The birds outside the window are driving the cat, and maybe even me, crazy. They are calling loudly, one unto the other, in fits and frenzies. The tail of the cat doth twitch, and I wonder what they all have to be so excited about. Perhaps it might be spring after all.
So, of course, I spent some sunny hours indoors yesterday, pouring over the Met Gala fashions. Didn’t know it was even that time of year but saw so many pictures of Tom Brady in his pirate outfit that I was able to make my way there. The best, of course, is this person dressed up in a bishop’s hat, but all the things that all the people were wearing are worth a languid scroll.
Now that the weather doesn’t seem to be in the gripping embrace of ice and snow, I suppose it is finally time to turn my attention to the Great Wretched Clothes Change Over of 2018. If you once perched on the edge of a runway, sometime back in November or something, making notes of what you planned to order from Givenchy for the spring, you might be eagerly checking the mail every day to see if your perfectly apportioned ball gown with no back and a bishop’s hat has finally come. This is just like that. The breathless excitement, the drama, the I-wonder-what-I-will-find-in-this-dusty-overfilled-bin-with-a-lid-that-doesn’t-quite-fit fluttering of the heart.
You pull the bins down, one by one, audibly whispering to Kon Mari, who is spiritually standing over your shoulder, that it may be one way in Japan, but here in the Northeast the number and variation of clothes for different seasons means they cannot reside peaceably together in one drawer. Thick bunchy corduroys and sweaters cannot abide comfortably alongside flimsy shorts and thin tee shirts with little ponies and stupid words scrawled across the front. It is not a matter of just putting a wooly sweater over a cute be-lambed smocked dress, adding a pair of socks and clutching a royal stuffed bunny. We are not the Princess Charlotte. No, the whole countenance has to change in all its essentials.
Which means I will have to beat my own way into the back of my bespoke closet and admit to myself that I have lived here long enough that I no longer can rally an emotional and spiritual accommodation for summer. Though I love it, I no longer have clothes for it, even when I technically do. So completely has my soul come to inhabit the gray sweater of Binghamton,* that I reach for its drab comfort though the sun be shining.
So we will struggle on for a few short months, longing for and loving the sun, but being anxious about its heat and light, unhappily wearing clothes that show a speck of skin, reaching evermore for the coat, the socks, the sweater, worried that snow will suddenly plunge from the sky, relieved when it finally does, returning always to the touchstone, the gray overbearing sky.
See how good I am at not getting my hopes up?
*Worn even by Marissa Tomei in that Binghamton movie with Hugh Grant that no one could ever remember the name of–did you know, they both came here? As in actually came and shot some scenes in Binghamton. Her sweater wasn’t apparently gray but it was in an Aristotelian sense, like, the fountain source of the sweater was gray, even though it’s outward properties, or accidents, were not.
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