Bedroom curtains drawn on a cloudy morning, after a night of storms. It's turbulent out there even now, with wind and more storms in the forecast. This isn't really how I visualize the Feast of the Assumption, although in truth, it probably is like this at least half the time in this part of the world. Kathleen Norris's beautiful little free-verse poem "Ascension" (included in Christian Poetry in America Since 1940), envisions a weather like this, though, with updrafts and downward pressures, the child leaving the earth of his mother's womb and "beginning the long goodbye," which is also his larger, freer life.
Of course the local church celebrates the Ascension on Sunday, but it's today that the Great Forty Days really end and the days of waiting begin, for the baptism that follows the great birth of the Ascension. Traditionally this waiting period was called Rogationtide, a time when parishes blessed their boundaries, or "bounds," especially the new crops and young growing things that fell within their borders. It is still the springtime, bursting with life and a sense of the future. Even the rains and storms are part of that vitality. Soon, soon, Pentecost will come, with the birth of the church and the settling of the year into summer (though of course the life of the church has often not been that sunny, and maybe our own long spells without rain signal the difficulty of the church on earth, with its fallen human personnel, as it tries but maybe sometimes not hard enough to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit).
Anyway, the curtains close on the season of the Incarnation, stretching from Christmas and the entry of God into human history, to now, marking His second birth into eternity, and his "long goodbye" to us. It's funny: Twelve days of Christmas always feel like such a slog, and then there's Lent, but the forty days of Easter wing by joyfully, feeling like the celebration they are. I always miss them when they go. I love Ascension and Pentecost, but they feel rather the same way that going on vacation very early in the summer feels. You go, and it's great, but then it's over, and you have the summer ahead of you with nothing in particular to look forward to, just one hot day after another. Yes, there are feasts, and beautiful ones: Trinity, Corpus Christi, Assumptiontide. But none of them is really a season. Granted, you do at some point need some rest from all the celebrations. If every day is Christmas, then Christmas doesn't mean much, and so on. Still, like a child kept up late for a party, I might be overtired, but the last thing I want is to go to bed.
ANYWAY. Other than the fact that it is the Solemnity of the Ascension, it's a normal Thursday. Rain is falling again, hard and fast. I had to dope Dora up with Benadryl at 2 a.m., because the thunder and lightning were making her hysterical with fear, and now she's sleeping in, as well she should. I sat up with her for a long time, bundled in my Aran cardigan and a blanket, leaning against her crate so she would calm down and go to sleep, and finally she did.
Not that I don't have plenty to do today. The progeny are rolling in, God willing, late tonight, driving straight through on the southern route from Dallas through Birmingham and Atlanta, spelling each other behind the wheel. I've got to strip and remake the Viking's bed, because the Fire Son has been sleeping in it, a night here, a night there, since January. If he turns up again, as well he might (and I hope he does), I guess we'll put him in the husband's office upstairs. Got to do some upstairs chores, at any rate, as well as writing another essay. The husband has a theology-majors lunch today, really a goodbye to their graduating seniors, and then tonight we'll hit the pub or the wine bar, whichever he decides he feels like. While it's not thundering and lightninging, I think I shall bathe and wash my hair and dress, to be ready for all these things as I decide to do them.
WEARING:
*Wool& Brooklyn dress (S/Long) in Beetroot, bought November 2023
*Secondhand Xero Mesa trail runners, bought April 2024
The day is so gloomy that something bright seemed indicated. Here's another contender for Favorite Dress Ever, a style I really love, so versatile, fun, and easy to wear. These days I don't feel quite so compelled to wear crop tops under these cross-bodice dresses, though I guess if I'm going to church I still will. This dress, with its Pacific-green twin, will definitely go into my backpack for the Norway trip next month.
I put on my light hikers, partly because I want to get used to wearing them, and partly because it's wet out, and I'm not wearing Birkenstocks in the rain. In truth, I'll probably put the Birks back on when I come back into the house, but these will be my outside shoes for today. I'll probably wear my Crocs sandals out tonight: dressy and waterproof.
The temperatures are warm, but the pervasive wet makes things feel colder than they are, so I put on a cardigan:
This is a brighter, higher-contrast outfit than I usually wear, but again, on a gray wet day, some extra cheer seemed called for. I can imagine this exact outfit as a uniform when I'm traveling --- this might well be the cardigan I pack this year, because it's lightweight but VERY warm. Last year I didn't need much warmth, but you never know. And in the evenings, even in the loveliest summer weather in Scandinavia, an extra layer feels good.
The nice thing about Norway, too, is that it's easy not to stand out too much as a tourist, especially if you're wearing a casual dress. I mean, you can always tell the people who've just gotten off cruise ships, mostly because there are so many of them all in one crowd, but otherwise, on the streets in Norwegian towns and cities, women are mostly wearing athleisure (as on the streets worldwide, really) or casual dresses. The Scandinavian countries, by and large, don't seem like real couture cultures, the way France and Italy do. Norwegian women tend to look . . . normal? Like not really self-consciously dressed, even though they look good. The look, insofar as there even is a Norwegian look, is a lot more natural, unfussy, outdoorsy, and colorful, with not so much black. And nobody really seems to be looking at you and thinking, You're not from here, are you? I mean, I don't know what people are thinking, but they mostly seem to have better things to think about than that, and to be nice when they realize that you're American (or just generally not from there --- I know what most of the world thinks about Americans, but the Norwegians just seem generally not to get too bunged about anything).
ANYWAY. These are my thoughts for this morning. The rain is slacking up some, and it's time to let the dog out and Get On With It.
P.S. It's a no-buy for me for clothes, but I can still buy things for my husband. This in itself is a little dopamine rush. In fact, he needs some more wool tees, and I've bought him a couple in the last day or so. His green Smartwool tee (bonus shot of my bag of resistance bands) ---
--- has incurred some damage, right on the front.
I'm not sure what caused these holes. Moth damage would be plausible, though I have not noticed any of the tiny detritus of Marth larvae that you'd typically find, and I washed this tee just the other day. My second thought is that somehow, in tucking it in, he's snagged it on his belt buckle, or otherwise stressed it --- though I don't know how you'd get that pattern of holes. I will try to darn it, but I doubt he'll want to wear it quite as much in its holey-and-mended state.
He had already asked me to find him some more secondhand wool shirts anyway. I bought him a blue Smartwool long-sleeved tee, which he's delighted with, and now I've bought him both a navy wool-tencel tee and a kind of ochre one. He still has two orange merino short-sleeved tees, plus the long-sleeved Devolt tee he bought last summer in Norway and the aforementioned blue one that I just bought him. So he ought to be pretty well set. I will tell him to examine his other wool shirts for signs of damage, though. I've put moth pheremone traps in his closet as well as mind and on the drying rack, and they've caught nary moth, which does not seem to indicate an infestation. These holes, plus the moth I found on drying clothes the other day, could just be flukes. BUT I'm not taking any chances.
My own drying-rack clothes are still in the deep freezer, where experts say to leave them 72 hours to a week. I tumble dried all the wool clothes in my closet twice on high heat and am being vigilant about checking for damage. I know what holes my dresses have had, and I know what caused most of them, so I'm not unduly worried. Again, no sign of male moths in the traps, and I keep my closet door open and wear my wool clothes regularly, all of which mitigates against a moth infestation. But again . . . we want to wear these clothes for years, and it's good to be careful.
On that note, I think I'll eat some lunch, especially since I never got around to eating breakfast, and then --- once the husband has cleared off to campus for the afternoon --- get on with housework and other things.
AFTERNOON WORK BREAK:
So far today I've walked the dog, changed the Viking's bed (because the Fire Son has been sleeping in it --- the Artgirl's bed has been made up and undisturbed for months now), cleaned the upstairs bathroom, and swept the upstairs hall, bathroom, and stairs. The kids won't roll in until sometime in the small hours of tomorrow morning, but their rooms are ready, their beds fresh and waiting for them to fall into them and sleep the sleep of people who have driven fifteen hours straight through.
AND I've drafted an essay. Not bad innings, really, for somebody who got started after lunch. Still haven't played Wordle, Connections, etc, but I can do that in my next break. AND I still need to get the upstairs shower liner out of the wash, put another load in, and change our sheets . . . housework, housework, but it's got to get done.
Meanwhile, my hair has dried. I haven't done anything to it: just washed with Head&Shoulders Bare, squished in a little light leave-in conditioner (Not Your Mother's Curl Talk Leave-In, which has rice protein), and let it air dry. As you can see, there's no question that I have wavy hair:
Just add humidity, amirite? The trade-off is that it gets coarse and frizzy when moisture in the air fattens it up, but on the whole I prefer that to limp. In its natural, unretouched, zero-gel state here, it's a little flat at the roots from air drying, and not all that defined or shiny, but . . . you know, it's not bad on the whole. The waves have some definition, and the ends look as though maybe I did do something to them --- they don't just kind of dissolve the way the ends of wavy or curly hair can tend to do (especially if they need cutting, and my ends could use a trim).
Again, not influencer hair, but I'm not willing to do what it takes to have influencer hair. I guess what's good is that if you've taken care of your hair, not punished it with heat tools (especially a flatiron), and have used gentle products that don't cauterize it every time you wash, then it will probably respond with gratitude. Also, if you can resist the impulse to brush it out, it will reward you with some semi-defined waves, at least (assuming that you have waves to begin with --- some people don't, which is fine). That's really what causes the "straight but poofy" effect that nobody likes, that leads girls to think they have "bad hair."
Interestingly, brushing while wet with a brush designed for that purpose (and after you've detangled your wet hair) has the opposite effect. You can get really defined waves or curls by wet brushing sections of hair (I did not do that today). Also interestingly, combing dry hair gently with a wide-toothed comb doesn't really result in the straight-floof look. Yes, you break up some curls, but they aren't nearly as obliterated as they would have been if you'd brushed your dry hair. I usually wind up combing my hair, though I try to hold off, especially if I have used gel and am letting the gel cast dry thoroughly. But I typically like the results I get from combing out my hair once it's dry --- very gently --- and this kind of scratches the itch to do something to sort it out.
I thought about maybe smoothing on some gel or mousse to quiet down the humidity frizz, but I'm not sure I'm going to bother. I can do that, and it would take two seconds, but I don't have to.
Back to work.
EVENING UPDATE:
Fixin to go out to the pub to meet our friends, who got thwacked by a storm last night and have no power at home. Nothing like no power to make a body drive thirty minutes for a beer with friends.
Wearing the same thing I've been wearing all day, with only a shoe change:
I did slick on some mousse and gel, just for fun, taking about two seconds to smooth each product onto my hair and scrunch it into the ends. Result: slightly less frizzy hair, though I did comb through it to fluff it and break up the cast. It's kind of settled into place now, and I am satisfied.
Also hungry and ready to go find out what food truck is on for tonight.