A letter from a reader

At 63, I had spent eleven winters in four layers before my grandson asked why I was wrapped up like a package

I am writing this out on the back porch on the first cool evening of the fall, with a notepad on my knee and more lines crossed out than kept. I am not a writer, and I have never once thought it was my business to tell another woman what she ought to put on.

But three different women asked me about this one in line at the catfish place on Friday night, and I have now explained it so many times that it seemed easier to just write it all down once.

I am careful with money and I will not pretend otherwise. The heat does not go on in our house before Thanksgiving, and it goes off again the week after Easter, whatever the weatherman says. So for eleven winters, from the first norther that blows through in the fall, I have gotten dressed in layers. An undershirt. A blouse. A sweater over that. And my old beige fleece over the whole lot, zipped to the chin.

I did not think anything of it until last winter, when our grandson Caleb came over for supper. He was nine. He watched me come in from the yard and start peeling it all off, one layer after another, and he said it in front of everybody.

Grandma, why are you wrapped up like a package?

Frank laughed. Our daughter pretended not to. I laughed too, but I looked in the hallway mirror on the way to put the coffee on, and the woman looking back was about three sizes bigger than me and the shape of a couch cushion. He was nine, and he was right.

I will not pretend I chose to look like that. Nobody sets out to spend half the year bundled up like something waiting to be picked up at the post office. It creeps up on you one cold morning at a time, one more layer at a time.

How it happens

I was never a frump. When Frank and I were dating I had a camel coat with a belt that I thought was the smartest thing in Austin, and I still think I was right.

What changed was not me. It was the stores, and I suspect a good many of you will know exactly what I mean.

Look at what they sell a woman my age for keeping warm. On one rack there are thin little cardigans that are pretty in a store with the heat on full and no use at all in a kitchen in January. On the other there are great chunky knits and fleeces that keep you warm and make you look like you have come to fix the furnace. Nothing in between. Warm, or a shape. Pick one.

So you do what I did. You wear the thin one, and then something over it, and then something over that, and you stop looking in the hallway mirror.

What I had wrong

Here is the part I had most wrong.

I thought warm meant thick. I thought the more I had on, the warmer I would be, and that looking like a package was simply the price of not paying the electric company.

It was my sister Sue who set me straight, and she did it without meaning to. She came for Sunday dinner in October, took her coat off in the hallway, and underneath it she had one neat knitted cardigan over a plain top. That was all. She sat in my living room, which I will admit is not the warmest room in Travis County, and she was perfectly comfortable. I sat opposite her in four layers and still had both hands wrapped around my mug.

She looked at me for a long moment and said, Peggy, honey, you do not need all that on. You need one good thing.

It had honestly never occurred to me. Warm or a shape. I had spent eleven winters choosing warm, and it took me until 63 to find out I was allowed both.

The cardigan is called the Estelle

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. Sue had found hers there, and I went and looked that same evening, mostly to prove her wrong.

It is called the Estelle. A soft gray knit with a fine rib running all the way down it, a neat round neck, long sleeves and a straight, relaxed shape that sits on the hip. It comes in black and a warm brown as well, which I will come back to.

The knit is soft, which was the first thing I noticed, and it is warm without being bulky, so there is one layer where there used to be four. It breathes, too, so I am not roasting the minute I walk into somebody’s living room, which was the other thing the fleece always did to me.

The fit is relaxed without being a sack. You can see there is a woman under it, and I can still lift my arms to reach the top shelf. It goes over a plain T-shirt with jeans, or over a blouse and good slacks for church, and it has been through the wash with no fuss at all.

There is nothing clever about it. It is simply a cardigan that does the job on its own, and looks like I chose it.

What happened in line at the catfish place

We have fried catfish on a Friday. Frank stays in the truck with the ballgame on the radio and I go in, and the line on a cool night is out the door and halfway down the parking lot.

I wore the Estelle for the first time with a white T-shirt and my jeans, and no coat, which would have been unthinkable a month ago. A woman behind me with a little boy on her hip asked me where it was from before I had even gotten inside. The girl at the register asked while she was boxing up our order.

And the third was Arlene from across the street, who has lived opposite us for eleven years and has not once said a kind word about anything I have worn. She looked me up and down and said, I had forgotten you had a waist, Peggy.

From Arlene, that is a bouquet.

What I noticed more than the compliments was that I walked back to the truck with the box under my arm and did not once think about being cold. I sat in the passenger seat with supper warm on my lap and felt, for the first time in a long time, like I had gotten dressed on purpose.

I had it on again the next morning with my coffee on the back step, and on Monday for the grocery store.

Three things I have learned since

One. Buy it for the size you are now. It goes from a small right up to a 5XL, and the fit is relaxed, so there is no need to size up to fit a sweater underneath. Check the size chart, then trust it. I am usually a large and I took the large, and there is room for a blouse and nothing else, which is exactly the point.

Two. It goes over everything. T-shirt and jeans for errands, a blouse and my good slacks for church, and once over a dress for Sue’s birthday lunch. I have not had to buy one new thing to go with it.

Three. Your family will notice before you do. Caleb came over for supper last week, looked at me for a while, and said, You got unwrapped, Grandma. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

About the price

I will be straight with you, because I am careful with money and I have already told you as much. The price made me suspicious.

The Estelle is $45.95. It was $92.00.

My first thought was that there had to be a catch, because the fleece cost me about that, and look how that turned out.

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 do not trust a perfect score, so I 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 is exactly why I read on. One woman from Levelland had written, “I bought the gray for the house and the black for going out, and I have not worn my big cardigan since.”

Then I ordered the black as well, for church.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you were sitting across my kitchen table with the coffee on, this is what I would say.

If you have been getting wrapped up like a package every winter, piling one thing on top of another and avoiding the hallway mirror until spring, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a cardigan will change your life. It will not. But there is something in being warm and still looking like yourself that I had stopped expecting, and I would rather you did not stop expecting 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 large in black 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.

I get dressed in one layer now. Caleb says I got unwrapped.

Peggy