A letter from a reader

At 63, my grandson drew a picture of me for his first grade class, and he only needed the gray crayon

The last thing I wrote that anybody else was meant to read was a note on the freezer that said Do Not Eat, This Is Sue's Pie, and Frank ate it anyway. I am not a writer, and it has never once been my business to tell another woman what she ought to wear.

But three different women asked me about my cardigan at an old soda fountain up in Dublin this past October, and I have now told it enough times that it seemed easier to just write it all down. To tell it properly I have to start with a crayon.

Last fall my grandson's first grade class in Belton did a project called My Grandma. My daughter brought his home to me because she thought I would love it, and I did. Frank was in it too, off to one side, with a red cap, brown boots and a blue truck. The dog got three colors all to himself. And there in the middle was me, as tall as the house, gray from my hair down to my shoes. One crayon. He had pressed very hard.

I laughed until I had to sit down, and I put it on the refrigerator. Then that night I went and stood in my closet with the light on. Gray. Taupe. Oatmeal. Something the tag called mushroom. Eleven cardigans, and you could not have told one from another in a dark room. That boy was six years old and he had not missed a thing.

Nice enough to be forgotten, or loud enough to be laughed at. Those were the only two racks I could ever find.

How it happens

I did not set out to be gray. Nobody does.

What happens is that somewhere around fifty-five you stop buying what you like and start buying what cannot be a mistake. Gray goes with everything. Taupe does not show the dog. You get one compliment on a beige sweater, years ago, and you go right on buying it for the rest of your life.

And it is not as if the stores give you much else. Go and look. On one side, the soft quiet colors for women our age, row after row of them. On the other side, the fun rack, with the sequins and the reindeer and the sayings across the chest, which I have seen on women at church and which make you look like you lost a bet.

So you stay on the quiet side. It is not a decision. You just stop going over to look.

What I had wrong

For about a month after that drawing, I thought what I needed was color. I bought a coral top, wore it once, and felt like a traffic cone at the post office. It went back in the bag.

I also thought it would mean starting over, that I would have to clear out that whole closet and be somebody new at 63. I do not have the energy or the money for that, and I like my gray tops. They are comfortable and I know where they all are.

Here is what I had backward. I did not need more color. I did not need to get rid of one thing. I needed one thing with something to say, to go over all the things that had nothing to say.

And it did not have to be a brave color at all. The thing that finally did it is black and white, which are the two safest colors I own. They had just never been put together in a way anybody would notice.

It is called the Josie

Waynette is the one who showed me. She lives next door, she is seventy-one, and she taught art at the elementary school for thirty-one years. She came down to the mailbox one morning in a big brown and white checked cardigan with a plain T-shirt under it, and I took her in the kitchen to show her my picture, because I thought she would laugh.

She did not laugh. She looked at it a good while and said, Peggy, that child is not being unkind. He drew what he sees. I have had thirty-one years of them, and they are the only honest portrait painters in the state of Texas.

I asked her where she got the cardigan. It is from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly looking after women our age for a few years now. I looked them up that same evening.

Mine is called the Josie, in the black and white. I will tell you what I thought, because I expect you are thinking it. Checks. At sixty-three. I thought I would look like a race flag, or a diner. I very nearly closed the page.

Then I put it on. The checks are big, so it reads as one bold thing and not as a busy thing. A plain black band runs down both sides of the front and frames them, with more black ribbing at the bottom and at the cuffs, and that is what keeps it looking grown up. It hangs open, with nothing to button and nothing to fuss with. The shape is loose, with dropped shoulders and plenty of room for a top underneath, and the sleeves are full and gather in at the wrist.

And it went straight on over the gray. All those tops I had been so ashamed of the night before turned out to be just what it wanted underneath. I did not have to give up a single one.

What happened in Dublin

We keep my grandson one weekend every October. This year Frank wanted to drive him up to Dublin to the old soda fountain he went to as a boy, so the three of us went on a cool Saturday, with Frank's cousin Jolene coming to meet us there. I wore the Josie over a plain white top and my jeans, and I will admit I checked the mirror twice.

We had not got all the way up on our stools before the woman on the next one leaned over and asked me where it was from. She had her sister with her and she made me say the name twice. Then the girl behind the counter set down my grandson's root beer float, looked at me, looked down at the old black and white tile under our feet, and said, ma'am, you match our floor. And then she asked me where it was from too.

And then there was Jolene. Jolene has been Frank's cousin for sixty-six years and has not, to my knowledge, liked anything. She told me at my own wedding that my shoes would hurt by four o'clock, and they did. She came in the door, took her glasses off, put them back on, and said, Well, Peggy. I did not know you owned anything you could see from the parking lot. Frank says that is the nicest thing she has said to anybody since Reagan.

But that is not the part I wanted to tell you. While all this was going on, my grandson had got hold of the crayons they keep in a cup for the children, and he was bent over his paper placemat with his tongue out. He did not touch his float. It was melting. I asked what he was making and he put his arm over it.

It was me. As tall as the soda fountain. He had taken the black crayon and done every single square, one by one, all the way down both arms, and left the white ones white.

Three things I have learned since

One. You only need one thing that has something to say. I thought I had a closet problem. What I had was eleven quiet cardigans and not one that spoke up. One bold thing over a plain top is all it took, and the plain top gets to stay.

Two. Nothing to button is a bigger deal than you would think. It hangs open, so there is no gapping across the front and nothing to do up with stiff fingers at seven in the morning. I put it on the way you put on a coat, and I am ready to go out the door.

Three. Pattern is not the same as loud. I had spent years afraid of anything with a pattern because I thought it would wear me. But black and white with a plain black edge is about as sensible as clothes get. It just happens that people can see it from the parking lot.

About the price

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

The Josie is $52.95. It was $106.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch. I have paid more than that for a mushroom cardigan that nobody has ever once asked me about.

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 cool weather is coming 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 Olney had written, “I am seventy-one and I have never owned anything with checks on it. The lady at my bank came out from behind the glass to ask me about it.”

Then I ordered the brown and white one for my daughter. He gave her four crayons, but I have seen her closet.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting on my back porch with a cup of coffee and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have looked in your closet lately and could not tell one thing from the next with the light off, and if everything you have tried to do about it has made you feel like you were dressed up as somebody else, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look. If checks are not for you, there are a dozen winter tops in the collection, and Waynette says I should tell you the point is not the checks.

A cardigan is not going to change your life. It did not change mine. But it is a fine thing, at 63, to be looked at by somebody who has known you all his life and to see him decide you are worth the trouble of all those little squares.

Two practical things. The sale is on now, and the favorites always go first. And once this stock is gone, it is gone.

Same boy. Still only the one crayon. This time it took him the whole of a root beer float.

Peggy