A letter from a reader

At 63, my sister watched me go out in my husband’s old hunting jacket and said, Peggy, you have been wearing Frank’s coat for ten years

My granddaughter asked me last week what the longest thing I had ever written was, and after some thought I had to tell her it was probably a note for the mailman. 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 a jacket at my grandson’s cross-country meet on Saturday, and I have explained it so many times since that it seemed easier to sit down and write it all out.

It started a few weeks ago. My sister Sue had driven down for lunch, and afterwards we were taking my daughter’s labrador out before the storm came in. I went to the hook in the laundry room by the garage door, took down the big dark green hunting jacket that has hung there for as long as anyone can remember, rolled the sleeves back twice so my hands would come out of the ends, and zipped it up. Sue stood in the doorway and watched me do the whole thing, and then she said it.

Peggy, you have been wearing Frank’s coat for ten years.

I told her it was a perfectly good coat. And it was. It was just not mine. It was two sizes too big, the cuffs were frayed, it smelled faintly of the deer lease, and every photograph of me outdoors for a decade showed a small woman lost inside a big green tent. I had not chosen it. I had simply stopped looking for anything else.

Nobody decides to do that. It happens one wet walk at a time. You grab whatever is nearest the door, and before you know it the nearest thing to the door has become the only thing you wear outside.

How it happens

Go and look for a real outdoor coat for a woman our age and see what you find.

There are the serious ones, covered in zippers and toggles, cut for somebody about to hike up a mountain. There are the pretty ones, thin as a cardigan, that would not last ten minutes on a cross-country course in November. And in between there are racks and racks of black and navy and khaki, all perfectly sensible and all looking exactly the same.

So you give up and borrow your husband’s. I know I am not the only one, because I see us every weekend, small women in big men’s coats, walking dogs.

It is not that we have stopped caring. It is that the stores decided a woman out in the cold only needs to be warm, and never thought she might want to look like herself while she was at it.

What I had wrong

I had it fixed in my head that you could have practical or you could have pretty, and at my age, on a cold day, practical had to win.

It turns out that was never the choice. What makes an outdoor coat feel like yours is not whether it is fit for the weather. It is whether it fits you, whether it has any shape to it at all, and whether it is a color you would actually pick.

A hood that is soft inside, a zipper that comes right up to the chin, a cut with enough room for a sweater but not so much you disappear. And then a color. Put those together and practical and pretty stop being two different coats.

The jacket is called the Tabitha

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 jacket is called the Tabitha. Mine is a bright sunshine yellow, with a roomy hood that is soft and cozy inside, two drawstrings to pull it in when the wind picks up, a zipper right up to the chin and three little snaps down the front to close it over. It comes in eleven other colors as well, which I will come back to.

It sits just below the hip, so it covers everything that wants covering without getting in the way of the car door. The cut is relaxed, so a thick sweater goes underneath without any tugging. And it is easy to keep clean, which with my daughter’s labrador staying most weekends is not a small thing.

It is a jacket for real fall days. It just happens to look like somebody thought about the woman inside it.

What happened at the cross-country meet

My oldest grandson runs cross-country for his middle school, which means that on fall Saturdays I stand at the edge of a course in whatever the sky decides to do. This Saturday the first real norther had blown through overnight, and it decided on a bitter wind straight across the pasture.

Everybody along that finish chute was in navy or black. I was in yellow. A mom from my grandson’s class asked me first, before the seventh-grade boys had even set off. Then the lady pouring hot chocolate at the booster club table wanted to know where it was from.

And then Verna, who has stood beside me at every meet for three years and has never once passed comment on anything I have worn, looked me up and down and said it was the first time she had seen me dressed like myself. From Verna, that is a blue ribbon.

What I noticed more than any of that was that I was warm and I was comfortable, and I did not feel like I was wearing a tent. The hood went up when the wind came around, and down again when it dropped, and I forgot about it entirely.

The next morning I put it straight back on to take the labrador around the creek trail. Frank asked if he could have his hunting jacket back. I told him he was welcome to it.

Three things I have learned since

One. A hood that is nice inside makes all the difference. I used to dread putting a hood up. This one is soft and cozy, so I actually put it up instead of standing there getting cold out of stubbornness.

Two. Color on a gray day is not frivolous. I thought I would feel silly in yellow. Instead I feel cheerful, and so, it turns out, does everybody who sees me coming.

Three. The sizing is honest. It runs from a small all the way to a 5XL, and it is the same relaxed cut the whole way up. I took my usual size and there is room for a real sweater underneath.

About the price

I will be straight with you, because the price was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Tabitha is $63.95. It was $128.00.

My first thought was that at that price it would be flimsy, the sort of thing that looks fine in a picture and gives up the first time it meets a mesquite branch. You can pay a great deal more than that at the mall for an outdoor coat in navy that you will never love.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so nobody is 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 expect you are doing now and read the reviews first. 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 a little more. One woman from Canton had written, “I have not worn my husband’s coat since it came, and he is thrilled about that too.” I laughed out loud, because that is our house exactly.

Then I ordered the red one for Sue. She had it on before she had finished reading the card.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were standing at the edge of that course together, stamping our feet and waiting for the runners to come around, this is what I would say.

Go to the hook by your back door and look at what is hanging on it. If the coat you go out in on cold days is somebody else’s, or something dark and sensible you would never have chosen, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look at this one.

Two practical things. The sale is on right now, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And the first of the fall stock is already going, and once this stock is gone, it is gone.

Frank has his hunting jacket back. I did not need it after all.

Peggy