![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valancy_jane I have made a beautiful mistake: the sweater I ordered is in fact an enormous, thick, heavy Irish shawl. For many people, this would be infuriating, but I am ecstatic. It is pure wool, long, heavy, black. It layers perfectly over my black-and-brown turtleneck; it lays elegantly on the back of my chair.
Tossed on, it conjures the very best memories of the Spanish woman (late 50s, early 60s?) I lived with half the year in Spain, who set my standard for a life well-lived as an adult. (The friends! The events! The joy of the city! The children who adored her! A woman always with plans.)
While her shawl was the classic thin Spanish one--one I also love--this, though thick, has that same elegance and maturity, a shawl that says you know exactly who you are and you are precisely the age you mean to be.
It is warm in a way that only my recently purchased cashmere sweater is; a warmth built of real fibers, something whole and healthy and good about it. (I remember reading interviews with Outlander cast members; all the cast were absolutely comfortable, in period-perfect wool and silk, in the cold and wet of Scotland. [Wool is warm wet or cold, unlike killing cotton.] The crew, in their technical vests and jeans and even I think someone in snow pants, were utterly miserable.)
It's enough to entirely put me off synthetics forever, which I have been huddling under, shivering under, for winter thus far. Five minutes in this shawl and I turn off the heater and throw on some lipstick, pleased with my elegant, cozy self, and can hardly believe I will ever catch a cold again.
Tossed on, it conjures the very best memories of the Spanish woman (late 50s, early 60s?) I lived with half the year in Spain, who set my standard for a life well-lived as an adult. (The friends! The events! The joy of the city! The children who adored her! A woman always with plans.)
While her shawl was the classic thin Spanish one--one I also love--this, though thick, has that same elegance and maturity, a shawl that says you know exactly who you are and you are precisely the age you mean to be.
It is warm in a way that only my recently purchased cashmere sweater is; a warmth built of real fibers, something whole and healthy and good about it. (I remember reading interviews with Outlander cast members; all the cast were absolutely comfortable, in period-perfect wool and silk, in the cold and wet of Scotland. [Wool is warm wet or cold, unlike killing cotton.] The crew, in their technical vests and jeans and even I think someone in snow pants, were utterly miserable.)
It's enough to entirely put me off synthetics forever, which I have been huddling under, shivering under, for winter thus far. Five minutes in this shawl and I turn off the heater and throw on some lipstick, pleased with my elegant, cozy self, and can hardly believe I will ever catch a cold again.
