There was something striking about this shadow of my table flowers on the kitchen wall this morning, something appropriate for the Feast of the Transfiguration, though I haven't had any coffee yet and can't tell you why. Maybe what struck me was a half-thought about how we see, or think we see, but through a glass darkly so much of the time. I suppose what I'm thinking is really more like Plato's Cave than that, since here are these shadows --- but I can easily shift my gaze from the shadows on the wall to the real flowers in front of me, which by now, having been on the table since Monday, are not as striking and beautiful as the shadows might suggest. The Transfiguration is a moment when the opposite occurs: human vision shifts, by an act of grace, not the will of the seers, from what isn't really a shadow, because it's real, to the startling and beautiful wholeness of its reality.
So a shadow on the kitchen wall is about as imperfect an analogy as you can find, but in its unlikeness, maybe you see more clearly the thing the analogy so imperfectly shadows.
Or maybe I need to get up from this table and pour myself a big cup of coffee and start over.
At any rate, the Transfiguration is my favorite gospel narrative, so I do love this Sunday feast.
The Fire Son called yesterday while I was driving home from the store, where I had bought my husband a new toothbrush. He needed one anyway, so maybe my knocking his old toothbrush into a sink full of blue dye wasn't the crisis it might have been. The son and I wound up talking for about an hour, in the car and then after I got home. He was just off a roll somewhere north of Missoula and very chatty after two weeks in the woods with no phone signal. It was lovely to talk to him for so long, a real gift. We were both hoping his father would get home in time to talk as well, but at last we had to hang up --- Fire Son said he'd call back today or tomorrow, as he has several days off before they gear up for the next roll.
I also spent some time sitting outside with Dora, taking various garden shots. Here's some lemon thyme growing in a planter on the patio:
I have four of these concrete planters, which are really nothing special --- you can get ones just like them at Lowes --- but came from my parents' house, when my mother moved ten years ago. My parents had a checkerboard of pavers as a sort of patio in a courtyard: the house made an L around it, and then the far side was a kind of brick-floored breezeway roofed by an arbor, on which trumpet vine grew. These planters were set one at each corner of the checkerboard (pavers and mondo grass, which first my dad, then the yard man, kept mowed) and had pansies in them in cool weather, something summer-appropriate in hot weather. I don't have anything like that kind of arrangement and have moved them around a lot without ever being really happy with the composition. Someday I would really like to extend the patio area out as far as the firepit, maybe graveling it instead of paving it, and put these planters at the corners of that currently nonexistent thing. In the meantime, I've filled them with things that I don't have to rip out with the seasons: lemon thyme, creeping phlox, and ajuga.
In other news, the Texasgirl reports that they have now had an arborist out to look at all their trees. She says that the firemen, the power, company, and the arborist all looked at the tree that fell and said, "It's the heat." It really was uncanny --- my husband kept wanting me to ask her what the rootball had looked like, and she said, "There wasn't one. The roots didn't come up." The tree had literally snapped off several feet up from the ground, and was completely hollow inside. They have a bigger oak closer to the house about which she is understandably worried. It's already sent its roots down into their sewer line, which was their first serious adventure in home ownership, shortly after moving in several years ago. She says she's surprised that that tree wasn't the one to fall yesterday, and that she still worries that it will fall on the house. So there may be some adventures in tree-cutting to come, a job which will be rendered less expensive and complicated by the loss of the other tree and the taking-down of the fence, because now the tree guys can get a truck back there. In the meantime, she hopes that this diagnosis of a weather-caused event will mean some joy from the insurance company. When we had a maple fall into Jane and Steve's side yard five years ago (shortly before the removal of the big front-yard oak --- the original plan had been for them to take out the maple, too), our insurance company said, "Sure, we'll cough up, but your premiums will go up $500 a year." Of course, in that instance, the tree just fell. And it was clearly a diseased tree, not a victim of any especially adverse weather conditions. Anyway, we decided that it was cheaper for us to pay the tree guys to cut it up and haul it away, and to fix our own fence, than to pay the insurance company $500 a year more for perpetuity. I'll be interested to hear what the Texasgirl's insurance company has to say about her tree and its manner of demise.
I also spent some time yesterday afternoon on Zoom with a friend whose book club I'm visiting (via Zoom) on Monday. It was a good thing we decided to meet beforehand to test the tech --- took her and her husband a while to get the audio channeled through a bigger speaker than her laptop's, so that people in the room can more easily hear me when I speak. It's going to be kind of a big group interview, for which she's sent me questions to prepare, which is GREAT. I've come to love it when podcast interviewers do that, because otherwise, when they ask me things like, "Who's your favorite poet," what I think is: Have I even read a book before? What are words? So I plan to spend a little time today reflecting on those questions and planning some things to say.
But first, there's Mass at 11. Wearing for it:
I reached for Audrey, largely because she hadn't yet had an August outing. I have worn her a lot this summer, but not really to church, so it's her turn for that. With her: my redyed linen big shirt, for a first whirl since its dye bath in "Evening Blue" this past week.
I wasn't necessarily going to wear purple Birks with this outfit, but there they were, and I put my feet in them, so I guess that's what we're doing. I like the play of muted soft colors with the smudgy dark dress.
I am also wearing one of my Kosher Casuals crop tops for more coverage with the lower Audrey neckline. I might add a second, longer necklace since I'm not wearing a belt, for a little more interest on my dress, but overall I like this easy, unstructured, flowy outfit. I can just flow into Mass like the ocean tide and ebb out when it's over.
But first, of course, before I go anywhere, I need to give the dog a walk.
PS: The weather app says our high today is only 87F, but wow, it's swampy out there. I'm grateful for light wool and linen on a day like today.
Also, the shirt was a little stiff after its dye experience, but is softening up nicely with wear. All it needed was some body heat, apparently.
LATER:
Home and fed after a very nice Mass. Many faculty and students are starting to trickle back, and there's the feel of a new energy, even in the heavy, sultry August air. It was nice to stand around and visit with friends we haven't seen all summer and to sense that wheels are starting to turn.
The bathroom is more or less recovered from yesterday's adventures in fine dyeing. I thought about wearing that scarf as a shawl today, but the linen shirt was a good move. I didn't have to fuss with it, it was cool and light, and the color is so soothing to look at. I thought I'd toss it off when I got home, but I haven't.
BUT I have played with my scarf. It's an exciting new development, especially having been, for its entire life with me, something I wanted to like more than I did. Sentimental attachment is real, but I'm here to tell you that that alone won't make you wear something you don't love to wear.
But now!
It's a wrap, folks. Like literally. It's the perfect summer wrap, lightweight, airy, and breathable. I could put on nicer shoes with this dress and go to a wedding. Look at that luxe blue!
The color is so beautiful I could drink it through a straw and never get tired of it.
Here's a close-up of the pattern:
I mean to ask you, is this not?
So, from an item I would reach for and then put back again, to what I think is going to be a staple in my wardrobe, all for the price of a bottle of Rit Indigo dye . . . yeah, I'm happy. It's worth a little blue stain in the bathtub.
(I probably won't wear it with marine-blue Maggie, but everything else? Yep. It looks great against greens, purples, and teals, not to mention dark charcoal grays. I'd include it in any travel capsule. It wouldn't make an airplane blanket the way my gray pashmina does, but it does make the perfect accessory, to wear as a scarf, a shawl, a sash, a head covering. Endless possibility!)
And now it looks as though a storm is rolling in --- hooray, especially if it rains. A growl of thunder now, and wind in the next-door neighbors' front-yard magnolias (and all the other trees, too --- it's just that I can see those from where I'm sitting).
And down comes the rain!
WHILE IT RAINS:
I've been doing a bit of closet inventory. I counted up all my clothing items, inclusive of jackets (but not actual overcoats), scarves, and things like tights (but not actual underthings, including crop tops).
The total: 72 items, I think. I'm never sure I haven't counted a scarf twice. But roughly that. If I were going for a round number, I'd say 70 items total, excluding outerwear and underwear.
The core of my wardrobe: 9 dresses.
Pullover sweaters: 3
Cardigans: 12
Leggings: 4
Tights: 12 (including 1 footless)
Knit shirts (tees and tanks): 5
Woven button shirts/tunics: 4
Jackets and blazers: 7 (but 2 of these are peacoats, so maybe they count as overcoats?)
Scarves, pashminas, shawls: 17 (whoa, and I've culled out quite a few, and will probably cull more)
So . . . and I admit that this is total navel-gazing. I begin to bore myself. But I like to KNOW these things. It's like calorie counting: you never think you're consuming that many calories until you actually add them up. And it's helpful to do that, to gain a realistic picture of what's going on with some aspect of your life, so that then you can make an informed decision about what to do: either nothing different, or else something.
I'm still looking at the shirts, hoping to cull out a few more, asking myself hard questions about what I really like wearing and what would be better off moved along to someone else. I was gratified to sell my Ibex tee last week --- wool items move fast on Poshmark. So I'm really looking at at least two more wool tees and thinking: how much do I really like and wear these things?
There's a compulsive part of me that would love for everything to be multiples of 4. What if I had 8 dresses (subtracting one)? 4 pullovers (adding one)? 4 knit shirts (subtracting one)? 16 scarves/pashminas/shawls (subtracting one)? Of course I already have 4 leggings, 12 tights, 12 cardigans, and so on.
There's no actual REASON to want multiples of 4, except that even numbers are kind of nice. They feel soothing and balanced, unlike odd numbers, which by definition aren't balanced. I didn't think I was mathy enough to have these strong feelings about numbers (one of my cousins as a child assigned each number a color --- she had a very strong intuitive sense of what color 7 was, for example, though I don't remember the color. She's also now an accountant). But apparently I do have these feelings about numbers. Threes are nice, for obvious reasons, at least for the Trinitarian Christian. Seven is good. Blah blah blah. But there's something so nice and symmetrical and calming about 4s.
I don't know. I probably will put more things up on Poshmark this week. I've already culled out some scarves, planning to list them, and I could easily subtract one more to achieve that golden multiple-of-4 I'm envisioning. I could subtract one of my blazers, and not miss it.
The multiple-of-4 rule tells me, meanwhile, that I don't need any more leggings, but then I knew that anyway. It tells me that maybe I really ought to think seriously about whether I want the Pact dress or not, and that if I wind up wanting another wool dress anytime in the next six months, I should probably move one dress (Camellia would be the likeliest candidate) to nightgown/ratty-wear-only status. On the other hand, I could stand to add one more skirt (a thing I do actually think about).
I dunno, maybe this is dumb. But one thing I considered while I was in Norway, living with my travel capsule, was that with four dresses, four pairs of leggings, two sweaters, and one pashmina, I could make a LOT of outfits --- and there was something kind of neat about the way the numbers went together like a factor tree. My real-life closet is sort of the reverse: the number of dresses I might have is more like a factor of the number of scarves, for example (assuming I pared each category back by one item). But --- and maybe this is just a mental game I am playing with myself for no good reason --- it seems as though a large integrated capsule would work together well if set up on this kind of mathematical principle. Again, I'm seeing some weird clothing iteration of factor trees, a thing I have not thought about since I last dragged people through pre-algebra.
Anyway, the rain has stopped now, but while it was raining and the laundry ran through its cycle, this was something to think about. Now I can stop thinking about it. Or can I?
*Things could be multiples of 3, actually. I already have a lot of that going on. It wouldn't be hard to reduce my shirt collections to three of eaach kind. I could pare back two scarves, or add one. I could add two more pairs of tights to give me 18 tights-and-leggings, as a category. Or get rid of one, so that I have 15, which might be a better idea. And so on.
Not that it really matters, but that's one principle for making decisions --- one kind of parameter. I don't think I'll ever have just 33 wardrobe items, but I could have some number that is a multiple of 3. Or 4. Or whatever. And that would be an easy way to tell myself what I do and don't need, what I would need to pare back before I added anything. It would be a focus, so that what was in the "frame" was what I would really wear, and not things I think I might wear someday, but . . . I do have an end of my closet devoted to, for example, black choir dress, mother-of-the-bride attire --- though I really should sell those dresses --- and a couple of other odds and ends that now that I think of it, I don't know really why I've kept them. If I haven't worn them in all this time, am I going to start now? That settles that, doesn't it.
I guess with the school year starting, people gearing up to leave, and all that, I have autumn cleaning and organizing on my mind, and clothes are more fun to organize than the kitchen drawers or the black hole under the bathroom vanity. So here's an organizational principle. Now back to reading Ngaio Marsh, until it's time to walk the dog again.