Wild roses probably not getting nearly enough sun in my Mary garden --- quickly becoming a deep-shade garden.
This new month belongs to Mary, fittingly, with all its blithe loveliness and bursting life. The birds are nesting. Everything's in bloom. The earth's in love with itself in the purest possible way. That terrible things are going on out there in the world doesn't negate the abiding presence of beauty. Terrible things are always happening, yet the earth, even in its fallenness, goes on renewing itself. So Hopkins wrote: For all this, nature is never spent. Granted, it's a lot easier to believe all this when bombs aren't falling on you and security is your norm. But I hope that to practice believing it now would mean that I'd still believe it in some terrible day when peace is no longer my own world's default setting --- that even in a moment when it all goes up in flames, I would still believe that there was, truly, a dearest freshness deep down things.
Anyway. Here, it is beautiful today, and I don't see that my noticing it and saying so either helps or hurts the general state of the world, or is more or less an insight than to notice and say that the world is terrible. It is beautiful, always, even in its terrors (here I think of the 20th-century English poet Ruth Pitter, friend of C.S. Lewis, and her great war poem, "The Sparrow's Skull"), but I am grateful that for the moment, anyway, this sweet fragile bubble of peace and safety rests undisturbed.
So it's May, Mary's month, and also a month of no-buy for me. This isn't a bad discipline, really: I tried and failed to do a whole year, but shorter seasons work, interspersed with short seasons of acquiring things. The first six weeks of this year were a secondhand-buying free-for-all, followed by a no-buy Lent encompassing half of February and all of March. Then an April Eastertide of reckless abandon. We're still in Eastertide, of course, though by now we can see to the end of it, and now feels like a good time to rest and appreciate what I have. I've been trying, consciously, to wear what's in my closet and not leave things untouched.
By now, of course, there's enough there that I do have to stretch a little, and my rotas for wearing things are longer. I don't think this is a bad thing --- what I lack in minimalist simplicity, I gain (I hope) in my clothing's longevity. I have clothes I really like, and I don't want to have to replace things too soon. Some of my favorite dresses are already, in their second year, showing signs of heavy wear, and that's a process I'd like to slow down as much as possible.
Wearing today, as it happens:
*Secondhand Japanese linen pinafore dress, bought November (?) 2023
*Secondhand cashmere-silk-merino vintage 1990s tank (I forget the label at the moment), bought January 2023
*Secondhand Birkenstock Mayaris, bought April 2024
An all-thrifted outfit today, in other words. I paid $28 for these Birkenstocks, and already they're probably costing me about $1 a day to wear. Or if not quite that little yet, soon enough the cost-per-wear will be even cheaper than $1. The pinafore dress cost less than $20, and I forget what I paid for this lovely tank, but it wasn't much, either.
I had bought this tank originally to be a warm base layer under my wool dresses, which purpose it serves very well. It's light and thermally regulating, the perfect long-underwear layer. But it's also a really nice tank. I love the color, and it's incredibly smooth, soft, and light. Today's high is 84F, and I think I'll be as fine wearing this wool-blend tank as I was wearing my wool dress yesterday. One of my aims in buying more pinafores and skirts, plus a couple of pairs of wide-leg trousers, was to give myself more things to wear with items like this --- since I already owned the items, that seemed a sensible expansion.
I've always loved the look of a little tank top under overalls, but have given up on the idea of owning overalls myself. I love them --- on other people. On me, given my height, the silhouette tends to be more round and stumpy than I like. The look I crave depends on having a birdlike frame inside the large overalls, and that's not me, really.
BUT I love pinafore dresses like this, not least because they can give the same idea with a more graceful free-floating line, that doesn't depend on the body's being any particular size and shape. The loose A-line pinafore over the close-fitting tank, with enough openness in the top of the pinafore that you can see that the tank is close-fitting: that's perfect. It's the right balance between the independent shape of the clothing and the gesture toward the shape of my body in the clothing, if that makes sense.
This pinafore generally looks better with a close-fitting top under than with a billowy shirt, which makes for too much of the same big-clothing effect. My husband loved my Ash Wednesday outfit, because he loves my purple linen button shirt, but to me the proportions felt off. It wasn't a terrible outfit, and maybe it was exactly as good as an outfit should be on a day of penance, but I felt weirdly off all day. On the other hand, an outfit like this feels in balance. It's the same pinafore, skimming my body. I'm really not revealing anything, unless shoulders are too much (some people think they are, but I choose to ignore them). But the close-fitting tank under the body-skimming pinafore suggests that there is a body in there --- not in a salacious way, I don't think, but in a way that's kind of anti-gnostic. No, really, there's flesh and bone here, not just a head and hands and feet and then clothes full of air.
I guess I'm saying that there's a sweet spot between bodycon clothing, which really depends on the body's own silhouette, and clothing that implies that there's no body in there at all, to have a silhouette. I can understand why some people tilt in one direction and others in the exact opposite. Neither extreme, in my view, is as honestly attractive as wearing clothes that say, Yes, the body exists, and I'm comfortable with mine --- which don't totally hide the body, and don't totally expose the body, but hang well on the real body that's in the clothes, to acknowledge its reality. For many of us who don't happen to have actual bodycon bodies, clothes with graceful necklines and bodices but a good bit of grace, I guess, in the rest of the fit, work pretty well --- showing up our faces and arms, skimming the rest without swamping it.
ETA: What I think works about this outfit, too, is that it's largely composed of vertical lines, albeit slanted ones (A-line). There's always the danger of looking too much like a triangle, but that's where the drape of the fabric comes in. It's not so stiff that you can't discern a body underneath it. I can see why this silhouette might not work for someone a lot more buxom than I am, just because it would be harder to see the body's shape under the drape of the dress, when the front profile, I guess you might call it, is holding everything out and away from the body. Princess seams might work better, and/or the kind of longline 90s dress that curves in at the waist, without having a fitted or set-in waist, before flaring out again.
But here, there's just a strong vertical line, with the extra lines of the tank underneath, which mostly (I think) would draw the eye up. And then there's the vibe, which is the really subjective part. My vibe is natural, earthy, outdoorsy, unstructured, fluid, open-air . . . that kind of thing. So I'd want my whole outfit to add up to that vibe, always. Even when I'm really dressed up, not knocking around the house and neighborhood with the dog, that's the vibe. Whatever I'm doing, whatever the occasion, the idea is that I'm not wearing a bunch of disparate pieces --- I'm wearing an outfit that coheres around the vibe. You might or might not like this particular vibe, but that doesn't matter to me. I'm the one who has to wear the clothes, not you. Your job is to find your vibe, and make the pieces you wear cohere around that vibe, and be happy in your clothes and in your skin.
Anyway, that's a lot of overthinking, but I think it explains why I feel good in my clothes today. As it happens, I am happy in my skin. Meanwhile, I'm wearing my way around my closet: I forget when I last wore this tank (I think it was under something in the cold weather), and I last wore this pinafore about two weeks ago.
The sun is shining and it's about time to take the dog out and water the kitchen garden. Then on to the day's work, ever waiting to be done, ever increasing its volume no matter how much of it I did yesterday . . .
ALSO:
Not to be missed: my man Derek Guy comparing the British presenter Piers Morgan's attire with that of Kermit the Frog.
AND WAIT, HOLD THE PHONE:
My new Xero hikers have arrived.
I had tried to buy these same shoes on Poshmark some weeks ago, and the seller never got around to sending them, so I cancelled my order. But then I saw another pair, again for more than half off the original retail price, and I thought, You know . . . I still like those. This seller was a little more on the ball, and here they are, on my feet.
I'm really happy with them. They're far lighter and slimmer than standard hiking shoes --- actually cute enough just to wear as sneakers. I'm not really a sneakers girl, by and large, but I do like my Xero Oswegos as a casual closed-toe shoe option, and I like these in much the same way. They look outdoorsy enough not to be just your standard street-style sneaker, and they're not either glaring white or really dark, which I like. This greeny gray will work nicely with all my clothes, for a medium level of contrast with my hemlines. I also like the wide toe box, both for its accommodation of my problem feet and for its silhouette. My feet are really long and narrow, and I like a silhouette that doesn't make them look like skinny clown feet. The shape creates a nice balance with the shape of my legs, too.
They'd look better with leggings, and/or with a shorter skirt, than they do with this pinafore:
For me, as a shorter person, open-toed sandals tend to look better with a midi-length skirt, since they add more illusion of length. But this combo isn't bad, and I don't mind wearing it to walk the dog.
These will pack really easily in my carry-on backpack, or I could opt to wear them on the plane.
So that's pretty much my last April purchase, before the onset of this no-buy month. I did also buy a slim travel wallet --- my old wallet is both bulky and falling apart, having been given me for some gift occasion by a very sweet Viking, probably ten years ago. I've been noticing how much room this wallet takes up in my belt pack/cross-body bag, especially when I also want to carry my glasses case, to change in and out of sunglasses. So I thought a new one, with anti-scan protection, was in order.
AND the husband's blue Smartwool long-sleeved tee came. It's a hit. He wore it over another merino tee last night, for a light extra layer when we walked the dog in the dark. I might look for yet another wool tee for him sometime between now and the time we pack for Norway, though honestly, he seems pretty set, as do I.
OK, really, on with it all.
BEDTIME UPDATE:
Wore my new Xero hikers all day, as it turned out, and they're pretty good. Definitely jazzed to have them for travel.
Having some knee and lower-back pain today, though, possibly from trampolining yesterday, after several days off. I think I'm going to break down and take some ibuprofen before I go to bed, so I can sleep. Hip pain kept me up some last night --- I need to go back to doing abductor exercises, I guess.
We had a run-in with a loose dog on our walk tonight --- our neighbor's doodle dog, Billy, got out while people were coming and going from their house and came bounding across the street to see Dora, who was Not Amused. He's just a big floofy goofball, but she would have killed him if she'd had a chance, which . . . was fun and neighborly. The teenaged boys who'd let Billy out were massively apologetic, and I hated that they felt bad, since my dog was the jerk in this scenario (though not a totally unprovoked jerk, it must be said in her defense --- and it's quite possible that she was being a jerk in my defense, seeing big ol' goofy Billy as a threat to the major resource it's her job to guard). They are nice neighbors, though we don't know them well at all (Billy's is the only name I actually know in that household), and it would be nice to meet sometime over something a little more pleasant than a dogfight.
But now we're back, the rosary is said, and the jerk dog is stowed in her crate for the night. She was very apologetic afterwards, I have to say, crawling into my lap, putting her head on me, and so on. She doesn't especially enjoy those encounters, either. They wear us all out. So now we're going to bed, to sleep the sleep of people (and dogs) who've had a less relaxing evening than we had hoped. Whew.