A letter from a reader

At 63, I had worn the same band-fundraiser hoodie every time it turned cold for four winters, right down to the Christmas picture

The only writing I do all year is the little labels on the bags of pecans I hand out at Christmas, and Frank says even those look like a doctor wrote them. I am not a writer, and it has never once been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on.

But three different women asked me about my jacket out at Lost Maples last Saturday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

It started at Sunday lunch, the first cool weekend of the fall. Our daughter came over with her labrador, and I was setting the table in my navy zip-up hoodie, the one from our grandson's marching band fundraiser, with the band's name across the back in gold. She watched me carry the potatoes in, and she said it.

Mama, you look like you are on your way to sit in the bleachers.

I laughed, and after lunch I went and got the photo albums out, and she was right. The Christmas picture on the stairs, in the hoodie. The church supper, in the hoodie. Our anniversary dinner at the steakhouse, with my good earrings on, and the hoodie over the top. Four winters of it, every time a norther came through.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to wear a sweatshirt to her own anniversary dinner. It happens one chilly morning at a time, until your daughter looks up from the gravy and there it is.

How it happens

I was not always like this. When Frank and I were first married I had a camel car coat with big round buttons, and I wore it to every football game until the lining gave out.

What changed was not me. It was the weather, and what the stores do about it.

Here in Texas we get a handful of truly cold days and a whole season of in-between ones. The stores give you two choices. A big puffy coat you wear twice a year and feel like a sleeping bag in, or the sweatshirt rack. Nothing for a forty-five degree morning that turns into a seventy degree afternoon.

So you do what I did. You grab the hoodie off the hook, because it is soft and it is there. You wear it to the grocery store, and then to church, and then one day to the Christmas picture. Nobody says anything. That is the trouble.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have.

I thought cozy and put together belonged to two different closets. You could be warm and soft, or you could look like you had somewhere to go, and somewhere around sixty I had picked warm.

It turns out the hood was never the problem.

It was everything around it. A sweatshirt hood on a sweatshirt looks like the gym. The same hood on a jacket with a proper check, a row of buttons and cuffs that button at the wrist looks like a choice. It took me until 63 to see that the cozy part and the dressed part could be sewn into the same thing.

The jacket is called the Thea

It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now.

The jacket is called the Thea. A soft gray and white check, the color of a November sky over a cotton field, with a fine tan line running through it, a hood, a row of little black buttons down the front and buttoned cuffs. It comes in red, green, black, brown and a multicolor check as well, which I will come back to.

It is warm on a cold morning, but it is light, and it breathes, so you are not cooking in it by lunchtime. It is soft, and it moves with you, which I did not appreciate until I spent a morning climbing in and out of a pickup and down a creek bank. And it is plain enough in its shape that it goes with jeans or with my good slacks without arguing with either.

Nothing fancy about any of it. Just a jacket where somebody remembered that fall in Texas changes its mind three times before supper.

What happened at Lost Maples

Every October Frank packs a thermos and drives us two hours out to Lost Maples to walk the river trail. We go a few weeks before the crowds come for the color, so it is just us and a handful of other early birds. This year it had turned cold overnight, and only the first few maples down by the water had started going red.

I wore the Thea for the first time. A woman at the next picnic table asked me about it before Frank had the thermos open. A young woman coming off the trail asked me the second. And then there was Earlene, who has sold us our day pass at the headquarters window every October for twelve years and has never said a word to me beyond two seniors.

She leaned out of that window on the way out and said, Well, Peggy, you look like you came to see the leaves instead of rake them. From Earlene, that is the peak of the season.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I stopped thinking about the weather altogether. It was cold enough at the trailhead to see your breath, and warm enough by noon that the people in puffy coats were carrying them, and I just left it open and kept walking.

The next morning I put it straight back on for the early service, and felt completely myself in it. That is the rarest sort of jacket. The one that walks a limestone trail on Saturday and sits in a church pew on Sunday, and looks right in both.

Three things I have learned since

One. Warm does not have to mean heavy. It keeps the chill off on a gray morning, and by the afternoon it is still comfortable instead of a burden over your arm. For our in-between weather that is the whole point.

Two. The hood counts. Down, it sits at the back like part of the design instead of an afterthought. Up, it keeps a north wind off your ears in a parking lot. I had forgotten a hood could be grown-up.

Three. Order your usual size. It comes from a small up to a 3XL in a comfortable cut. I wear a medium in nearly everything, and the medium fit over a sweater with room to move my arms.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Thea is $60.95. It was $122.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a sweatshirt with a mascot on it at a band fundraiser.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on right now while the first of the fall stock comes in.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it more. One woman from Coleman had written, “I keep it on the hook by the back door now. I have worn it to feed the chickens and to my sister’s birthday lunch in the same week.”

Then I ordered the brown one as well, for Thanksgiving.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the back porch with two cups of coffee and the pecans dropping on the roof of the shed, this is what I would say.

If you have been pulling on the same old hoodie every time it turns cold, and you have quietly decided that warm and soft and looking like yourself cannot happen in the same piece of clothing, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a jacket will change your life. It will not. But there is something in catching your reflection in the truck window on a cold morning and recognizing the woman in it that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on right now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first, which I found out because the medium in brown was gone by the time I went back and I had to wait for it. And the first of the fall stock is already going, and once this stock is gone, it is gone.

The band hoodie is in the bottom drawer now. My grandson says I can keep it there.

Peggy