Rain really doesn't photograph, so you'll just have to trust me here. It's pouring out there. Watering my garden, making my seeds grow . . .
In here, I have a pot of pho-like soup (put together a little more quickly, with Aldi chicken bone broth and no actual meat) that I made for dinner last night. I don't usually use a meat broth on a Friday, but it is licit, and my stomach was upset, so I wanted comfort food. I found a pho ga recipe that looked followable, and it turned out really well. I used vermicelli rice noodles, not pad Thai, which I think is what this recipe calls for, and again, no separate meat (which kind of cancels the whole "pho" idea, but it was Friday). We had basil, cilantro, and mint from the garden, and I sent the husband out for mung bean sprouts. Again, it was pretty delicious, if not actually authentic restaurant-quality pho, and it's what I'll have for breakfast and probably lunch, too, today.
The husband has to go in to campus for various things, so my plan is to eat this pho, read the Artgirl's art-history paper (I read the Viking's junior thesis yesterday), and read Jane Scharl's new play-in-progress, another installment in her Rabelais trilogy, of which Sonnez Les Matines was the first.
Also, here's the cover design for my forthcoming book of short stories from Wiseblood Books, with woodcut art by the Artgirl:
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Launch day is August 26!
Now I am eating this leftover kind-of-pho, and it's very good the second day. More heat from the ginger, after sitting overnight. I was afraid the noodles might get mushy, but they're just nice and silky. We have had a pho restaurant here, but at the moment they're "temporarily closed," which means I do not know what, so I'm glad that when I get this particular itch, I can make something that scratches it. The only spice I didn't have on hand was star anise, but both anise and fennel seed have a similar licorice taste, so I just used a little more fennel seed, and the balance of flavors is at least plausible.
Meanwhile, wearing today:
*Wool& Audrey dress (S) in Black Heather, bought November 2022
*Crocs sandals thrifted by the Texasgirl, April 2024, and passed along immediately to me when they didn't fit her
OK, yeah, here is another contender for favorite dress ever. I would buy this design, too, in more colors, as long as they came in this tencel-blend knit, which I really love. Tencel gives the merino a little more weight and heft and sturdiness --- though as I write this, I'm reminded that actually, this is one of the dresses whose pocket I've had to mend, because a little hole had sprung up where the pocket is set into the dress's side seam. So maybe the sturdiness is illusory, but anyway . . . I do like the shape and drape here.
This dress does make me glad I've been working out, even as wimpily as I tend to work out. I'm not pumping iron here. I'm not deadlifting. I just do a few reps with some weights (like 10 lbs) pretty much daily in some fashion, in addition to walking and trampoline-jumping. All of it is meant to build some muscle, reduce fat (especially belly fat, that great menopausal bane), increase strength, and reawaken my natural metabolism. And I'll tell you . . . when I got this dress, it fit snugly across my stomach and hips. It's not too big now, by any means, but the drape really is a lot better. My belly is not flat, and I don't have abs to speak of, but it is reduced somewhat since last fall. This is all good. I'm not trying to be skinny, but I do want to be more fit than I have been, and it's nice to see some progress, especially given that I'm not exactly killing myself to make progress. My goals are all things like Walk a steep mountain trail without suffering too much. But goals like that do result in at least some degree of clothes-fitting-better, and I am not complaining about that.
It's not sunny, so I thought I needed a top layer. In the interest of continuing to wear my whole closet, here's the one I chose:
*Very old thrifted Gap gray linen hoodie
I can't remember when I got this. I'm pretty sure I found it at Goodwill. It's never looked as good with other clothes as I had hoped --- it particularly didn't look as good with jeans as I wanted it to, back when I wore jeans. But I like it with the long flow of this maxi dress, and when I wear it, that's generally what I choose to wear it with. I don't wear it often, but that's okay. It's not what I want all the time, but when I want something like it, there it is. And it's a good choice for a cooler day --- yesterday's high was about 85F, while today's is 73F --- that's not that cool, but is wet.
I like the contrast with my lowest hemline that these bronze-colored sandals offer, but also I like that I can go out in the rain in them without worrying about doing them any harm.
Dora is still tucked up in her bed, in the dark at the end of the hall on this gloomy day, but eventually I am going to have to rouse her and take her out.
NOON UPDATE:
Still raining, raining, raining. I finally took Dora out; we both got soaked (I did, even with my rain jacket on), so now the clothes I had on (see above) are on the drying rack, and I'm wearing warm cozy dry things:
*Wool& Sierra (S/Long) bought November 2021, originally Charcoal Gray, redyed with Jacquard Spruce in the summer of . . . 2022? I think? I think it was longer ago than last year, but maybe it wasn't.
*Secondhand Aran Crafts zip hoodie cardigan, bought fall 2023
Anyway, this dress has been worn hard in the time I've had it --- my reward dress from my 2021 100-day challenge. I still wear both these dresses, my challenge Camellia and my reward Sierra, on a regular basis, albeit as nightgowns and housedresses. Today it felt good to come in out of the rain and put on a total-body sweatshirt.
I wear this cardigan all the time, too, in the house and sometimes out of it.
I've been interested in this graphic that's been making the rounds, about the myth of thrift stores as a way of making clothes buying more sustainable. Now, I wouldn't call myself a zero-waste activist. I have left zero-waste groups because they gave me anxiety --- there's so much that's just out of my control (especially the prevalence of plastic packaging for groceries) unless I want to make zero-waste my full-time job, and I don't. BUT I also think a normal person can be mindful of a mandate to steward the natural world well, to remember that our discards and waste don't just disappear because we stop seeing them, and to adjust habits to minimize waste. I also think you can do this without beating yourself up for existing as a human being on this planet, which is the subtext of a lot of environmental messages.
Thrift stores, actually, are easy. I'm glad they exist, because aside from all the people who really like thrifting as a pursuit, there are people on limited incomes who need clothes, and you can find far nicer things in a thrift store than you could ever have bought for yourself. For years and years I dressed my kids and myself out of thrift stores and English charity shops, and I have no regrets about that. Clothing I've owned and loved for years came from thrift stores. And I liked the fact that I was buying clothes I want without adding directly to the demand for mass-produced fast-fashion clothing, with all the attendant moral issues.
The problem was that I also bought a lot of clothes I didn't really want. They were just cheap and there, and I thought why not? But then, though I had them, I didn't wear them. They didn't really fill the hole in my wardrobe I had thought they might, if I thought that way at all. In truth, mostly what I thought was, Hey, wow, here's a thing I don't own already. Dopamine jackpot! Ding ding ding!
So what happened next? After an appropriate period of hanging unworn in my closet, these clothes would go back into a trash bag, and eventually I'd get around to dumping that trash bag off at Goodwill. Back again where it all had come from to begin with --- only this time the items in the bag were less new than they had been, one more standard deviation in the direction of used, less desirable, less resaleable. Some things did make it back onto the rack, which I know because I went back to Goodwill. There's that, I'd think, while holding in my hand the next candidate for that. But for every that that I encountered on the racks, who knows how many things got sent to the dumpster, or shipped overseas as rag bundles, to become dumpster fodder in some third-world country, or ocean trash off its coast.
Now, legitimately, thrift stores are a good option when you need to get rid of stuff. Sometimes you have to purge your belongings, and if someone else can get use or wear out of them, then they should. A first option might be to resell what you can, though you don't always have the physical space or mental bandwidth to hold onto things long enough for them to sell via some online venue like Poshmark. Another option would be to donate anything that's honestly nice and usable, especially as work clothing, to a local clothes closet (Christian Ministries, around the corner from us, has such a clothes closet). In other words, everything is eventually on its way to becoming trash, but these are steps you can take to slow down that trajectory:
1. Resell
2. Sort clothes yourself and donate genuinely nice, usable, especially professional clothing, to a clothes-closet ministry
3. Donate what you can't resell or donate to the clothes closet to a thrift store
This can be non-problematic. What does become problematic is, as in an eating disorder, an established binge-purge pattern. You overbuy --- even telling yourself that it's okay because it's the thrift store --- and then you have too much, so you have to get it out of your house. Once every year or so: not a problem. Multiple times a year: problem. The thrift-store system can't handle continual massive influxes of potential, often largely unusable stock. Donating to thrift stores is less a problem than is the overconsumption, even of secondhand goods, that turns donations into avalanches of stuff.
Buying things is not bad. Essentially, it's good. It's what keeps a cash economy moving. Any economy in the contemporary developed world needs consumers. Buying things is good in the same way that eating and sex are good --- that is, it's good until you get disordered about it. It's good until your relationship with it is out of whack, and you're expecting it to do something it wasn't really meant to do, like solve all your emotional problems and make you feel better about yourself.
At some point I realized that I was rationalizing constant thrift shopping in a way that pointed to its being disordered. I was buying things I didn't really want and telling myself it didn't matter, because they were secondhand and cheap --- and then I was cycling them back onto the conveyor belt for the landfill.
These day, I buy things. I'm not a minimalist. I love clothes. I enjoy wearing them. But I'm trying to be purposeful about buying ONLY things I know I'll wear (even if I don't wear them all the time), and then wearing those things for a long, long time. If something doesn't work for me, I resell it. I've hung onto some things for over a year, waiting to resell them. Occasionally, if a daughter is home, I'll see if she wants anything out of the outbox. I have a handful of things I'm hanging onto for the next time I see the Texasgirl --- I couldn't pack them in my backpack to fly there last time I went, but they are things I think would look better on her than on me, and that she would like better than I do, and I can keep them until I get her yea or nay.
And sometimes I do still take things to Goodwill. But I try to make it a once-a-year thing, and to exhaust all other options for moving pieces of clothing out of my house before I donate. If something is really worn out, I repurpose it for kitchen rags or other scrap uses. If I can compost it --- and I have done this before --- I will, but most of my clothes have some nylon content that make composting not an option (alas). I don't want to turn into a hoarder, just to avoid ever sending anything to the landfill, but taking charge of my acquisitions and making sure that I wear and care for and mend and reuse what I have makes that arc a lot longer than it might otherwise be.
All of this is not taking into account what we all surely already know about the fashion industry and its dependence on the slave labor of vulnerable people around the world. That's why a lot of us get into secondhand buying to begin with --- to slow down the demand for production of new clothes and other things. The truth is that there are enough clothes in the world right now to dress an entire populated solar system. Overproduction, and the market forces that drive overproduction, is its own problem. As individuals, our power to shift those market forces is limited. But without taking some puritan or self-punitive approach to our natural desire for nice, pretty things, we can regulate our own habits of consumption at least a little --- and if nothing else, at least not end up with a house full of crap we don't actually want to use, look at, or wear.
And, yeah, having gotten that off my chest, now I think I'll go read about Rabelais.