A letter from a reader

At 63, I had not worn a stripe across my middle in thirty years, and my sister told me I had started to look like a mailbox

The most I write in a month is the memo line on a check, and the girl at our bank has told me more than once that she cannot make out a word of it. I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on.

But three different women asked me about my sweater in a bank lobby in Kemah last Thursday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down.

It started in September, when my sister Sue sold her house and moved down to the coast. I drove down to help her unpack. On the second morning I walked into her new kitchen in my navy top and my navy slacks, and she looked up from a box of plates and said it.

Peggy, you have been dressed like a mailbox since the grandkids were born.

I laughed, and that night I looked in my suitcase, and she was right. Navy top, navy slacks, a navy cardigan for the evenings and a black one in case. Every single thing one color from the collar to the hem, and not a line across the middle anywhere. I had packed for a week by the water like I was going to a funeral.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody sets out to dress like something the mailman empties twice a day. It happens one sensible sweater at a time, until your sister looks up from a box of plates and there it is.

How it happens

I used to wear color. At my cousin's wedding I wore a dress with wide red and white bands, and our mother said I looked like a barber pole, and I danced in it anyway until the band packed up.

But that remark stuck. A few years later she cut a page out of a magazine at the beauty shop, the one that said no stripes across the middle after a certain age, and it lived on her refrigerator under a magnet for the rest of her life. I believed every word of it.

The stores were happy to go along. Walk into the women's section anywhere and look. Rack after rack of one-color sweaters in navy, black, charcoal and oatmeal, because that is what we have all been told is safe.

And once a rule like that settles in, you stop noticing it is a rule. You buy the navy one because it is fine. Nobody says anything about it, and after a while that is exactly what you want.

What I had wrong

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

I thought the choice was between safe and seen. One dark color and nobody looks twice, or a pattern and everybody does. Somewhere around fifty I had picked safe and never thought about it again.

Then that same afternoon Sue came out to the porch in a sweater in big blocks of gray and cream and charcoal, and I said, Sue, those are stripes. And she said, Peggy, those are not stripes, those are blocks. Nobody ever told you about blocks.

It turns out the stripes were never the problem.

It was the kind of stripe. Skinny busy stripes running round and round you like a candy cane are what that old magazine was worried about. Four wide blocks of color are a different thing altogether. They do not jitter, they sit still. And it matters which color goes where. Put the light one up by your face and the deepest one across the middle, and you are dressed the way you were always going to dress, only with some color in it. It took me until 63, and a sister holding a box of plates, to see it.

The sweater is called the Maren

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 sweater is called the Maren. Four wide bands of color: a soft denim blue at the shoulders and neckline, cream across the chest, a deep navy through the middle and a bright clear blue at the bottom, with a little line of white stitching where the colors meet, which is my favorite part. It comes in gray, red, yellow and purple as well, which I will come back to. I ordered the blue that night on Sue's back porch, sent to her new address, and it came before I went home.

It is warm without being heavy, and it breathes, so you can sit in a building with the air conditioning going and then walk out into the sun without cooking. It is soft, the kind of soft you notice the minute you pull it over your head. It goes with jeans or with my good slacks, and it washes without any fuss.

Nothing complicated about it. Just a sweater where somebody put the colors in the right order.

What happened at the bank

Sue wanted me added to her new account, the way we have always been on each other's, so on Thursday morning the two of us sat in the lobby of the little bank in town waiting for the new-accounts lady.

I wore the Maren for the first time. The woman in the next chair, holding a folder of papers for her mother's house, asked me about it before I had properly sat down. The young teller asked me the second, leaning over the counter when we went up to sign. And then there was Odessa.

Odessa has sat at the front desk of that bank for thirty-one years, keeps the coffee pot going and the lollipop jar full, and Sue says in three weeks of banking there she has never heard her comment on anything but the weather. She poured me a coffee at the little table by the window and said, Honey, you look like you came in to make a deposit. From Odessa, that is compound interest.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I forgot about it. That lobby had the air conditioning going like it was July, and I was not cold, and when we walked back out into the sunshine I was not too warm either. I did not tug at it once.

The next morning I wore it straight back out to the fishing pier at the end of Sue's street to watch the pelicans with a coffee, and felt completely myself in it. That is the rarest sort of sweater. One you can sign papers in on Thursday and lean on a pier rail in on Friday, and look right in both.

Three things I have learned since

One. It is color you can actually wear. It is all blues and a cream, which goes with every pair of jeans and slacks I own. I have not had to buy one new thing to go with it.

Two. The blocks do the work. Because they are big and calm, the sweater looks put together all on its own. No necklace to choose, no scarf to fiddle with. I wore my small earrings and that was that.

Three. Order your usual size. It comes from a small up to a 2XL in a relaxed, easy fit. I wear a medium in nearly everything, and the medium has room in it without hanging off me.

About the price

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

The Maren is $44.95. It was $90.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that at the department store for a plain navy sweater that was pilled by Christmas.

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 Sweeny had written, “I was the lady in black in every family picture for twenty years. My daughter took one look at this and asked where I had been hiding it.”

Then I ordered the purple as well, for Thanksgiving.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on Sue's back porch with two glasses of iced tea and the wind coming in off the bay, this is what I would say.

If you have been dressing in one dark color from top to bottom because somebody, a long time ago, told you stripes were not for women like us, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a sweater will change your life. It will not. But there is something in walking into a room and having the color arrive a second before you do 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 red was gone by the time Sue went back for one. And the first of the fall stock is already going, and once this stock is gone, it is gone.

I packed one navy top for the drive home. It never came out of the suitcase.

Peggy