Sun on the kitchen floor, the first day of September. And the whole morning kitchen, with my husband's lunch packed on the kitchen island:
I started last year purposefully making his lunch for him to take --- it's usually dinner leftovers, so I can pack it the night before while we're clearing up after supper. I don't know why I hadn't thought before to make his lunch, but I guess things just gain clarity when you have fewer people to superintend on a daily basis. At any rate, it saves him buying a meal plan, which he used to do, usually to share with one or more children who were also on campus with him. This is the kind of thing he'd never demand that I do, or even expect that I do --- after a year, he still acts surprised that I've made his lunch, day after day.
Today, as it happens, in a little 4-cup container, it's a chicken thigh with pesto sauce, a cup of quinoa, a cup of cubed cantaloupe, and a cup of peas with mint and a dash of plain yogurt.
Meanwhile, for grins and giggles, I think I'm going to essay the new 7x7 capsule-wardrobe challenge from Wool&, because why not? The gift certificate you win is fairly small, only $15, but every little discount helps when you buy a dress from them, as I plan to do around my birthday, a scheduled purchase in my overall no-buy year.
Anyway, who doesn't love a good challenge to jumpstart a new season? This transitional phase, when here in the South we're sick of summer but it won't feel like fall for weeks and weeks yet, seems like a good time for a little extra spark.
The essential rule:
*Choose seven items, or fewer, from your wardrobe (excluding sleepwear, underwear, cold-weather gear, shoes, and workout clothes) to wear as a capsule wadrobe for one week.
*These do not have to be all Wool& items, or any wool items at all (so somebody who didn't even have any Wool& dresses could do the challenge and receive a little discount on a first purchase).
I can easily pick the core of my capsule wardrobe, because I wear it already:
*redyed royal-blue Camellia dress
Then four more items to wear with these three dresses:
*belt
*2 cardigans
*one scarf to wear as a shawl
Here's what I've hit on, which I think will handily carry me through seven days, to include Sunday Mass.
It's just so hot right now that I rather reluctantly excluded things like my jean jacket in favor of lightweight cardigans that I do in fact reach for as layers to wear in church, restaurants, and other seriously air-condtioned spaces. I wanted to include my braided leather belt, but can't find it --- I fear I might have left it in Memphis or Dallas last week. But this pale pink one, though not a particularly nice belt, goes with things and adds a note of softer, lighter color. I do want to encourage myself to wear that scarf on the far left more often. I liked it a lot last Sunday as a shawl with my Maggie dress.
This is a reasonably close approximation of the travel capsule I took on my roadtrip with the college kids --- I debated with myself, in fact, whether I wanted to include my gray Athleta cardigan in this mix, but decided against it for now. It's also just too warm still for leggings or tights or any other bottom layers. I was wearing dresses every day anyway . . .
Mostly this will be very Team Basic, I think. I just don't feel like incorporating shirts, for example, as top layers. As the season progresses, maybe I'll do some more 7x7 challenges, just for my own benefit, to help me mix up more little capsules in my wardrobe, but for now, this will do.
LATER:
WHEW. I have just uploaded my three Sun essays for next week, on Richard Lovelace, Elinor Wylie, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These were hard to write --- my brain did not want to let thoughts hang together in any coherent way. But they are DONE! DONE! And I am going to spend the rest of the day reading Margery Allingham's first Albert Campion mystery, which I have to say I don't like all that much. Or, well, to put it another way, she's not knocking Ngaio Marsh off the throne in my literary-mystery heart. The novels might get better, though. I didn't think Marsh's A Man Lay Dead was all that great, either --- and now that I think about it, what IS it with first mystery novels about house parties? Agatha Christie's Mysterious Affair at Styles. A Man Lay Dead. And now whatever this one is called --- I can't actually remember offhand, but it's sort of Wilkie Collins-like, with a weird Victorian-ish Gothic flavor (not just a house party, but a house party in a CREEPY house, staffed by criminals, with a cursed dagger as a centerpiece).
But I'm going to finish it, because I still don't know whodunnit. And then I might read another, just to see.
WAIT: HOLD THE PHONE: THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
I wouldn't wear these shoes as part of an actual outfit, but: check out the scarf-as-sarong action with the Camellia dress I'm already wearing. Take me out to dinner, somebody, quick!