The livin' is easy: porch table set for dinner last night. A cold supper: pasta salad with fusilli and snipped-up garden herbs and greens marinated in garlic and this good olive oil which our daughter's in-laws sent us from California, plus an Italian beet salad (sliced beets marinated in more olive oil, garlic, and basil), plus cold hard-boiled egg halves. And wine, because you know . . . Anyway, it was nice. Simple and nice and cold, which is the best kind of dinner in the summertime.
Here's the severely pruned-back forsythia by the front porch (the end opposite the table), with the yellow rose it's been propping up. I didn't plant this rose very wisely, i.e., in a place where it would be easy to train or trellis. Actually, it's been planted a number of places, since I bought it nearly 15 years ago off the clearance table in the garden center at the dodgy old Walmart in the space where the Tractor Supply is now. It's been in this spot for about a decade now, though it's definitely benefited, as has just about everything else, by the removal of our big front-yard oak five years ago. It's been sort of trellised on the forsythia all this time, but had been pretty much obliterated by it, as had everything else in that bed. Now it's just sort of floating there randomly, but it is budding and blooming (though the blooms are sadly brief), and it is visible.
The Viking Son doesn't come home until tomorrow night. He had made what he thought were plane reservations for tonight, to arrive home around 8 p.m., but woke up this morning to realize that his tickets were for a.m. instead, and he'd missed his flight. So now he's on one which is supposed to get in around midnight Sunday/Monday. His father remarks that he'll be right there to pick him up at 8 Monday morning.
Today that father is up and out to give an address for the First Saturday Marian devotion after Mass at the Abbey, and I'm sitting here with my coffee, finishing a Sun essay I'd begun last night. I don't like to work on the weekend, but I'd gotten up with that essay on my mind, so I figured I might as well tie it off and paste it in. This takes us through Friday the 23rd of June. Next week I'll knock out more essays, hoping really to get them all done, through late July. I can't quite do 5 a day, usually, but I can handily do 2-3. Doing that every day, I can cover quite a bit of territory quickly. The trick is to look at the poems and have them in my mind, where I usually start to formulate something I want to say about them.
The essay I've just finished is about the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer, who was a fascinating figure. If you have some free articles left for the month and can access it, there's an interesting New York Times article about her house and garden which is eminently worth reading. Her Wiki entry is good, too.
So this week I've written about Spencer, plus Ben Jonson, Edward Thomas, John Keats, and Shakespeare: for Midsummer we're running the fairy's speech ("Over hill, over dale . . .") from A Midsummer Night's Dream, which should be a lot of fun. My next five are William Blake, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Christopher Marlowe, George Macdonald, and William Carlos Williams. Stay tuned . . .
The paywall at the Sun is a pain, I realize. We've had some vociferous social-media complaints when we've shared the Poem of the Day. Registering for the free email digest gets you a rather meager 2 articles a month (as opposed to the standard 5 at places like the New York Times), which is better than nothing.
Wearing today, for a mundane Saturday when I'm probably going to putter in the garden a lot:
Wet hair + Sierra + thrifted Birks. That's it. That's the outfit.
Kinda boring, but she'll do. And the wet hair completes the lewk. I was running out of shampoo and conditioner, so while splurging on everything else, I also splurged on a couple of new hair products that I'm pretty happy with. Mind you, they don't give me Influencer Hair. a) I am not an influencer. b) I ain't got that kind of time. But given that I don't put time and effort into styling, I get results I like with
*Treluxe Reflex Serum
and
*LUS Irish Sea-Moss gel
Again, these are both splurgy items at upstairs of $25 each. I've never spent this much money on a single hair product in my life. I use them spaaaaaaringly, let me tell you, and I'll be diluting them with water until the last residue is gone from the bottle/tube. But I like them. They're both pretty moisturizing products without being too moisturizing, which has been the problem with the Love, Beauty, & Planet shampoos and conditioners I was using. Those products were weighing down my hair, making it limp. It was soft, I grant you --- and my hair has never been soft or smooth. But it didn't hold its own waves, either.
Unlike some of my children, I don't have real curls. What I have are waves that can go all shapeless and flat. I don't mind sacrificing definition for volume---I didn't refresh my Day 3 (or 4?) hair yesterday, but was pretty happy with how full and shiny it still was.
This is most people's "before" hair, I realize. But I really am not going for the super-clumpy curl-wave look that's all over Instagram. Just . . . natural, healthy hair. At this point, several days out from washing, I still had, you know, nice enough hair. I could wet my hands and get it damp and scrunch a little, and some defined waves would emerge.
I'd done that just the day before, in fact.
This is the kind of thing my hair does well: nice plump round waves. I was on Day 2 here, I think, or maybe Day 3. Can't remember whether I'd washed my hair Tuesday or Wednesday, now that I think of it. I usually wash it to go out Thursday night, but this past Thursday I didn't really have to. It still felt clean and springy, and all I had to do was emulsify a little serum on my hands and smooth and rake it through, then follow with a little gel emulsified in water.
What I like about the first picture, from yesterday, is that even if my hair isn't styled, it's still shiny and holding some shape, not just hanging there. And it's easy to refresh, even if all I do is use some water on my hands. It looks healthy and lush. The surface is still pretty smooth, not frizzy.
I've been using a sulfate-free dandruff shampoo with my conditioner and other products, because I have this persistent dermatitis. I've liked the b.h.s. brand shampoo I bought in the drugstore, but today, because I was out of the other, I tried Head and Shoulders Royal Oils shampoo instead. They've come out with a whole line of sulfate-free shampoos which seem to get good reviews, and are an inexpensive option. Anyway, since this shampoo is supposed to be very moisturizing, I didn't use a conditioner at all, just went right to a couple of dabs of the Reflex Serum smoothed and raked through, then the gel. It all smells very nice, anyway!
And I like that the gel isn't really heavy --- a decent hold, but it's easy to break the cast. We'll see how it looks when I've been for a walk to let it air dry. I do get really good results from diffusing my hair, but I try to avoid doing that whenever possible, just to spare my hair the stress. I only get it cut a couple of times a year, maybe three if I'm really diligent, so I try to preserve it from damage as much as I can.
Again, I am not a perfectionist about how it looks. I was fine with yesterday's hair, undefined as it was. I just want it to be healthy and to encourage it to do its thing --- not to be failed straight hair, but to be whatever level of wavy/curly it wants to be. I do love silky, straight hair, but I hate the trends that have driven women to feel that they have to straighten their hair, make it flat --- which is what straightened curly hair does look like. It does not look like the silky limpid tresses of the girl who really does have straight hair. It just looks flat. And often enough, it looks flat and damaged, because that feels safe, at least. I also know that for American women of African descent, there's a whole complex of associations around that very thing: the perceived safety, I guess, of straight hair. But I know other women who seem to have developed something like the same relationship with their natural hair.
Anyway, just as I'm here for "the old face is the beautiful face," so I am also here for "the healthy natural hair is the beautiful hair." And I'm here for the occasional product splurge, to help with all that. Again, I'm not spending hours, or even minutes, usually, on styling techniques. Yes, I've paid attention to them --- the brush styling, the finger-curling, the sectioning, the scrunching, all the things. And I'm still going to do what takes me five minutes and either be fine with however it turns out --- or it's a ponytail.
And now, thank you very much, I need to free the dog from her crate and walk with her in the glorious sunshine.
LATER:
Home from a fairly hot 2-mile dog walk, the highlight of which was a whole conversation, over a distance of some yards, with a woman walking a dog who hates other dogs when on leash, about how to deal with that. I was going to try for 3 miles, but we got off the greenway to avoid some crowds, circled back through town, with a lot of hot pavement and little shade, and decided, by the time we reached the railroad tracks, that we'd had it.
Now making some herb iced tea, which I haven't done in some days: lavender, lemon balm, bee balm, and mint.
A view of my house from across the street, with trees cleverly obscuring the house numbers.
You can't see the curbside daylilies well at all in this shot, but they are there, a-blooming.
Here I am, under the crape myrtles by the community-college parking lot, sporting my post-walk, mostly-dry, very gel-crispy hair.
It doesn't look like much. Really doesn't look like much more than it did when it was wet:
But I like that the ends are doing that punchy kind of curl, right there at the bottom. To me that's really the difference between hair that's done and hair that's not. It's not a big difference, mind you, but it's the kind of thing I go for when I want to feel that (in the phrase of one of my dorm-mates in the performing-arts dorm at Vanderbilt almost 40 years ago) I've got my hair together.
So I have begun to challenge myself:
Then the three pairs of leggings. This gives me, automatically, nine outfits for twelve days, before I have to repeat anything.
Merino patterned
Merino-blend navy
Cotton red
(maybe still also one pair of merino tights)
Warm layers:
Blue merino cardigan
Teal merino-blend tank for under
*wearing 1 dress + 1 pair of leggings + socks + hiking boots
*carrying my pullover sweater in my purse for easy access
That would mean packing only TWO dresses and pairs of leggings, i.e., PRETTY SMALL PACKING.
3 dresses x 3 bottoms x 2 sweaters = 18 discrete outfits, with no single outfit repeating itself entirely
These wearables, plus my hiking boots and the socks I plan to wear with them. Sweater and pashmina can go in my purse, no problem. I can even put them in a mesh bag. I still need to pack toiletries, but I have room for a quart ziploc bag of those in the biggest outside pocket. I packed my laptop, to make sure it fit, too.
It's clean, anyway. Just doing its clean, wavy thing.