What I love about February in a single photograph.
Great night's sleep last night. Thank you, new bed.
Today I want to read --- this book for the review I need to write, but also Little Dorrit (a reread) for fun.
I'll also walk with Dora, maybe a little longer than I have been doing lately. It's a chillier day today, in the low 50sF instead of the 60s, but that's okay. We don't need to rush spring too hard. I would like to cold-sow some more lettuce seeds --- I need to ascertain when it's safe to put my current butter-lettuce seedlings out in regular beds. Tonight the low's supposed to be 26F, which seems a little cold for them, even though they have been outside in milk jugs all this time. Still . . . lettuce is a cold-weather crop, so I hope the answer is SOON. We don't usually drink milk out of plastic jugs anymore, and I'm kind of loath to buy more, so I'd really love to be able to recycle the ones I'm currently using for another round of seeds sometime soon. I also need, before too terribly long, to start some blue false indigo indoors. My office windowsill, actually, would be the perfect spot for some seed-starting, and I'd love to have some thriving seedlings to put out in April.
But in the meantime I'm going to wash my hair and get dressed.
A LITTLE LATER:
I had a bit of a play-around in my closet this morning, since it's Saturday and I have nowhere in particular to be and nothing in particular pressing upon me to be done.
Here's the base outfit:
*Wool& Willow dress (M) in Wisteria, bought February 2023
*Secondhand Allbirds slate-blue tencel-merino leggings, bought January 2024
*Darn Tough Socks, bought last summer
*Xero Tari boots, bought summer 2022
I bought this dress last year thinking it would be just the thing for Lent and Advent --- but I've worn it far beyond those purple seasons. This time of year, the fresh soft springlike purple feels especially welcome.
When I take my clothes off at night, I generally fold them on the hamper in the bathroom, by the bedroom door, where I can pick them up and hang them to air or put them away the next morning. So yesterday's purple linen skirt was still there, waiting for me when I was ready to get dressed today. I hadn't really expected it to go with this dress --- I thought the dress was bluer/grayer, the skirt more purple. But actually, as I discovered, they harmonize quite well.
I'm never entirely sure about this dress worn over things as a tunic. I worry that it's weird. But I think I kind of like the idea of the skirt as a slip/underdress to extend the length of the dress. I like this mid-thigh length, but sometimes I wish it were a little longer --- there are places (e.g., church) where I wouldn't wear it just as it comes. So if I wanted to keep the swingy shape but have some added length, this could work.
Alternatively:
Elastic-waist skirts can be a little dodgy --- things don't always stay in place as securely as I might like. But this works, I think. In any event, I'm pretty gratified to know that I can wear this dress and skirt together. It's a combination I hadn't really considered, and my consideration of it extends my wardrobe possibilities by at least two outfits.
Another outfit idea:
The big shirt. Here, I'm not entirely sure that the purples work together. But I'm also not entirely sure they don't. A big shirt over a swing dress can get a little boxy, but on the other hand, it's a fresh change from always wearing a cardigan. Again, a solid option I hadn't really considered before, but now it's on my list of things to wear.
And while I was putting on big shirts:
Green is purple's most perfect complement, so unlike a number of other non-purple items in my closet, this thrifted tencel shirt was already a definite inclusion in my loose Lenten wardrobe capsule. It's what I'm wearing right now, at least partly because I know it would be my husband's vote, among the things I've tried on. He loves this shirt. Green is his favorite color, and every time I wear it --- but most especially this shirt --- he remarks how nice it looks, and how good the color is on me. And while I am not really dressing for, as they say, the male gaze --- if I were, I'd dress in an entirely different way from the way I do dress --- I appreciate that the male whose gaze actually matters to me likes certain things. It's no skin off my nose to make him happy.
Actually, he likes the purple shirt, too. He seems to like these menswear-ish things on me --- he loved what I wore Wednesday, for example. Mind you, menswear-ish things are far from the only things he likes on me. My Brooklyn dresses are big winners, and not because they make me look like Annie Hall. Again, I'm not really dressing for men, I don't think, though I like men and appreciate their attention. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. By attention, I don't mean men yelling down the street after me, which mercifully is one of those things that stop happening as you age. I don't miss that one tiny little bit. I still occasionally get the creeper eye, up and down, and I hate that. It makes any kind of normal conversation impossible --- what can you say to somebody who's just undressed your old self? Good grief. Or, well, actually, goodbye.
BUT there are a thousand unspoken ways that men and women signal their pleasure in each other's company, and while that pleasure is probably always going to have some erotic strand, sexual attraction doesn't have to be, and often isn't, the main driver of interactions. You can feel attractive without sensing that the man talking to you is so focused on your anatomy that he's not hearing a word you say. Or to put it another way, the world is full of good men who are capable of a) finding a woman at least basically attractive as a woman and b) still interacting with her as if she were fully human, as indeed she is.
ETA: This works both ways, of course. It's entirely possible to find a man attractive and just . . . have a normal conversation. Normal, platonic interaction is not nearly as difficult as people sometimes seem to think it is.
Anyway, all of this is part of the pleasure and interest of social life. That seems to hold true even as we age, though obviously . . . well, the world is increasingly full of men whose mother I'm old enough to be, and that changes the whole experience a lot. But it's good to have, right here in my house, the one man whose gaze actually matters. I might find a lot of men basically attractive (and believe me, I do --- I notice men a lot), but I'm only ever going to sleep with one of them. And fortunately for me, he likes the way I dress.
Oho. And I have just been asked out to dinner by that guy, so score. He messaged me from upstairs, or I'd have said it was the outfit.
(Incidentally, I'm not going to pretend actually to know anything about men. I have known a lot of men, some as quite close friends, and have been married to one of them for almost 34 years. But I still feel in my bones that men and women are largely foreign countries to each other, which is precisely why we're interesting to each other. I can kind of parse the elements of that interest, but do I actually know anything? No. I do not.)
EVENING UPDATE:
I have done a killer barre/pilates legs routine, then been taken out to dinner in Hickory, where the restaurants are, by the guy who is now making tea.
Evening amendment to the day's outfit:
Kind of a perfect brew-pub outfit. All I did was add taller, darker boots to make it an evening-ish look. The man remarked over the table how much he likes this shirt. Yes, I said. I know you do. (I don't know much, but I know what I know)