I kept my hands out of sight for ten years. Two bracelets in a pecan line changed my mind.
I kept my hands out of sight for ten years. Two bracelets in a pecan line changed my mind.
Six things I have noticed since a morning in De Leon, from a woman who tucked her hands under the table in every picture and has never once written to a store about a bracelet.
Peggy Dalton · Customer · Austin, Texas · 5 min read
Let me start with the hands, because that is where all of this starts. I am Peggy, I am 63, and I live in Austin, Texas, with my husband Frank. Somewhere around my fifty-third birthday I looked down at the steering wheel and found my mother’s hands on it. The same spots. The same big knuckles. The same veins running up the back like a county road map. I had never thought one way or the other about my hands until that morning, and after it I started keeping them out of the way.
The bracelets I am writing about are the Agnes and the Harriet, from Iris and Nora, a small boutique here in Austin that has been quietly dressing women like us for a few years now. The Agnes is a layered band in dark green with a row of green stone chips and gold-tone accents. The Harriet is a slim silver-tone cuff with three tan cords and one plain little heart. When the boutique asked if they could put my letter up for other women to read, I said yes, as long as I could be completely honest in it.
I first saw them last November, in the line at the pecan cracker in De Leon. Frank’s family still has some old trees on the home place out that way, and every fall he fills the truck bed with sacks and we drive them in to be cracked, because neither of us has the thumbs to do forty pounds by hand anymore. You wait your turn behind everybody else’s pickup and you help each other get the sacks up on the scale. The woman ahead of us was named Nadene. She had to be close to eighty, she was hauling her own sacks in a man’s work shirt with the sleeves shoved up, and her hands were every bit as spotted and knuckly as mine. Worse, if I am honest. And there they were, out in front of God and everybody, with a wide green bracelet on one wrist and a little silver cuff with a heart on the other. When she stepped back from the scale I asked her plainly where they were from. Nadene looked down at her own wrist and said, “Honey, I quit apologizing for these hands in about 1998. Now I just give them something to wear.” Read on.
Frank took this one on the tailgate this fall, back in that same line. Both hands out where anybody can see them.
Here is what I had been doing, and maybe you have been doing it too. I quit wearing rings, apart from my wedding band. I gave my bracelets to the church sale, because the way I saw it, anything shiny on a wrist is an arrow pointing at the hand. I pulled my sleeves down over my knuckles. In ten years of Christmas pictures you will find my hands behind a grandbaby or under the table, and nowhere else. The bracelets in the stores seemed to come in two piles anyway. Dainty little chains made for a young wrist, which on mine looked like a thread tied to a fence post. Or big loud bangles that clanked on the steering wheel and hollered for attention. So I wore nothing.
I thought a bare wrist kept people from looking at my hands. All it did was leave them nothing else to look at.
The morning they came. Frank asked who they were for, and I said, me.
I ordered both that night from the motel, with pecan dust still on my jacket, and I have worn them most days since. Going by all those months, it comes down to six things, and I will give them to you plainly.
The Agnes gives your wrist something to say
It is a stack of slim bands running side by side, so it reads like four or five bracelets you took years to collect, and it is really just the one. Across the middle sit five green stone chips, no two the same shape, with little gold-tone discs between them. Along the top runs a strip of fine chain and tiny bronze-colored beads. It has some width to it, which is the whole point. When I look down now I see the bracelet first and my knuckles second, and that is exactly the order I want.
On Frank’s flannel shirt at the kitchen table, so you can count the stones for yourself. There are five.
It looks like I bought three bracelets and I only bought the one. I get asked about it at the bank.
Nelda T., ProctorThat green goes with more than you would think
I assumed a green bracelet would only go with green. But this is a dark green, the color of cedar in the shade, with soft gray-green bands beside it and a warm gold-tone bar along the bottom holding four little faceted beads. I have worn it with denim, with brown, with a rust sweater, and with my navy church dress. It looks as if it meant to be there every time, and through a Texas fall it looks right at home.
I wear it with jeans and I wear it to church. I have not found the thing it does not go with yet.
Wilma J., SidneyThe Harriet is a heart for a grown woman
I had not worn a heart since high school. Most of them are puffy and shiny or spell something out. This one is flat and plain, smooth silver-tone with not a word on it, and it sits right where the cuff ends. The cuff itself is slim and goes about halfway around your wrist, and three thin tan cords go the rest of the way. It is quiet enough for a plain Tuesday, and I have had two women at church lean over to look at it anyway.
On Frank’s old barn coat on the back porch. That is the whole bracelet, and that is why I like it.
Not a bit silly, which is what I worry about with hearts at my age. It is just pretty.
Billie G., GormanThe small things on the cord are what people notice
Past the heart there is one round filigree bead tied between two knots, cut all over with little flowers and dark down in the cut-outs so they stand out. Below it hangs one short tail with two silver balls on the end, a big one and a small one, and they move when your hand moves. Nadene’s swung every time she reached for a sack, which is half of why I could not quit looking. It is such a small thing, and it is the first thing my granddaughter reached for.
I love the little bead with the flowers on it. You would not think anybody would notice, but they do.
Ruthanne C., CarbonOn in seconds, and light enough to forget
If you are going to wear a thing every day, you had better be able to get it on by yourself. The Agnes closes with a magnetic clasp, a smooth gold-tone block at the back, and you bring the ends near each other and it takes care of the rest. The Harriet has no clasp at all. You slip the cuff over your wrist and hook the cord loop over the heart, and you are done. Neither one weighs anything to speak of. I have rolled out pie crust in them, driven to Belton and back in them, and gone to bed still wearing one.
This fall’s first pie out of the oven. Neither one got in my way.
I can put it on with no help and no glasses. So light and comfortable that I forget it is there.
Joyce B., Rising StarOne on each wrist, or whatever suits you
Nadene wears one on each wrist, so I started out copying her, and most days I still do. But the Harriet sits nicely beside my good watch, and the Agnes will carry a sweater all by itself. And now that I have my hands back out in the open, I have noticed the boutique does twenty-eight designs in this collection, stone chips in other colors, wraps, little fish and birds. Nadene owns four. I have my eye on a third.
Where they spend the night, in a chipped saucer on the kitchen windowsill beside this year’s pecans.
I wear mine with my watch and get more compliments now than I did at forty. My daughter already has her eye on it.
Patsy W., Cross PlainsThe Agnes and the Harriet, against what I was doing
You can keep tucking your hands away, like I did. Here is the difference, laid out plainly.
Bare wrists and sleeves pulled down
Dainty chains that disappear on a grown woman
Loud bangles that clank on everything
Tiny clasps you need help with
Hands under the table in every picture
Something on my wrist worth looking at
Five green stones and one plain little heart
Enough to be seen, light enough to forget
A magnetic clasp and a cord loop
Hands out on the table where they belong
About the price
Each of these is $29.95. They were $60.00. A price like that makes me suspicious, because I once paid more than that for one bangle that I wore twice and gave to the church sale. So I read the whole page looking for the catch, and I have not found one. They came with free shipping, they looked like the pictures, and they have been on my wrists most days since.
I will pass on what the boutique told me, which is that these come in small runs and the stone pieces do not stay in stock long. Their words, not mine. What I can tell you from my side is that the two of them together came to less than a tank of gas for Frank’s truck, so it was an easy yes.
And I do not trust perfect scores, so I read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars, which sounded like real women rather than robots. The same six things I have just walked you through come up in them, over and over, in other women’s words.
If you have been keeping your hands out of sight for years, this is where I would start. Take a look before this run sells through, because once it is gone, it is gone. And if you are ever in line at the pecan cracker in De Leon and you see two old gals heaving sacks with their hands right out in the open, one of them is Nadene, and the other one is me.
Peggy
THE AGNES & THE HARRIET
- Agnes: layered dark green band with green stone chips
- Gold-tone accents and a magnetic clasp
- Harriet: slim silver-tone half cuff with three tan cords
- A plain heart charm and a filigree bead
- Slip on and fasten in seconds
- Lightweight and comfortable all day
- Free shipping
Fall sale on now, half off. Once this run is gone, it is gone.