A letter from a reader

At 63, my mother’s gold locket had sat in its box for eleven years, because nothing I owned was nice enough to wear it on

My granddaughter typed the first try at this on her phone while I talked, and I made her take out every word she had put in that I would never say myself. 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 sweater on our Sunday school class trip to the old missions in San Antonio last Saturday, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down.

It started in September. Maddie, who is fifteen, was staying the weekend, and she sat on my bed going through the jewelry box on the dresser the way she has since she was little. She lifted out Mama’s gold chain with the little round locket, held it up to the window, and said it.

Grandma, why do you never wear any of these?

I told her I did not have anything to wear them with, and the minute it was out of my mouth I knew it was true. Sweatshirts. Knit tops with the church picnic printed on the front. Two blouses with fussy collars that I keep for funerals. Mama has been gone eleven years, and in all that time her locket had been out of the box twice.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to put her mother’s necklace away for good. It happens one comfortable morning at a time, until your granddaughter holds it up to the light and asks you why.

How it happens

I was not always like this. In my forties I wore earrings to the grocery store, and Frank used to tease me that I dressed up to buy milk.

What changed was not me. It was what the stores think a woman my age wants in the fall.

Go and look. You get two choices. A sweatshirt, which is soft and warm and says absolutely nothing, or a dressy blouse that is cold by the afternoon, creases if you look at it and makes you feel like you are on your way to a viewing. Nothing in between for a sixty degree Sunday in Texas.

So you wear the sweatshirt, because it is there and it is kind to you. And the good jewelry goes in the box for occasions, and the occasions come around less and less, and 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 being comfortable and being dressed belonged in two different drawers. A good necklace on a sweatshirt looks like a mistake, and a blouse felt like hard work, so I gave up on both.

It turns out it was never the necklace.

It was what was underneath it. A plain soft sweater with a neat little neck that stands up on its own does what a velvet tray does in a jewelry store window. It gives the chain somewhere to sit. It took me until 63 to work out that the cozy part and the dressed part could be the very same piece of clothing.

The sweater is called the Annika

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 Annika. A plain, soft sweater in a real clean white, not cream and not that tired ivory, with a little high neck that stands up neatly on its own, a straight cut and deep ribbed cuffs at the wrist. It comes in nine other colors as well, which I will come back to.

It is soft and it is warm on a cool morning, without any bulk to it, so you do not feel bundled up. The cut is straight and simple, so it skims rather than clings, and the finish is smooth enough that it looks dressed even with jeans. And it keeps its shape in the wash, which with a white sweater is the whole battle.

That is really all there is to it. Nothing fancy. Just a sweater where somebody remembered that a woman might want to wear something nice on top of it.

What happened at the missions

Every October our Sunday school class takes the church van down to San Antonio to walk the old missions. Carol organizes it, and Wilma drives, the way she has for eighteen years. This year I asked if we could stop at Mission San Jose first, because that is where Mama and Daddy were married, a long time before I came along.

I wore the Annika and Mama’s locket for the first time. The woman beside me on the van seat asked about the sweater before we were out of Austin. A young woman on the tour asked me the second, by the big carved doorway. And then there was Wilma, who has driven that van for eighteen years and has never once said anything to me but seat belts, ladies.

She looked me up and down at the van door on the way home and said, Well, Peggy, you look like you came to be in the wedding pictures. From Wilma, that is a sermon.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was that I forgot about it. It was cool in the shade of those stone walls first thing and warm by the time we sat down to enchiladas, and I did not once wish I had worn something else or reach to fix anything.

The next morning I put it straight back on for the early service, locket and all, and felt completely myself in it. That is the rarest sort of sweater. The one that walks around a church older than Texas on Saturday and sits in your own pew on Sunday, and looks right in both.

Three things I have learned since

One. White is easier than you think. I was nervous of it, with grandchildren and gravy in my life. It has been through the wash more times than I can count already and it still looks the way it did the afternoon it came.

Two. The neck does the work. It stands up on its own, it does not need folding or fussing, and it frames whatever you put on it. A locket, a string of pearls, or nothing at all, and it still looks finished.

Three. Order your usual size. It comes from a small to an XL in a straight, easy cut. I wear a medium in nearly everything, and the medium sits nicely without pulling anywhere.

About the price

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

The Annika is $54.95. It was $110.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I have paid more than that for a blouse I wore to one funeral and never again.

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 Pecos had written, “I bought the white for my grandson’s wedding and wore it again to the grocery store the next week. My sister asked where I had been hiding it.”

Then I ordered the gray one as well.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the back porch with two cups of coffee on the first cool evening of the fall, this is what I would say.

If you have a box or a drawer with the good things in it, the necklace your mother left you, the earrings somebody bought you for an anniversary a long time ago, and you have quietly decided that nothing you wear these days is nice enough for them, 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 catching sight of yourself in the hall mirror on a Sunday morning and seeing your mother’s locket where it belongs 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 gray 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.

Mama’s locket has not been back in the box since September.

Peggy