November 8, 2007
Thursday

Today I shipped fifteen pounds of books and supplies to Wyoming. “This will arrive next Thursday,” the woman at UPS said. “Does it need to be there earlier?” “That’s the very day I’m arriving, so that’s fine!” I told her. I thought briefly of asking her to just slap a bar code on my forehead and let me sit out on the dock with the packages. I have a lot of anxiety about wrangling my gear through airports, misunderstanding how and where and when to check in, missing connections, not having the right documents.

With four heavy books and some manuscript files on their way, I can concentrate on choosing and packing the clothes I’ll need. I was nattering on about this to a friend the other day. (My friends are surely weary of hearing about my concerns about this trip. It’s a wonder anyone is still speaking to me.) Winter clothes are bulky, I whined. And shoes. I need hiking shoes and casual shoes and maybe dress shoes and warm slippers too. My friend pointed out that I probably really didn’t need to take a whole lot of clothes. “It’s not like you have to dress for success,” he said.

And that’s true. I am going to Wyoming to work, to shape and polish and refine this manuscript I started six years ago into something I can begin showing to agents and publishers. I’m not going out there for sightseeing nor for adventure nor for any other purpose except to write. Did Thoreau take an extensive wardrobe when he went out to the woods to live deliberately? Did the Desert Fathers buy fashionable outfits for their periods of purgation and illumination in Egypt? I think not.

My study of the nineteenth century has shown me how people made do with very little. Most ordinary people had only two sets of clothing. They wore one for several days while they washed the other and then set it aside for when the first was truly soiled. I could get by in Wyoming with two pairs of sweatpants, two sweatshirts, and maybe four turtlenecks. And one pair of shoes.

My first year at Bread Loaf I knew a woman whose home was in Colorado. She was tall and blonde, her hair obviously colored by a skilled professional. I knew that everything she had with her had to have come packed into a single bag that rode in the cargo hold of an airliner.

Bread Loaf is a casual place, rustic almost. The intellectual stimulation is almost more than I can handle, and the community I find myself in is a delight. But the facility itself is no resort. The buildings and the furnishings are not much better than what you’d find at a church camp. The bathrooms are cramped and not well-lighted, and the bedrooms are sparsely furnished with only a bed, a desk, a low chest with no mirror, and no closet. It’s a place that doesn’t call for more than comfortable pants and a t-shirt, with a sweatshirt for the cool nights.

Yet every time I saw this woman she looked as if she’d stepped out of a fashion magazine. She wore a different outfit every day, gauzy tops with swirly skirts, jeans with just the right ribbed t-shirt, jackets with sequins, and shoes to match them all. More than anything else, though, I noticed her jewelry, chunky necklaces, bangle bracelets, dangly earrings that caught the light just right, rings on her fingers and on her toes. I imagined her on the cover of More magazine with an article on the inside outlining her path to publication after fifty, photos of her in her light-filled studio in the Rockies. Sitting next to her, I felt plainer and mousier than usual. I wondered how she did it, how she managed to look so fresh and so stylish.

This afternoon I pulled out all the clothes I might be wearing if I were to continue with my “normal” life this next month, if I were to continue to go to my Thursday morning spiritual study group, my biweekly writers’ group, church and lunch with friends and visits to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker in preparation for my party. I put them on the bed beside the more compact pile of t-shirts, turtlenecks, and two well-worn Vermont sweatshirts. I ran my hands over my favorite sweaters, stacked them up, and gauged just how much trouble they’d be to haul half way across the country and back.

Among the pieces is a mock turtleneck in a soft and drapey turquoise silk and cotton. It fits close to the body and yet when I have it on I don’t feel schlubby, I don’t think I look, as my grandmother and mother said of unfortunate get-ups, like “a sack tied in the middle.” I was wearing it the day last November that I walked a landscape from my youth and felt a certain energy come into me. When I have it on I think I look like that writer from Colorado, and I feel like I can do anything.

It’s going to Wyoming with me, and so are its fellows. I put the serviceable but uninspiring tees and turtlenecks away. I’ll be dressed for success in Wyoming, even if no one sees me.

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