posts

A post from Wisteria & Sunshine on this first day of June. We are focusing on clothing this month…

Today was the day to bring armfuls of clothes from their Winter bins and hang them to air on the line. I brought my two bins right out to the clothesline and pegged each dress or skirt or blouse that I deemed worthy of the effort, the rest going back in the the bin for consideration later (meaning when Lesley has lost some weight!). I pegged them out with my new-old clothespins…a recent acquisition from ebay. A few years ago, when I was running low on clothespins, I found out that the last clothespin factory in the US had recently closed. The only clothespins available new are plastic ones (no thank you) and wooden ones made in China. China is known for its rather indiscriminate logging practices, which I didn’t want to support. So I thought to turn to ebay and was delighted to find an abundance of wooden clothespins on offer.

I wasn’t savvy enough then to always look for “from a smoke-free home” in the ebay listing, tho’ my box of attractive but smelly clothespins taught me that. I soaked that batch in some oxygen cleaner and dried them in the sunshine and they were good to go…if a little roughened from the water and light…two things they would continue to experience over the years when I inevitably left a line or two of wash to get rained on as a fairly regular occurrence. Many were lost, or gravitated to other parts of the house, until there was a rather motley and skimpy collection of clothespins left to me. Forgive me my casual laundry ways!

And so it was time to acquire some more and I started my now familiar routine at ebay when there is something we really need…a search for the item, then filtering it to “used” items, then scanning the offerings and putting the ones that fit my budget and taste on my ebay Watch list….or putting a high bid in right away and then forgetting about it until I receive the happy or not-so-happy email about the end of the auction.

Two weeks ago I received a happy email and was the new owner of more than a hundred smooth, lovely old clothespins. Enough to keep even me for a long time to come. They had their debut for the airing of my dresses and were such a pleasure to use. And I made them a promise to do a better job in shielding them from the elements than I had with their predecessors.

I’ve been thinking alot about Simplicity lately…what comprises it…and a large part of it for me is not to have to use many of my hours “getting and spending“. Tho’ it may take more of my hours to reuse and create from scratch and care well for what I already have than it might to find and purchase new things (tho’ it might just as well not, shopping online and in person can use up a good deal of time I find)…those ways nourish me and fill me with satisfaction instead of draining me and causing strain as the latter so often does.

So I am thinking of my worn, smooth clothespins…and the thrift-store dresses they are keeping on the line as the moonlit wind softly tosses them…and wishing that one of those simple dresses would do for the wedding I will attend next month…all the while knowing I will have to probably have to go on a Dress Quest in the weeks to come…sigh…

How do you feel about Getting and Spending?

Update this June morning in 2018…I did go on that dress quest several years ago and the brown linen dress I found has served me so beautifully ever since. Getting and spending makes up less and less of my world each year that circles around, but there is still such plenty, especially of peace.

If you’d like a garden of thoughts and pictures and company (when you wish it!) to visit whenever you like and be surrounded with ideas for a life more wildly simple, I am at the garden door ready to welcome you in…

Except for knowing there was going to be a wedding, and the name of the bride-to-be, I’ve been well out of the Royal Wedding loop until the last few days.

Even tho’ just a week ago Doug and I celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary, very quietly, visiting his mother in the hospital after knee surgery and doing errands, with lunch out and a toast with his father by way of celebration. There are banner anniversaries and there are the sort honored with an unspoken summing up of it all in a long, private look, yes? And even tho’ May, as much as June, seems to be ripe with weddings and wedding anniversaries, at least in my world.

But I am on board now. And with wedding references abounding, royal and personal, woven in with some mentions of Laura Ashley and the eighties in the Susan Branch memoirs I’ve been reading lately, I’ve been been thinking of my own wedding in the last few days, and especially the dress…frock…gown.

In my catching up, listening to Harry and Meghan talk so easily and naturally about their love and mutual aspirations brings me to quick tears, but I do believe it is the anticipation of the first glimpse of Meghan’s dress that will have me rising in the wee hours tomorrow.

In 1987, fresh from the New Year’s Eve proposal, my thoughts eventually turned towards what I would wear for my May wedding. And after years of almost living and breathing Laura Ashley, I was sure that this dress would be my wedding dress…

It first appeared in the 1983-84 collection (don’t worry, I don’t remember these sorts of things and had to look it up!) and I had loved it’s romantic-yet-simple-cotton-cambric look. The Laura Ashley store across the square from the bookshop where I worked didn’t carry the wedding gowns and I remember having to travel somewhere (?) to try it on in person. Imagine my disappointment when it didn’t suit me at all. So easy to see that now. I am too short and curvy to handle all the ruffles and flounces. But it was the only one I liked and it took me awhile to regroup. Going to a wedding dress shop never crossed my mind.

Fortuitously, through some connections Doug’s father had with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, an expert historical seamstress there kindly agreed to make my wedding dress…for $100. Can you imagine? My sweet mom and I drove to Washington DC to find the cream-colored raw silk I had been picturing, a length of old lace my adopted grandmother had given me years before was pulled out of storage, and an illustration from a fairy tale book I used to peruse in the bookshop (The Wild Swans by Angela Barrett) …

…all came together to make my lovely wedding dress. I understand that Princess Diana, another eighties bride, cringed when she thought of her wedding dress, years on. And I suppose I would choose differently now myself. At least, I would make it more like the illustration…and lose the tulle underskirt…and definitely tuck some feathers in my bodice. But I don’t really mind. Everything about that time, especially seen through a modern lens, is so much less styled and “just so.” As much as I notice and love details, in those days, I just went with the flow. It was very easy-going.

I think it would be harder to be so now?

All the little details and ingredients of a wedding day are delightful to look forward to and speculate upon. And I will be enjoying it to the full in the next few days, but I know I wouldn’t have been drawn in if not for the true affection and goodness I saw expressed between Harry and Meghan in an interview in one of the Royal Watch shows on PBS. It is that weaving of the deep and the not-so-deep that makes weddings so enticing, I think. But even better is having had the wedding, be fortunate enough to cherish the memories of it and to be able to continue the weaving of the deep and not-so-deep in our everydays.

::  ::  ::

The shy comment form is tucked away at the top of the post, if you are looking for it…