The kitchen table set last night for the husband's birthday dinner. We had steaks (chosen and grilled by him, marinated in salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce) with roasted-garlic/feta mashed potatoes and green beans. He wanted cheesecake for dessert, so I had the Artgirl pick some up, rather than making it myself, as well as a bottle of red wine. We had a fun, festive, candlelit time, the three of us, a lovely last dinner before the Artgirl goes off today to Texas, to get in some time in the ceramics and printmaking studios before her final semester begins next week.
German Epiphany dishes bought from a friend who had been cleaning out his parents' house after their deaths. He brought us a whole car trunkload of religious and other objects, worth far more than the $400 we paid him for the lot. Among those items were these beautiful dishes, which I used to fill out my Christmas dishes to serve twelve people at Christmas, but which I'm making a point of using --- not every day, but with some regularity --- during the "Weeks After Epiphany" in the traditional calendar.
Getting mileage out of the various Christmasy table runners I own, too.
It's good to continue whatever festive good cheer we can in the house: candles, bright warm colors, touches of Incarnational beauty. Right now the January weather is looking very January, leaden and cold with that peculiar Southern kind of cold that isn't actually in the negative numbers --- again, my friend in South Dakota laughs a little whenever I say it's cold here --- but penetrates to the bone nonetheless. When the sun shines, it feels brisk and invigorating, but when the weather is gray, it's just . . . cold. According to my weather app, the sun is supposed to come out, but it sure hasn't yet.
My hair was feeling kind of gummy, and my scalp itchy, so I got up this morning and took a bath and washed my hair, not putting any 3-in-1 styler in it, just some leave-in rice-protein conditioner that I glazed on after I got out of the tub. I didn't bother brush styling or anything, mostly because I wanted to trim my ends. I have to say, I am getting rid of the old layers, an eighth of an inch at a time, and it's nice to see them go away. The longer my hair gets, the easier it will be to trim, which is one more argument for letting it get long again.
And I'm considering what on my outfit plan I feel like wearing. Desires that spring to mind are things like color and softness. My plan for the day includes seeing off the Artgirl, plus the usual writing work, plus a little work on choral music, plus fish tacos at the pub in Belmont --- which I've been jonesing for for a solid week --- plus choir practice at the Abbey tonight, in preparation for Br. Chrysostom's Solemn Vows on Wednesday (for which I plan to wear my Marine Blue Fiona, since we don't have to wear choir dress --- it's nice and solid and dressy and unobtrusive).
Aaaaannnnnnd . . .
Wearing:
*Wool& Maggie dress (S/Long) in Aegean Teal, bought May 2023, last worn January 6. Wears in 2025: 3 (including once as an under-dress with my NPL Emerald Green Smock dress).
*Secondhand Garnet Hill cotton-modal lantern maxi skirt, bought June 2023, last worn sometime in Advent, I believe. First full year of wear. First wear in 2025.
*Secondhand O'Connell's merino cardigan, bought right after Christmas, December 2022, received early January 2023. Last worn sometime before Advent this past year, I think. Second season of wear.
*Snag merino tights in Crocodile, second season of wear.
*Xero Tari boots, third season of wear.
I tweaked my plan a little: I'd intended to wear my Ocean Teal Willow with this skirt, but somehow I always end up choosing this Maggie dress instead. I like the scoop neckline for one thing, and I always feel that I should wear it a little more often than I do --- though in fact it's not as though I hadn't been wearing it. It is a versatile under-layer/top with skirts, though, and I love it in this combination today.
In fact, I love everything about this a lot more than I think I had expected to. It's been a while since I last wore this skirt, and I kind of had to push myself to put it on, but once I did, I remembered why I continue to own it. It's actually the only skirt not currently in my outbox, because I do not wear skirts often, and when I do, I always reach for this one. I'm just not sure I need more than one skirt. Mind you, I haven't yet put the others up for sale. I'm just testing whether I miss them at all, once they're out of sight, safely in the sale basket in my study closet. I can always get them out again, but will I truly feel the need to? That's the test.
Meanwhile, the play of blues, teals, and greens in this outfit is very delicious to me. These are nice, warm, light layers, enjoyable to wear from a sensory standpoint, but also visually pleasing to my eye. I like buttoning cardigans like this: they look neater, I always think (unless the buttons are straining, in which case I would not button the cardigan), and showcase my waist, rather than obscuring it. As you can see, mine is a body with some curves, and a fluid fit-and-flare shape feels better to me than a straight line. In some quarters, the idea of flattering your body is suspect --- are you dressing for the male gaze???? --- but I think there's a positive, self-honoring sense in which you can want to align your clothing with the lines and movement of your body, rather than either flaunting it or, out of shame, swamping it in huge shapes intended to hide it completely.
That's easy for me to say, I realize, at my height and weight. There's a discourse right now on a particular social-media platform about women's height and weight (as related to fertility, actually, which is obviously not relevant to me, a 60-year-old woman who has been in menopause for the last 15 years), so in a spirit of full disclosure I'll tell you that I am 5'4, and right now I fairly reliably weigh between 146 and 150 pounds.
I would like to lose belly fat and build muscle, and my sense is that my ideal weight is more like 135-140, but whether I actually get there or not is not something over which I plan to lose sleep or develop a punitive relationship with food. The focus is far more health, strength, and muscle mass than it is a number on a scale. But I am back on my weights game, by which I mean that this morning I set my timer for a minute and did some one-leg deadlifts with a 10-lb kettlebell, a minute on each side, and then a minute of lawn-mower lifts (you put one foot on a chair and lift the kettlebell exactly as if you were pulling the starter cord on a lawn mower) for a minute on each side. I will repeat something like this later on today. I just keep my weights out and in my line of vision ---
--- and that, friends, with multiple short dog-walks throughout the day, is basically my fitness plan. I did build a little visible arm muscle this way last year, and that gives me a foundation to build more on. My big fitness goals are things like: always be able to get up out of a chair, always be able to sit down without collapsing with a noticeable flump, always be able to get up from the floor, always be able to carry a pitcher of water to the table and pour water into glasses without my hand and arm shaking. All that is, of course, contingent on my remaining basically healthy and not getting hurt. If I break my leg or get sick in some long-term way, then clearly all bets are off, and my goal will be surviving and regaining anything like normal function. But given that "normal function" is my baseline currently, my aim is to build on that for lasting strength and movement.
So anyway, meanwhile, this is the body I'm dressing, aiming for dignity as well as visual pleasure in colors, silhouettes, and drape. I really love the color and movement of this skirt, for example --- that's a lot more important to me than the fact that a voluminous maxi skirt can hide a whole world of cellulite, though that fact is not completely off my radar, either.
In another social-media conversation, I shared a "picture of myself from another era." Now, as it happens, I have plenty of other eras to choose from, but most of them would require my digging through a box and scanning in an old photograph, so I went for about the oldest photo of myself in my Google photos:
This is me in the early fall of 2008. We had just moved into this house. I was 43, turning 44 in November. The Artgirl, pictured with me, was 4, almost 5. The Viking had just turned 6. The Fire Son was almost 11, and the Texasgirl was 14, almost 15. I'm wearing a pair of overalls I remember being delighted to find at Thrift Town in Memphis, and my first pair of bifocals.
I was already in intense perimenopause and felt unspeakably old. But looking at myself in that photo now, all I see is how young I still was, the mother of still-tiny children. 2008 doesn't seem all that long ago, but when I consider that the child pictured here went out yesterday to buy wine for her dad's birthday, I realize how long ago it actually is.
At that time, I probably weighed roughly what I weigh now. I was on my way to weighing, at my non-pregnant heaviest, almost 170, just five years later. My 40s were not a great era, honestly, in many ways, and I don't think I felt good or pretty or anything but overwhelmed and wigged out by life changes for much of that decade. But when I look back at myself, I can see how pretty I actually was, how still-young, how full of life, even when I know that that's not how I felt at the time.
All that to say, I guess, that the present moment can be deceptive in so many ways. What we think we know about reality and ourselves is so often not accurate. We see with clarity only in hindsight --- which can also be deceptive, so really only in heaven will we not see through a glass, darkly. But what I thought about myself then, versus what I see about myself from the vantage point of the future, enables me to have compassion for a person who was not, at the time, sparing much compassion for herself. I see that as clearly as I see that woman's youth and beauty, and I forgive her for not registering those things for herself. She had a lot on her plate and on her mind.
What's on my plate now, though, is getting people out the door, and the dog out for a walk.
LUNCHTIME UPDATE:
*Saw the people off to the airport and to school for the new semester.
*Walked the dog, but there was still lots of ice in various places on my route, so circled back home, avoiding it, and did some trampolining to round out that part of my active day.
*Ate a little leftover steak and a rather generous portion of roasted-garlic-feta mashed potatoes (see No Punitive Relationship With Food, above) for lunch. Now drinking the first of multiple quarts of water --- the Artgirl gave me this glass water bottle in my Christmas stocking, and I love it:
It so much easier, somehow, to drink a lot of water through a straw. And I use these electrolyte drops, which don't have a flavor, but do give the water a thicker texture somehow, which weirdly I have grown to love:
I don't know where the husband gets these, but they're great. I keep them by the kitchen sink, where we have a filtered-water tap, and when I fill my water bottle, I just squirt a dropper of electrolyte liquid into the water and drink it. It's mostly magnesium and potassium, of which we all probably need more than we're getting anyway.
*Read the first two acts of Act II of Richard III. Man. It's good. I had forgotten how good. Horrific in lots of ways, of course --- I just read the death of the Duke of Clarence last night (stabbed, then drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine) --- and probably not at all historically accurate (read Josephine Tey's very fun The Daughter of Time for a corrective of our typical view of the historical Richard III), but as a play: so. good. All about divine justice, salvation, and the ways that transgression both disrupts temporal order and places man outside the divine order. Motif: people who are and are not sorry for their sins or view themselves as sinners in need of pardon and redemption (see, e.g., the first and second murderer in the scene of Clarence's death in Act I --- they are very much the first and second thieves on the cross with Christ, though they take turns in each thief's role).
See? I don't just think about clothes . . .
LATE AFTERNOON:
Taking a break after going out with the dog again. In just a few I'm going to leave to meet the husband at the Abbey, so that we can go have fish tacos, but here's what I've accomplished since my lunch break:
*finished and uploaded a Substack essay for Friday
*read through music for practice tonight
*made our bed
*took down kitchen towels and napkins from the drying rack, folded them and put them away
*stripped the Artgirl's bed and washed her sheets with some towels and kitchen laundry, and hung the lot to dry
*emptied the dishwasher and put dishes away
*started a small crockpot of (dried) Lima beans to make this recipe for tomorrow's dinner. Though we've been somewhat derailed by the birthday and having the Artgirl home, I am trying to cook through a lot of what we have in the pantry, which includes a good stock of dried beans. I am going to buy some milk, eggs, and meats, but really focus on pantry meals at least a couple of days a week.
I didn't do all these things in some huge wave of motivation, by the way. I did them in bits and pieces all through the day. No task was really urgent, with the exception of bed-making, which I always do (because I have built the habit), plus dealing with dishes in the sink (not that there were many), but I figured: might as well get things done. We have houseguests coming at the end of the month, and while I could put them both in the husband's office (dad in the bed, son visiting the Abbey on a mattress on the floor), it's just as easy to use the Artgirl's room for guests. She leaves it tidy enough that I don't have to do any major work to ready it, once the bed is made up with clean sheets. And the mattress is still in there from Christmas, so I could just make up both beds in there and let the husband keep his office to himself.
Either way, I thought I might as well deal with those sheets today and have done with it. Also, the sun is shining and is supposed to shine tomorrow, so it's a good time to leave things out on the line to dry.
I've also drunk more water plus two small glasses of kefir, which was both hydration and snack. I'll be hungry by the time we get to the brew pub, but kefir is good for taking the edge off.
I think that, before I go, I'll copy another quatrain of "Now Winter Nights Enlarge" and work on my memorization.