A foggy beginning to what looks to be a warmer day: highs in the mid-60s. Hello again, January spring! We love you! Granted, these temperatures bring storm weather with them, and I'll be surprised if there's not some tornado action over the next day or so, but still. I'm never ready for hot weather, but warm is just fine, especially this time of year.
Daffodil fronds are up with swelling buds, and I need to go get some compost for my garden containers, to amend the soil for the coming season. I'm out of bird seed, too, and the dog food is starting to run low, so maybe that alignment of situations will prompt me to leave the house, as in in the car. I leave it plenty on foot, to tramp around the neighborhood with Dora, but go to the store? Thanks but no thanks, unless I just can't not.
My husband has gone limping off in his car --- the car is limping, that is --- to get his tires looked at. Both the back ones are low, and one is really low. I hope they can get things fixed up in time for him to make his weekly coffee date with a colleague before classes. There was a period where he had friendly collegial relationships at work but no actual serious friends, so this is a good development. I like the man's wife, and we've gotten together a few times as couples, and it's been very pleasant.
We lost a big chunk of our social life when we left our parish, almost three years ago now, but slowly, slowly we're rebuilding. I could meditate on how different it is to build a social network when you no longer have children at home, after years of bonding with people because your children were friends and/or did things together. I guess it helps if you have hobbies or activities that bring you into contact with other people, but if you're a congenital solitary like me, yet you do like people and having somebody to talk to now and then, it's a bit of a challenge.
Granted, I have a huge long-distance network, and in an epistolary way, through email and various social-media private messaging, I actually talk to a lot of people all the time. Sometimes little groups of us get together to Zoom, and that's fun. I look forward to literary events where I'm going to see people, which is a development I never imagined would be possible. I really didn't think I liked other writers much, or that they liked me. My MFA was a fairly lonely and uncomfortable experience: wanting to be friends with the people around me, but for whatever reason feeling like an alien among them. To have actual writer friends is a rich blessing I did not see coming, and I'm grateful for them all.
So I'm not really sitting here pining, and I can't remember now what started me down this melancholy path. Oh, yes, that my husband has this standing coffee date with his friend Clark on Wednesday mornings. That too is a rich blessing. I think men often find it harder than women do, to connect with each other in any kind of meaningful way. My husband is maybe unusual, at least in these surroundings, in being a really intensely conversational person. All his long-standing friendships, especially from his first round of graduate school, are rooted in all-night sessions at some bar, eating wings, drinking beer, and arguing about Karl Barth --- or as he says, beginning with theology and ending in paeans to eternal friendship in the small hours of the morning. The men he's most connected to are like that, which I guess is to say that they're all scholars, and they want to go at it intellectually over beer, and then eventually, after more beer, seal their brotherhood in blood. But even in an academic setting, as a launched professional it can be hard to find anybody who wants to do that kind of thing, or has the energy. People turn out to be more interested in administrative details than ideas. Or they're teaching a 5/5 load, because of course everybody is, and they have ten kids at home, and they're too tired for ideas. So it's a real blessing that this particular other man is interesting, interested, and energetic, and that he too likes to meet for coffee to solve the world's problems on Wednesday mornings.
In other news, yesterday I wrote a little intro on the sapphic stanza and this very funny comic poem, by a woman I used to know very slightly online and am sorry to have lost touch with. Jody knew her better than I did, so was the one to email her for permission, once we had tracked down her contact info through a mutual friend. She writes under another surname now (neither this name nor her pen surname are her actual married name --- it's not that she's been through some husbands), but anyway, I always liked her and loved her funny poems.
Meanwhile, my Dominican friend in Australia, Fr. Robert, has sent me what he intended for a Christmas present, but the mails are slow.
He had sent me links to some of her poems previously --- she was married to Yvor Winters, but I really didn't know her own work at all. I'm delighted to have this book and have started reading around in it, as one does, not straight through, but flipping pages to see what catches my eye. This poem, for example:
I'm very grateful to Fr. Robert and looking forward to reading more. These strike me as the kind of poems I want to write. Hardly new and groundbreaking at this stage of the tradition's development, but then I have the same feeling about midcentury British novels. I'd be happy to write my own Penelope Fitzgerald novel, never mind that it's not the 1960s anymore.
You knew I'd get around to it finally . . . here's what I'm wearing today:
Wet hair + Wool& Camellia + thrifted Eileen Fisher merino camisole top + thrifted cashmere cardigan + old navy leggings (as opposed to Old Navy leggings --- these are just old and navy, period) + Xero Colorado sandals, because it's wet out. As gray as it is, I thought some bright color was in order for the day.
This Eileen Fisher camisole, which I'm wearing over my dress with the bottom tucked up underneath to make it cropped, came insanely cheap on Poshmark. I was looking for merino crop tops and bralettes, but this cost less than any of the actual wool undergarments I was looking at, so I bought it. The good thing about it is, of course, that it's not really an undergarment, though it could certainly be worn that way. I love the raspberry pink, which I can wear with various things. I also have a Duckworth wool skirt on the way, in midnight blue, which I can wear with it, assuming the skirt fits and is flattering.
I think I'm going to wait on another dress, incidentally, since the new colors aren't out yet. AND I think I might only buy one this year, or at most, two --- one for the spring, one for the fall. I am fairly handily covered for the summer, to be honest, though I suppose I could revise that thought once summer is actually here. I am still culling my closet carefully as I add things, but it is fun to have new-to-me pieces "around the edges" to wear with the dresses I already own. This is certainly the less expensive approach to making more outfits. Anyway, I'm happy with this camisole. It feels "sweatery," but it's not heavy, and I don't see why I couldn't wear it all summer --- maybe not over a dress, because that gets to be a bit much in the heat, but with a skirt for sure. The rest of the year, it does go nicely over or under a dress. And it's cheering me up today.
UPDATE: Well, now you can put your name on the list to get an alert when you can buy a wisteria Willow dress, so I think I am going to do that after all. Sending back the Duckworth skirt, which doesn't work for me. And really thinking, yet again, how simple dresses are, as opposed to separates, although it is nice to have some separates to give variety to the dresses . . .
AND now that I'm all cheered up, I suppose I should go and do something.
Oh, but before I do, feast your eyes on this pattern-clashing I was enjoying on my kitchen table yesterday:
Cheap cotton bandana-napkins for the win (I mean, they are actually bandanas that I use for napkins). Mixing up the country gingham with a little boho-pattern action, that's what I'm talking about.
MUCH LATER:
We went out tonight to the pub, since my husband will be out of town tomorrow and Friday. The food truck didn't show, so we took ourselves over to the friendly wood-fired pizza place, got some pizza, and came back to the pub for beer. It was poker night . . . usually we're there for trivia night, so this was new. We met some of the poker regulars, who are completely different from the trivia regulars.
I didn't change my outfit much, but did put on socks and boots for the evening.
I have really liked this outfit all day, I have to say. I felt guilty about buying the pink camisole (although it was unbelievably cheap for an Eileen Fisher piece --- like $12), but I LIKE SO MUCH how it works with what I'm wearing. I can envision so many things to do with it, so really, I don't feel guilty. I feel fun and bright, which is a good way to feel on a gray day.
I got these wool-blend socks at Target 3-ish years ago. They are the cutest socks I own, and they were fun to wear tonight.
Trying to decide what to wear tomorrow --- not that it really matters, but it's fun to get dressed, and to contemplate getting dressed. This is a big deal, because not so long ago I found getting dressed so stressful that I had anxiety dreams about getting dressed. That I feel confident and actually take pleasure in what I'm wearing and how I look in it is, again, a big deal. It's a big deal to put on clothes with pleasure, and then just go about my day feeling good instead of self-conscious. I've long maintained that the real trap of personal vanity isn't feeling too good about yourself, but feeling insecure about yourself, so that you can't stop thinking about how you look. The way out of vanity is to feel that you look great --- totally your best self, whatever that means for a particular person --- so that you can forget about yourself completely.
So I'm thinking maybe Fiona with my blue linen shirt tied over, because it's going to be warm again, and I haven't worn Fiona that way. It's fun to think about playing around with what's hanging in my closet right now, because potentially I could put together any number of outfits and be happy with them. But there's never a day when blue seems like a bad idea. We'll see what I feel like in the morning, but I'm making a note of this thought because I want to remember in the morning the outfit idea I had tonight.