I love clothes and shopping for clothes. Each purchase (and there are many) is framed by the question ‘where will I wear this?’. I imagine myself at elegant lunches at the gallery or a bijou bistro, my hair done and makeup on fleck.
Sometime I see myself holding forth in a board room sporting casual corporate; a limited-edition scarf draped around my shoulders and perfectly manicured nails keeping the world updated via social media.
Alas, many of my most indulgent purchases remain wrapped in tissue paper in my bottom draw. Gallery visits are sporadic and generally solo affairs. Bijou bistros the realm of fantasy rather than fact. Like most writers, I spend my days in tracksuit pants and sloppy jeans, an occasional slick of lip gloss the only nod to appearances. The yoga tights dragged over my knees at 5:30am likely to still be there 16 hours later when I’m preparing for bed.
And just as my fancy clothes gather dust, sometimes my marriage languishes in the doldrums. Busy lives interfere with love lives. The Husband works long hours and juggles many extra-curricula projects. And when he’s not working he’s tired. My pretty clothes aren’t called for and the token lip-gloss goes unnoticed.
So weekends at The Farm take on a dual purpose. They give The Husband space to breathe and the two of us a chance to reconnect. We drove here late yesterday and today I crammed a month of dates into eight hours.
After a sleep-in we stepped out for breakfast then larked about in the local supermarket, having fun buying toilet paper and mixed lollies and fire-starters for the Webber. A story in the local paper pointed us to the Kalbar Show where we wandered, hand-in-hand, admiring the fine arts exhibits in the football club change rooms. We inspected old machinery then stopped by the cattle judging, learning about evenly-distributed muscle and fat and how to imagine beautiful beasts as carcasses on a hook.
[/caption]Later, we drove a bit further to taste beer and at hot chips from a micro-brewery we discovered just over the hill from our house. Happy times.
Back at The Farm, he napped while I picked lemons and pecans and stripped varnish from an old chair. Then we drank cocktails on the deck watching the sun set and ate beef short ribs I’d thrown into the slow cooker earlier in the day, perched at the kitchen bench with a bottle of Shiraz between us.
And all day I wore a pair of old jeans and a sloppy t-shirt from the wardrobe vault. No makeup.
It’s been a very good day, no glad rags required.
