A Sense of Style

My niece's wedding is Saturday. Lisa will be a beautiful bride. She has a perfect figure, great hair, and a lovely smile. She also has an inherent sense of style that she may have inherited from my mother. It is one that bypassed me. There are some women who seem to have it all together as far as appearance goes, and I admire them. I really do. They know what looks good on them and they accessorize well to boot. Maybe if I had had different experiences from the beginning, if my feet hadn't been so big, my wrists too large for pretty bracelets, or arms that no long sleeves would fully cover, I could be like them, too. Maybe then the love of clothes would have come easier to me, and I would have found my style. But nothing ever seemed to fit quite right, the way it did on my mother whose model thin size and shape just naturally never changed. One of my most consistently repeated New Year's resolutions has been to find and define my style, but I dropped it a couple of years ago when I realized that whether I liked it or not, I already did have my own style. It just wasn't one that I wanted. I would call it more of a shabby-chic with less emphasis on the chic. But an aunt must look nice for the wedding festivities, so shopping for the right dress I went. I found one, longish and graceful, a deep red with thin black lines whirled about in some sort of pattern that reminds me of classical music. Today I walked around in it in the hopes that I will adapt to it and it to me. I tried on various pieces of jewelry and settled on an old (antique) necklace, an odd piece that I inherited from my grandmother. This is the first time those twisted links of black celluloid have looked good with anything, and it is a sweet way of taking a piece of Mama to her great-granddaughter's wedding. And I must find something of Mother's to wear also. No matter...the older we get, the less likely people are to assess our looks. And there will be plenty of youthful beauty and style to be admired on Saturday.