I've traded my fjord views for this familiar one, and honestly, I'm not complaining. The fjords are beautiful. Norway is a great country. But it's not mine, and I'm glad to be home.
We landed around 11 last night. It was midnight before we got home, 1 a.m. by the time we put the ecstatic dog back to bed and crawled into bed ourselves. Bags are still unpacked, clothes need washing, life needs reordering --- but we're back.
And today is a holiday. Charlotte Mason says this about children and love of one's country:
"Before we teach children to criticize the institutions of their country, before we teach them to be critical of what is bad, let us teach them to recognize and admire what is good." (Philosophy of Education 126)
As adults, we do well to teach ourselves the same lesson. The world is fallen. Humanity is fallen. It follows that human institutions --- the nation-state, for example --- will be fallen as well, that no political vision will be free of corruption, any more than any other human endeavor. But love of one's country is a virtue, if a secondary one, flowing from love of God and love of neighbor.
It's not wrong to love our family, our most immediate neighbors. And it's not wrong to love, reflexively, the larger neighborhoods of our city, our state, and our nation. If we couldn't love people in their imperfection --- believing that bad actions don't negate the essential goodness of their being (and yes, I think we're becoming, at our baseline setting, a society that doesn't believe this, which scares me far more than any formal political movement could ever do) --- then we can't love anyone. Our love becomes a matter of until you screw up, which is not really love at all.
We don't have to love blindly. We can love someone and still maintain a firm boundary, not giving that person more power in our lives than their actions toward us merit. We can love our country and see its ills. We don't have to assent to those ills. Refusing to recognize them turns our patriotism into a form of idolatry, a disordered love. But then there's also something disordered about hating national holidays. It's disordered to feel that you have to make these holidays occasions of protest --- and especially to sneer at people who just want to celebrate them.
Granted, the Fourth of July has never been my favorite holiday. It's always hot. I don't love summer cookouts (though the husband plans to grill hamburgers tonight, and that's just fine by me). My dog is terrified of fireworks. But once I get her settled in her crate with CBD treats and the white-noise machine, I'll go out to the parking lot across the street to watch them. It was cool, last night, as we were taking off from Boston, to look out of the airplane window and see fireworks going up all along the New England coastline.
And I don't feel that I have to hedge that assertion with a lot of but of course as we all know caveats. Yeah, we all know those caveats. We all know them so much that to repeat them would be tiresome. If there's anything a holiday is good for, it's that it gives us a break from the ordinary tiresomeness. Just lay it down for a while. It's okay, truly morally okay, to have a good time sometimes, and to love something not for what it is, but simply because it is. That is how God loves us. If we can't love in that way, letting go the strings we want to attach to our love, then we really are doomed.
Speaking of people we love, the Artgirl is coming home today, and I am happy. It's been a month since I saw her face, and even though I typically go many months without seeing those four beloved faces, a month right now seems long somehow. Maybe it's just that until this summer, we've always had somebody at home. The cast changes, but always somebody. And now, sooner than we'd expected, suddenly we don't. I'm not sure we'll see the Viking at all between now and the start of the fall semester --- he's in Dallas (I'm not sure where; he doesn't seem to be living with his sister at the moment), and there he will likely stay until Thanksgiving. Everyone else is grown up and hasn't spent a summer at home since . . . 2015, I guess. Nine years.
The phase of having children seems to go on and on and on, but I'm here to tell you: it doesn't. You blink, and a decade has gone by since people were in the immediate web of your life, every day --- the people you'd still lay down your life for without thinking, even though they don't actually need you to do that all the time anymore. They want you to be there on the phone when they're ready to talk (which fortunately for me is pretty often, depending on the person). But you wake up and realize that it's been . . . ten years or more? . . . since your first child really needed you, the way she needed you as an infant and toddler and small dependent person --- and that's sort of weird. It's even weirder when your baby . . . isn't a baby, definitively. I mean, granted, some people are still driving our cars. They're not completely self-supporting. But they're launching. They want to launch. It's good for them to launch. I'd be worried if they didn't want to, or weren't getting it together. Still, it's a weird place to be, a little.
Hard to believe that 30 hours ago I was here:
Wearing this:
For a journey starting here, the world's calmest airport:
Now I'm back in my regular old selfie spot in the bathroom. My wool dresses are in the wash. I told myself I was wearing linen when I got home, and so I am.
Actually, here's a rare shot showing my underwear, which doesn't look much like underwear and could actually function as outerwear, though I'm not wearing it that way today:
Okay, not all my underwear. The black bike shorts I leave to your imagination. But one thing I like about all these longline/crop-top bralettes I wear, which are really the only bras I wear anymore on a daily basis, is that they can function as clothing in themselves. They ride up a little as the day goes on --- one reason I'm not just wearing this Pact longline crop top as a top is that it becomes a little too much of a crop top for my comfort level. But when it sits right where I put it, when I first put it on, it's a nice camisole. I wouldn't not wear something like this.
But the silhouette is also more bodycon than I'm really feeling today --- as if I ever felt like wearing bodycon clothes, but anyway. What I'm feeling is more of the kind of thing I usually feel: some flow, some drape, some artiness, some soft, muted texture.
*Secondhand Flax navy tunic, bought April 2024, last worn the Sunday before we left for Norway (it was still on the drying rack where I'd left it when I undressed that night, to get up early for the plane the next morning).
*Secondhand NY&Co linen-cotton-blend red maxi skirt, bought January 2023, last worn, surprise surprise, on Pentecost. One reason I'm wearing it today is that if I don't wear this skirt on Pentecost and the Fourth of July, when will I wear it? I really like red, but I don't wear it all that often.
*Secondhand Birkenstock Mayaris, bought April 2024. I changed into them last night after going back through security in the Boston airport, because suddenly it was hot and I didn't want to wear hikers and socks anymore. I did leave my leggings on, a good choice because the plane was freezing, but wow, welcome back to summer.
Derek Guy had an interesting thread the other day on the site formerly known as Twitter, on why color charts are an insufficient guide to choosing your clothing. "You can't approach style in this pseudo-scientific way," he writes in his opening salvo, and I think he's right. Rather, he's onto something that I hadn't really consciously thought about before, but that explains a LOT about why a given outfit feels right or wrong when we wear it.
It's not bad to have some working knowledge of color theory and an open mind about what goes with what. That was my chief, and most lastingly helpful takeaway, from Nat Tucker's free Make It Look Easy course. I would not pay money for her program, mostly because it seems really formulaic, women all wearing the same basic look all the time. And a lot of that actual look I don't like. But I did like a number of the foundational principles, and I did buy her Brilliant Colour Combinations ebook (available at the same site, if you're interested), which I still think was a good expenditure. I have used it a lot over the years, mostly to expand my idea of what colors go together. That's been massively useful and empowering to me.
But what I think Derek Guy gets at is the missing piece of how we read outfits --- not just colors, but here he is focused on colors --- as part of a whole cultural language. Sometimes our comfort or discomfort with what we're wearing has to do with us, that in some way the vibe of the outfit is out of sync with our own energy, personality, image, whatever. But sometimes it's out of sync with the unspoken language of the culture we're operating in. So one of the questions it's helpful to ask ourselves is: How do I feel about this discord? Is it something I want, or is it not?
I can think of lots of ways in everyday life that this harmony/discord in cultural language might play out. The most immediate one, the one my daughters, for example, had to navigate as teenagers, was the context of a fairly conservative homeschooling community with both explicit and tacit "modesty" standards. You can feel out of place pretty fast if you're not wearing a maxi skirt (bonus points if you're wearing an infinity scarf that you can use as a veil at Mass, and you kind of slump around in your clothes like maybe existing is something you have to apologize for . . . I see this body language a lot, and possibly it's just that nobody's mothers tell them to stand up straight anymore, but it does communicate something, whether the woman is conscious of it or not).
But here's another example I thought of, from my own high-school years in the late 1970s and early 80's. I came of age in the preppy era. More than that, I went to an actual prep school, and then to a university with, at the time, a very prep-school vibe. I was not unaware of the cultural language around clothing: what was in, in my world, was the look of old money. Kind of sloppy chinos. Faded, soft madras cotton plaid button-down shirts, Tretorn sneakers (which looked terrible on my long, thin feet, as Converse later did).
There was a color language. For girls, pink and green were always right, as in hot pink and lime green. You either wore some more feminine version of the faded madras colors the guys wore, or you could wear Lilly Pulitzer neon patterns. In early high school, at the end of the 70s, you could still wear Gunne Sax dresses (I had one for formal dances in 9th grade) and things like that, and be kind of late-hippie in your vibe, but that quickly got lost in the whole preppy thing.
So, sometime in high school, like maybe 10th grade, my mother made me a skirt that I really liked. Actually, she made me several skirts from the same pattern, a kind of modified dirndl that buttoned up the front. They were great skirts, hitting at mid-calf, a length I still love (see what I'm wearing today), not too full but not too straight, very easy to dress up or down and wear with everything. I mostly wore dresses or skirts to school, because we had a dress code, and while you could wear pants (except on Fridays, which were dress-up day), you couldn't wear jeans, which were the only pants I ever really felt comfortable in. Chinos, made for a male or boyish frame, did nothing for me --- though I could not have articulated why I didn't like to wear them. I just thought I had the wrong kind of body.
This particular skirt I'm talking about was my absolute favorite. I don't remember the fiber content of the fabric, which I'm sure I never thought about. I only remember the color, a kind of rusty red. Nowadays I really wouldn't wear that color, because it's too orange to go next to my face, and most things I have don't really go with orangey colors, but back in the day I loved it. I wasn't wearing it next to my face, for one thing, but also it just felt warm and bright and nice, and I wore it all the time.
The thing I wore it with most, in combination with some Oxford button-down shirt or other, was a very old Fair Isle cardigan that had been my mother's in high school, in the early 1950s. I had a number of her cardigans --- I still miss a cropped charcoal-gray cashmere one that I wore into my 30s --- but I adored that Fair Isle cardigan. Its main color was a kind of muted, heathery blue-green, the kind of color I still love to wear (witness most of my current wardrobe, including everything I wore in Norway!). One of my favorite outfits, an outfit I wore on repeat, day in and day out for most of high school, was that cardigan, that rust-red skirt, and some fairly neutral Oxford shirt, blue or white or possibly pale yellow. All the time, baby. With sneakers and crew socks, because except on Friday, when you couldn't wear sneakers, that was what most of us wore with our dresses and skirts.
So one day, when I was wearing this skirt, this cardigan, and some Oxford shirt, I asked my friend Glennys, out of the blue and for reasons I can't now remember, "Does this sweater go with this skirt?" And she looked me up and down and said, "No." So although I adored that combination, I never wore it again.
Looking back, I can still see the heathered blue-green against the rusty skirt, and honestly: it's a nice combination. There is nothing wrong with soft blue-green and rust-red. In fact, if you're a person who wears rust-red, those tealy greens are a color family you're going to be reaching for, even though they're also a color family someone with my coloring reaches for. The correct answer to my question, if we're just talking about color combinations, is not no, but yes. My enjoyment of those colors together, which I learned to mistrust because I was insecure, was actually right, not wrong.
BUT. Here's what I think my friend Glennys meant. This was not a color combination that people in our environment wore. It wasn't part of the Memphis Old Money Preppy Code of Conduct. It was not a color combination you'd wear to an Ole Miss football game --- not if you wanted to go through sorority rush. It wasn't part of the language, and so it looked wrong. It was like a vocabulary word that nobody else knew how to read. I probably did look weird (I know I looked weird a lot), but not because the colors together were bad. They just didn't translate into terms people readily understood.
Again, I was insecure. And I didn't know that I could make a conscious decision --- to fit in or not to fit in --- and that there wasn't really a wrong way to go. I made the completely reflexive, unconsidered decision to fit in, because that was hard enough anyway, and if I saw an opening through which I could pass unnoticed into the crowd, I was going to take it. I wanted to be memorable, but not for being a standout dork. Did my outfit choice, that skirt and that sweater, make me a standout dork? Glennys, who loved me but was honest, said yes. So that was that.
If you want to know why I write this blog and obsess about clothes, in large measure it's because I am still talking to that sixteen-year-old girl whose friend told her her clothes were wrong. There was a lot that sixteen-year-old girl didn't know, about anything. I won't even go into all the various ways that sixteen-year-old girl was clueless, or the things she did out of cluelessness (let's just say that her mother liked the boyfriend she had that summer WAY too much, which meant she didn't have a curfew, which was always kind of inconsistent anyway, which meant . . . a lot of things that aren't relevant to the purview of this blog).
Anyway, I'm talking to that girl. She hated her body. She hated her hair. She hated her feet. She hated her personality. She wanted with all her heart to be an entirely different person from the person she was, because the person she was was all wrong. That is to say, that the templates for what made girls attractive and desirable to the people around them (not just men, but definitely including men) didn't really look like her. Or she didn't look like them. So what was wrong? Obviously not the templates. It had to be her.
To that girl I'm saying: it's good to be aware that cultural languages exist, and that clothing is part of those languages. It's good to be aware that you can make decisions about how much you want to participate in a given cultural language. It's good to be aware that you can speak another language --- and that you are speaking that language, and that it informs your decisions in particular ways. You can stand in front of the mirror and identify what it is you're going for. You can evaluate your outfit choices in light of that objective, which gives you a way to make effective tweaks if something isn't feeling right, to reach a place where it does feel right.
You still might not look like everybody else, but that's okay. If you can identify why you look the way you look, and you're happy with that explanation, then you're good to go. If other people's opinion regarding your aesthetic still bothers you, then that's something to explore, but at least you can articulate the aesthetic. It's not Oh, you're wearing the wrong thing. Instead it's You're wearing this thing that you chose for this reason, and if other people don't like it, that would be their failure of imagination, not your failure to know how to put clothes on.
I will probably keep thinking about this, but now --- for the first time in two weeks --- I need to walk the dog.
PS:
Gooby picture, but I have paid some attention to my hair this morning, for the first time in two weeks.
This is the half-dry, just-back-from-walk view of hair that has been
*washed with sulfate shampoo to clarify
*treated with a 4-minute Glaze bond-repair treatment
*rinsed thoroughly, gotten good and soaking, then had LUS 3-in-1 squished and combed through, with plenty of water to distribute
*squeezed in a bamboo-fiber towel (actually the hem of a slip I cut off to be a camisole), then scrunched gently
*a pretty big dollop, like maybe a half-dollar size, of LUS Irish Sea-Moss gel glazed on and raked through and scrunched again
So because of the gel, it looks a lot wetter than it actually is right now. I'm air-drying it, though if I get impatient I might finish it off with a diffuser.
This is more than I did on our trip. For one thing, I didn't even take a diffuser. For another, I never bothered with gel. The 3-in-1 leave-in gave me some definition and enough hold that things didn't completely dissolve --- or if they did, I just put my hair up. I was not going to spend two weeks in Norway worrying about my hair. In fact, my general rule is that I'm not going to spend time worrying about my hair. I'm not going to spend a lot of time doing anything to it.
But this routine is generally quick, easy, and effective:
1. Shampoo
2. (Optional, every week or so) Bond-repair treatment
3. 3-in-1 leave-in
4. Gel for hold, smoothness, and definition
This is how I deal with what for years I just thought was bad hair, the "wrong kind of hair." I never straightened my hair or did anything chemical to it at all: no perms, no color, nothing. I'm kind of invested in living what God has given me. No judgment for those who do otherwise, but this is my comfort zone, and I see no compelling reason to leave it.
This Instagram account is probably my favorite for hair ideas, because her hair is a lot like mine in texture and behavior. I don't actually want my hair to look like hers, though. I don't want that level of definition, which is lovely, but not quite my vibe (I actually think it's kind of out of sync with her vibe, like too-formal, too-defined hair with a jeans-and-t-shirt aesthetic, but these are her choices to make, not mine). What I want is that level of smoothness with some definition, but a lot looser wave pattern. I do love it when my hair turns over in nice fat spirals, but I don't need it to be curls all over.
How I achieve the natural look I want --- unfussed, but not a mess, and with some shine and movement --- is to follow the kinds of routines she suggests (but usually simpler and dumbed-down for my level of desire for styled hair), but to use a wide-toothed comb, once my hair is dry, to break up the curl clumps a little. I don't brush it --- the only time I use a brush is when it's wet. But a wide-toothed comb helps me detangle and achieve the looser look I want, without dissolving all the definition.
And the gel, which I didn't use all through Norway, does help my hair have some backbone, so that the waves don't just all fall out, even if I comb them. I tend to have a better second or third day when I use gel than when I don't. It also helps smooth any hairs that want to spring up --- new growth, especially gray hairs, tends to do this, but breakage can also cause that kind of frizz. So part of the picture is that I treat my hair gently: scrunchies and clips, a silk pillowcase, and mostly sulfate-free, low-ingredient shampoo, with just a clarifying wash here and there and fairly regular bond-repair treatments.
It also frankly helps, in terms of managing my expectations, that I grew up in the 1970s, with that kind of ripply natural hair that people had (the era of beer shampoo, baby!) and the 1980s, when everybody had a perm. I really missed the whole straightening trend --- I was too young in the 1960s when girls were ironing their hair, and too old in the aughts and teens of this century, to care about that. I also think that over-straightened hair looks a lot worse than unmanaged wavy or curly hair --- it does not look or move like naturally straight hair, so nobody is really fooled.
And it looks unhealthy so fast that all that work seems . . . well, I won't say not worth it, because obviously to a lot of people it is worth it, but it seems like a lot of work for not a lot of real aesthetic value. It's just a participation in a particular cultural conversation that says a particular kind of hair is desirable --- and as with clothes, you can choose how you participate in that conversation, or whether you want to participate in it at all. Clearly I have opinions about this. I do notice when somebody's hair seems really damaged, and I notice that a lot of it looks like straight-iron damage, though a lot of damage is also obviously from over-coloring.
My opinion is that whatever your natural hair looks like, and however unhappy it's made you that it looks that way, it probably looks better than it looks in the aftermath of whatever you've done to make it not look that way. But this isn't really a position, and it's certainly not a judgment. Why people make the decisions they make, with regard to their self-presentation, is always complex, often rooted in some kind of emotional trauma --- and most importantly, that person's decision to make. I can't stand on the outside of that person's experience and go, Ew, does she know how bad her hair looks? I wouldn't do that, even if I could. That's just uncharitable and mean, and I don't want to be that way, ever. But I would like, if I have the opportunity and the opening, to encourage her that maybe she's beautiful just as she comes, and that there are ways, gently and gradually, to start to live with the reality of her body (including her hair), instead of being at war with it.
Again, I'm really talking to the sixteen-year-old who wore the rust-colored skirt with the blue-green cardigan until her friend told her it was wrong. But maybe I'm talking to you, too.
**By the way, I think I'd identify the cultural language of what I'm wearing today as Southern Gothic Old-Money Artist. I hate invoking socio-economic class, but for better or worse, it's part of the aesthetic. The same circumstances that permit securely wealthy people to wear faded chinos and washed-out (but originally very expensive high-quality) cotton button-downs also permit women in those circles --- who are potters, maybe, or painters, or printmakers, or something in the visual arts (and frankly, many of the full-time working artists I have known have had family money, which is how they could be full-time working artists without waiting tables on the side) --- to wear loose linen trousers and tunics, and their hair twisted up with a paintbrush stabbed through it to keep it off the neck in the heat. It's a whole vibe that says I can afford not to think about my clothes too much. I often wonder whether you can consciously create that vibe, or whether your consciousness of it wrecks it. You can see that I'm not really one of them! But I can articulate that that's the appeal of today's outfit for me, that it channels that ease. Also, it just feels good on a day with a high of 96F.
LATER:
Wow, I'm tired, but getting things done. I've washed all the clothes I took to Norway (hand-wash cycle/cold, for all wool and the couple of pairs of underwear that needed washing) and hung them on the line to dry. I've made up the Artgirl's bed, folded some sheets, napkins, and kitchen towels to put away, and run the vacuum a little. Slowly, slowly, I'm getting my ducks in a row, which is essential to my mental health, or I wouldn't bother. Just doing it all it little bursts, then taking a break, then bursting again to clear my field of vision of clutter and disorder, because I'll be happier once it's done.
Hair:
I washed it, as described above, around 9:30 this morning. Here's how it looks right now, at 1 in the afternoon, having been out in the sun. It's almost dry, but doesn't look it:
That's because of the gel. Even when it's really dry, the gel cast means that it will have this wet, kind of clumpy look.
Fortunately that's good, and it's not the end result. Once my hair is really dry, I will scrunch out this cast and gently break the clumps with my wide-toothed comb.
What I'm glad to see in the meantime is that I don't have much "wet frizz," which is exactly what it sounds like --- frizz you see when your hair is wet. That usually means product buildup of one kind or another, but I used a sulfate shampoo today specifically to eliminate that possible issue. Not seeing wet frizz means I haven't overdone my products this time, either: I washed out the bond-repair treatment sufficiently and didn't use too much of the 3-in-1 (a tiny bit of that goes a LONG way, and you want to be sure your hair is full of water, and/or that you emulsify the product with water in your hands before you smooth it into your hair).
A lot of times when I do have that kind of frizz when my hair is drying, it's a signal that my dry hair is going to be over-moisturized, mushy-feeling, oily at the roots, and droopy, not holding the natural wave pattern that emerged when it was wet. Getting the product balance right, which usually is code for less-is-more, means dry hair that's shiny and clean-feeling, with some bounce and body and oomph of its own.
I applied another dollop (probably quarter-sized) of gel just now, to smooth down any flyaways and add some extra hold to my ends. Somehow, no matter what my hair does, I feel better if the ends have some definition, instead of just kind of petering out into a little shapeless frizzle, the way wavy hair can do. I often refresh my hair the next day with damp hands and a little bit of gel, to shape the ends.
Gel really is the bomb. I like foam, too (I use Not Your Mother's Curl Talk Foam a good bit), but it doesn't give quite as hard a hold as even this relatively light-hold gel. The thing about gel is that it does give you this crunchy wet look, which is a pain until you break the cast. That's the secret --- you have to break the cast. If you have all day, you can air-dry your hair, as I am doing, and just deal with the gel cast when you feel like it. If you have somewhere to be, then you have to diffuse your hair dry. But if you were going to blow it out anyway, or flatiron it, or curl it with a curling iron, you're not going to be spending any more time on your hair this way than you otherwise would. And the results are pretty reliable. You have to play around to figure out what amounts and processes work for you, but once you do find a product you like and figure out how best to use it for your own needs, then you're good to go.
People say that the longer you leave the gel cast in, the better. Some people don't break the cast until the next day --- I guess they have nowhere to go? These are also people who wash their hair maybe twice a week, which might not be you. Sometimes it's me, sometimes not. Anyway, some people plan their week around when they're going to wash their hair, so that they have a day (the washday) when it doesn't have to look good, so that for the next three or four days it does look good.
These people are also using sleep protection between washes, to keep their hair in order. I sleep on a silk pillowcase --- I took one with me to Norway, in fact --- because there are lots of benefits to silk pillowcases, including but not limited to silk's low impact on your hair. My hair is a lot less dry, a lot less tangled, with a lot less breakage, since I started using a silk pillowcase. I have not leveled up to using a silk-lined sleep bonnet, but people do use them. And I can see how, if you've basically invested an entire day in doing your hair, you would want to preserve that investment for as long as you could. I don't think I'm quite that invested, but it is a thing and worth mentioning, I guess.
While I'm reveling in my crunchy gel hair, here are some more Instagram accounts I like for hair stuff. I've probably listed them before, but in case anyone is reading this at all new here, I figure I'll list them again:
This isn't a long list --- I don't spend all my time reading about curly hair. But I'm always glad when these people cross my feed. Their hair doesn't necessarily look like mine. I don't really have "hair goals" as such. But these are people with common-sense tips and techniques for tweaking your textured hair into a style you like and can live with: products, techniques, haircuts, and more.
So, since my brain doesn't want to think about anything, really, I thought I'd have it think about this, in the hopes that it might help somebody today.
HAIR UPDATE:
Here's the post-scrunch-fluff-gently-comb result:
This might or might not be another person's cup of tea as a hair look, but what I like:
*loose waves
*shine
*curled ends for a slightly finished look
It has some shape around my face. It feels thick and full. I got rid of all the crispy feeling, but left in as much end definition as I could, so that it has shape overall.
My default setting is that I don't mind that my hair has texture. Again, growing up in the 70s and 80s probably helps my mindset. Stevie Nicks was the icon, and her hair was wild. It also helps that I've known a lot of arty women with hair like this, so I can tap into that cultural discourse and be like, Here I am! I fit in here.
So anyway. My husband just got home with groceries, which is good because I'm starving.