to consider getting rid of the dress, then that's a good thing, on the whole.
I probably wouldn't have thought before to wear blue shoes with this dress --- I've always thought of it as a distinctly not-blue item. But blue goes with literally every shade involved in the pattern of the fabric: all the pinks, the sage green, the hints of brown and taupe, the white. It harmonizes with all those colors without, itself, showing up in the pattern at all. And it makes a good dark-but-not-harsh frame for a light dress. So blue EVA Birks it is again today.
Note to self to wear this dress more often between now and the end of the summer.
LATER:
That feeling when you have a gate, even when there's no fence.
I might just . . . go out and walk through it. And back again.
