My beloved blue sage, still blooming until the first frost --- in other words, for quite a while yet.
Overnight the temperatures were in the mid-50s Farenheit; today's high is 82F. Again, not bad. I actually wore my Aran cardigan to walk the dog last night and am wearing it now, over my nightdress, to keep warm in the cool house this morning.
The other night we heard a lone cicada --- the last one standing, apparently, of the millions that generated the summer's backdrop of pulsating noise --- rattling away somewhere in the dark like an old man clearing his throat. The crickets have been here all along, but now their thready note is audible, their quiet farewell chant. In the ravine behind the gym, a big skunk appears every night. We hustle Dora past before she can glance that way and lose her mind.
I need to water the kitchen garden today. After a rainy summer, suddenly we're experiencing a dry spell, and everything is looking withered.
It's the husband's first late night of the year at school --- he thinks the campus group he sponsors is meeting at last. This might not be the case, and he might be home for dinner, but the plan right now is that he won't be. Much as I enjoy his company, I don't mind these evenings on my own. I'll eat some kind of small pieced-together dinner and watch a British detective show --- although I'm running out of them. I've finished Inspector George Gently, and I have only one episode left of the new season of McDonald and Dodds.
This latter is only an okay show, I think, notable chiefly for Jason Watkins, who makes art of any role he plays. The writing is fairly meh. And his partner in crimesolving is curiously uninteresting, though she may seem less interesting than she is simply because she has to play against Jason Watkins. But I watch it, because Jason Watkins, and also because it's set in Bath, which is eye candy even when its denizens are all dropping dead. But after George Gently and its tour-de-force writing and cast --- Lee Ingleby, as the young DS making every stupid mistake in his personal life, like really tanking himself in a way that makes you want to scream, the way you want to scream at Kristin Lavransdatter, is notably brilliant in that show --- nothing else is quite going to measure up.
I really don't want to watch the third season of Broadchurch, even though the first two seasons were, again, brilliant. I know it was conceived as a triptych, but I think it works just fine as a diptych, and having read a general synopsis of the third season, I think I'm going to continue to pass. As much as I like police procedure, there's only so much darkness I can take on.
Meanwhile . . .
The usual stuff.
*Dog walk
*Mass at noon
*Peck at my own writing
*Write an essay
*Research for lecture
*Try to figure out some Substack things, so that we can offer a premium of some kind to our long-term full-price paid subscribers
Just, you know. The usual stuff, as I say. Think I'll wash my hair now and get dressed.
Speaking of getting dressed, I saw somewhere on Instagram --- and I know I'll probably never find it again --- a post from somebody in South Carolina about dressing in the fall, when your weather isn't traditionally fallish. Now, we are having some cooler weather (see above), but I liked what she had to say, which can be summed up thus:
Fall Colors/Summer Fabrics
Of course, this can get problematic if what we often think of as fall colors aren't really our own colors. I love gold and orange, but I don't wear them. My best and favorite colors run from the tender shades of early spring (soft gray greens, periwinkle) to intense, saturated seaside colors (teals, blues, blue-greens, magenta). How do I wear these colors and not feel like a day at the beach? How do I cope, generally, with autumn when it doesn't feel like autumn?
*Light fabrics, but sleeves (the 3/4 sleeves of my Willow and Fiona dresses are perfect for this season).
*Maxi skirts and dresses: It's too warm for tights and boots, but bare legs feel, again, like a day at the beach. The third way here is a longer skirt or dress that swirls over your bare legs, so you have some seasonal coverage, but no fabric actually on your legs.
*Remembering that eventually it will get cold and I will miss sandals
This is a partial and ineffectual list, but it does detail some things that I think about when I'm getting dressed at this time of year. It probably also helps that I'm not really a pumpkin-spice kind of person --- I do not want those flavors in my coffee or my beer, and I don't care for those colors on my body. I just wear what I would normally wear, with these few adjustments.
Today, for example, I'm wearing:
*Wool& Willow dress (M) in Wisteria, bought February 2023, last worn August 26. Total wears to date this year: 15
*Secondhand Garnet Hill cotton-modal lantern maxi skirt. Bought June 2024, last worn August 29. Total wears to date this year: 9
*Secondhand Birk Mayaris, last worn yesterday, default summer shoe
So, I had put this skirt on my plan for the week, but thought that today, instead of the pink merino tank and cardigan I have often worn, and love to wear, with the skirt, I'd try my Wisteria Willow as a top. This soft periwinkle and soft grayish green are perfect complements for each other, and with 3/4 sleeves, I don't think I'll need a cardigan, even in church.
I can very easily add tights and boots to this outfit in cold weather, and a cardigan as well. I suspect that this combination will be a staple in Advent and Lent. For now, though the colors aren't really autumnal, the silhouette here isn't really summery. This feels like a nice balance. I don't want to look all dressed up and costumey, like I'm trying to have Some-Kind-of-Girl Fall, but I don't want to look like . . . well, again, toes in the sand, I guess. I could change into Mary Janes, but I like my Birks with this skirt, and as I say, the time is coming when I will have plenty of leisure to miss wearing them. Might as well enjoy them today.
Having last shampooed on Sunday, I washed my hair because my scalp felt itchy, but I didn't feel like styling it again. I really wanted to wear an updo, which I would have done anyway as a Day 3 option if I hadn't washed it. Instead, I shampooed it twice, scrubbing my scalp with my silicone scrubber, added two pumps of LUS 3-in-1 with more water, to give my hair slip so that I could detangle it, then once it was combed, I squeezed out excess water with a microfiber towel, braided it and folded it up and clipped it with my big metal claw clip. It can just dry this way, and I'll decide tomorrow what I feel like doing with it. For now, it's up and out of my way, and I like the more restrained shape with the billow of my maxi skirt.
And on with the day.
PS: Ashley at neverhomemaker has questions about communities related to clothing brands --- Wool& comes immediately to mind, as well as Not Perfect Linen. Why? she asks. Why these communities? Why do these brands seem like cults?
And, I mean, people in those communities joke about their being cults, which on the one hand people in actual cults don't do, but on the other hand, yeah, we're all acknowledging that brand loyalty can verge on that kind of experience.
With Ashley, I'm interested in why.
There might be negative answers, chiefly that all we've done is move the goalposts of our consumerism and found ways to justify it. I'm not saying that that's not true. We can start to look on our consumerism as a form of community service --- look at me, I'm supporting the cause of sustainable fashion --- but beyond a certain point, if we're being honest with ourselves, we're still just buying stuff.
But I think there are positives, too. She notes the human desire to belong, and to signal belonging through self-presentation, i.e. the clothes we wear. Like any human desire, this desire is not wrong. It's valid. Of course we want to belong. Even those of us who like a lot of solitude still crave and need connection with other people. We are social creatures. The theologically minded might say that our desire for connection and community is at root a sign of our desire to be part of the life of the Trinity, which is a community of three within the singular Godhead. We are made to connect and belong --- it's written into our very being as the Imago Dei.
And really, unless your community is actively dysfunctional and destructive, who's to say that it's wrong to belong to it, or that your reasons for belonging to it are wrong?
I think one reason women do gravitate toward these communities, beyond the desire to be part of a sustainable-clothing movement, is that they also desire validation for the way they want to dress. If you're going to swim against the currents of fashion trends, then it helps to have people there to tell you you look fine doing it.
And women listen to other women. To a huge degree it's absolutely true that we dress for each other, not for men. A man might like what we're wearing, but generally that's in the realm of you look hot, babe, which isn't, at the most basic level, the validation women are actually looking for. You look hot is NOT the same thing as you look beautiful. If a man says you look beautiful, most of us tend to translate that as you look hot. Depending on the man and our relationship to him, that's either welcome information or not. But if another woman says you look beautiful, we say to ourselves wow, I'm actually beautiful.
We don't just pull self-confidence out of thin air. Nor do we pull self-hatred out of thin air. And let's face it: other women have the power to make us hate ourselves and feel insecure about how we look. Our mothers hold more of that power than anyone else, just because they're our most primal female relationship. But I can think of times when a friend said to me, that outfit is weird --- and I never wore it again. Something shriveled in my soul, and however I felt that I looked in those clothes, that feeling was gone forever. And I can think of times when another woman has said that I looked fantastic, and I thought, YEAH. I am here to SLAY.
So, that's how those communities work, I think. If you're going to wear off-beat clothing --- and both Wool& and NPL, to cite the most obvious brands, represent clothing that is off the standard fashion radar --- then you kind of need encouraging. Not everyone is a Queen Baddie. Maybe most of us aren't. And to be honest, maybe those iconic women (whose clothes, truly, I do not at all want to wear, ever) wouldn't themselves be Queen Baddies if they didn't have each other. Look at all the photos of them posing --- TOGETHER. I'm not sure that it's precisely that they don't care what other people think. It's that TOGETHER they can not care what people outside their support group think about them, because they have formed this support group.
Anyway, yeah, I guess there can be a status thing happening with these brand-loyalty groups. These are not inexpensive clothes (but fortunately you can, if you're assiduous, find NPL, at least, at real discount prices secondhand --- Wool& not so much). I feel, myself, that I'm at a point in my life where
1. I do actually have a little more money than I used to, and I'm not spending it all on groceries for a family of six
and
2. As I get older and, I guess, more set in my ways, I want nice clothes that I enjoy wearing, and while I'm not (at all) buying every new style that appears, and I'm not going to buy multiple big-ticket things every year, I am going to target clothes I really like and buy them.
My husband and I have been debating the aptness of the term investment piece, as it applies to clothing. He says that this is ridiculous: What you are making is a purchase. I say, well, yes, BUT. You spend the money on something you're going to wear over and over for a long time. Every wearing reduces the cost-per-wear. It's not really like getting money back, but it is . . . kind of, in your head, which is not to say that it's not real. The item doesn't exactly become less expensive, because you've already spent that money. But if it serves you well over a long period, so that you don't have to replace it, or don't want to replace it because you like it so well, then that is some return on the money you spent. It's not literally money back, but it is a return.
And the older I get, and the more clear I feel about what I want, the more I feel that I just want those things. Maybe not a lot of them. It's not like I'll just buy 37 dresses instead of a yacht. We're not talking that kind of tax bracket. But one major item per season, say, instead of five of the same thing in different colors from Amazon --- over time you do amass a larger wardrobe, because that one major item from last season isn't out of style (because it was never trendy to begin with), and it hasn't worn out. It's worth it to me to have that one thing that I know I want, rather than spend less money on more secondhand dupes that maybe don't work as well or last as long.
But again, it can be nice to have the affirmation. We all want to hear that we look good. And we all want to hear it from people who aren't trying to get us into bed.
AFTERNOON UPDATE:
Resuming this train of thought after Mass, lunch, and drafting an essay. I'm still really interested in Ashley's thoughts (linked above).
Her starting point, which I'm not sure I'd totally digested before, is the memory of being young and longing for status items --- things everyone else was wearing, but she couldn't afford --- that would signal belonging to a group. Where she moves with that idea is to the moment when she could afford those things, and the realization that even though she could have the things, the cycle had moved on. Everyone else was wearing or owning something else. Meanwhile, acquiring the things didn't actually transform her life in any way. They were, after all, just things.
I think we all go through this on one level or another. I can remember wanting Tretorn tennis shoes in high school, because everyone was wearing them. They were the brand. Of course, playing tennis was part of the brand, and I didn't play tennis, but that didn't really matter. It was the look.
I finally got a pair, and what I discovered was that not only did they not magically transform me into someone who could pass for one of the popular girls, but also they just looked stupid on my feet. It was my first real experience of clown feet. White shoes that make your already long, skinny feet look longer and skinnier and weirder? What's not to love about that?
This was the preppy era of the early 1980s, and looking back, I can see that no matter what I did, I just wasn't going to look like a prep-school girl. Never mind that I was a prep-school girl. I didn't look good in Tretorns. I didn't look good in chinos or kilts. All the kinds of patrician menswear-ish clothes that marked you out as a private-school girl: I tried, but that wasn't my skin. I wasn't at all comfortable in it. And no matter how assiduously I put on the uniform, I didn't ever quite fit in.
Mind you, I'm not raising this as a lament. The only thing I'm really sorry about is that I didn't see myself clearly enough, or have the social courage, to be kinder and truer to myself, even if it meant being out of sync. I mean, in a lot of ways, I was out of sync. But I thought that was a problem, not just . . . you know . . . a fact and a valid identity. And there you have adolescence in a nutshell.
I don't remember still trying to obtain the same things once I was older, but I've certainly had, repeatedly through my life, the perfectly human expectation that some possession --- a clothing item, a car, my own house, whatever --- would make my life click into place. And of course it doesn't. Ever. Things are just that: things. If transformation is going to happen, it's because I cooperate with grace in some way, and that grace enacts some change in me. It's not going to happen because I put on a dress.
But that doesn't mean that clothes aren't fun. I know that when I've stumbled on images of the brands I chiefly wear (though my closet is honestly pretty eclectic), I've thought, oh YEAH. I like that. That's what I've been looking for, and I didn't even know it existed until now. Something in me knows that that's how I want to present myself. It's nice that other people do, too, and I have met some wonderful people through the communities I've passed through, but if there's one thing I've learned since high school, it's that the things that signal belonging to a group don't always affirm me, as an individual. And the older I get, the more important that is to me.
It's an interesting conundrum. Clothing is a social language. In fact, it can be a complex of social languages. It can signal that you're inside the group, or it can signal that you're outside. You might not feel like more when you acquire a given item, but it's easy to feel like less when you don't have what everyone else has --- or at least, what you perceive everyone else to have, which is not quite the same thing.
That's another really high-school-level problem that you hope you mature out of eventually: simply not seeing other people because they're not wearing the clothes that signal in-ness, in the group you want to belong to. Of course, in my own small school, there just wasn't a lot of diversity, of any kind. We were all girls. We came from more or less the same background, though in those days there was more income disparity than I think there is now, when the same school costs essentially what my kids' university costs to attend. There were cliques and groups within the overall community --- but those cliques weren't signalled by clothing. We didn't have uniforms in those days, but everybody dressed, or aspired to dress, the same.
But you might subtly not see a girl who wasn't wearing Tretorns and chinos. You'd be too focused on what everybody was wearing, and defining everybody as all girls wearing Tretorns and chinos. A girl not dressed like that would be simply nobody. You in your immaturity wouldn't stop to think that actually it wasn't true that everybody, literally, had X,Y, or Z. You would simply have cancelled out people who didn't have those things. Instead of saying to yourself that you maybe had another social group to belong to, you'd be hyperfocused on the one social group that struck you as real. But that would be --- so I tell my high-school self --- because your idea of reality was pretty limited, a fact that was making you less happy, not more.
I don't know whether any of this makes any sense. And I don't know to what extent it might apply to grown women who join groups dedicated to clothing brands. Surely we know that these are not the only clothes out there, that we have choices, and that at the end of the day, all these things are just things.
But maybe we don't know that. Maybe these things are just things, but I sure do seem to spend a lot of time thinking and writing about them. And that I can't really explain.
Also: reading East of Eden. It's making me want to vomit, but the prose is to not-vomit for.
AND: I've sold my Marine Blue Maggie dress for my asking price! Now I'm anxious that it's not perfect enough . . . though really it is in good condition. This is the first big-ticket item I've ever sold, so of course I'm anxious, wanting the buyer to be happy.
But I'm glad it's sold. I needed to do this a long time ago.