A letter from a reader

At 64, I had not sat down on the grass at a picnic in forty years. My grandkids had started calling the folding chair Nan's chair

The only thing I write every week is the shopping list on the fridge, and Graham adds chips to the bottom of it in his own handwriting like I will not notice. I am not a writer, and telling another woman what she ought to wear is not something I go in for.

But three women asked me about a skirt while we sat on the grass at The Entrance earlier this spring, and one of them asked me to write the name down for her on the back of a receipt. So I am writing it down once, properly, because the reason I bought it is a bit of a story.

Nan's chair

We have two grandkids one suburb over, and I pick them up from school on Thursdays. They are at the age where everything happens on the ground. Picnics, the beach, the backyard, the lounge room floor with a jigsaw. And for about forty years I have not sat on the ground at a picnic. Not once.

It started with skirts. In a skirt on a picnic rug you spend the whole afternoon holding your knees together and tucking the hem in, and getting back up again is a performance for the entire park. So I wore shorts. Then shorts went, and it was capri pants. And somewhere in there I stopped getting down at all.

Graham started bringing a folding chair for me. It lives in the boot now, between the jumper leads and the umbrella. At every picnic for years the whole family has been down on the rug, and there I am, up on my chair at the edge of it, passing the sandwiches down like the lady at the canteen.

At the start of spring our granddaughter, who is six, looked up at me from the rug at the park and said, Nan, why do you always sit up there like the umpire? Her brother said, that is Nan's chair. And everybody laughed, me included, and I went home and thought about it for a week.

Nan, why do you always sit up there like the umpire?

What I had wrong

I had decided it was my age. That women of sixty four sit on chairs, and that was that.

It was not my age. It was my clothes. Shorts at my age are a decision I do not want to make in front of the whole park, capri pants cut in at the knee the moment you fold your legs, and every skirt I owned was the wrong length for anything but standing up. I had not been choosing the chair. My wardrobe had been choosing it for me.

The skirt my daughter found

It was my daughter who found it, in the end. I mentioned the umpire business to her on the phone, as a joke, and she did not laugh. That evening she sent me a link with no message, which is how she tells me something is settled.

It is called the Emma, and it is from Thompson Sydney, a small Australian boutique. It is a long skirt, right down to the ankle, in a soft pale grey with a whole meadow of pastel wildflowers rising up from the hem. Pinks and lilacs and soft yellows, crowded together at the bottom and thinning out as they go up, the way a paddock does. It has an elastic waist, so it simply pulls on, and two side pockets, so my phone and keys came with me instead of going in Graham's.

The listing said it was for spring days, picnics and travel. I am not a woman who believes listings. But I did think, if it is long enough, I can fold my legs to one side and let it fall wherever it likes.

The pelicans at The Entrance

If you have never been, every afternoon at The Entrance on the Central Coast the volunteers feed the pelicans down by the channel. The pelicans know the time better than the volunteers do. They come in over the water about half an hour early and stand about on the sand looking put out. Everybody sits round on the grass to watch, and the kids sit right up the front.

We drove the grandkids up on a Saturday earlier this spring. It was warm and still and the lake was flat as a plate. Graham got the folding chair out of the boot at the car park, out of habit, and carried it all the way down.

I wore the Emma with a plain white t-shirt and my flat sandals. When we got down to the grass the kids spread the rug, and I did not wait to think about it. I just sat down on it, folded my legs to one side, and the skirt fell over them and stayed there. Nobody had to look away and nobody had to help me arrange myself.

Our granddaughter sat right in my lap for the whole feeding.

The woman on the next rug asked where the skirt was from before the first pelican had even been fed. Then the young girl helping the volunteer with the fish bucket came over after, wiping her hands on her shorts, and said she wanted one for her mum. And an older lady on the bench behind us, who told me she had given up sitting on the ground about the same time she gave up mini skirts, leaned over and asked me to write the name down for her. I did, on the back of a receipt from the bakery.

Graham carried the folding chair all the way back up to the car park at the end. It never came out of the bag. He said it was the first afternoon off it had had in twenty years.

What happened when we got home

When we got back to Epping the kids were staying for tea, and they wanted to play in the backyard before it got dark. So I sat down on the back step with them, still in the skirt, and Banjo came and sat next to me as though he had been waiting years for the invitation.

Three things I have learned since

One. It was never my age. I had blamed sixty four for forty years of chairs. It was the clothes, every time.

Two. Long is not old. I had always thought a long skirt was something you wore once you had given up. It turns out it is what you wear when you want to get down on the grass.

Three. Pockets matter more than you think. I came home with my own phone in my own pocket. Graham says he does not know what to do with his hands.

About the price

I sat behind a doctors' surgery front desk for thirty years and saw a great many invoices, so I will tell you straight, the price made me suspicious.

The Emma is $54.95. It was $110.00.

My first thought was that for that money the flowers would turn out to be a smudge on something thin. They are not. The meadow looks painted, and the skirt hangs properly when you stand up.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is nobody in the middle taking a cut, and they run a spring sale to move the season's stock. I read the reviews before I ordered, the way I imagine you are doing now. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if anything made me trust it more. One woman from Kincumber had written, “I wore it to a Christmas picnic and spent the whole day on the rug with my grandchildren. My daughter took a photo because she said she had never seen me down there.” That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were out on the back verandah with a cuppa and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If there is a folding chair in your boot with your name on it, or a picnic coming up this summer where you already know you will be the one up on the edge passing the sandwiches down, give it ten minutes of an evening. There are twenty four skirts in the collection, all sorts of prints and colours, and you only need the one.

Not because a skirt will change your life. It will not. But I have a photograph now of me on the rug with the grandkids and the pelicans, and for years every picnic photo had me sitting up above everybody like the umpire.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on now and the middle sizes go first. And with summer and the Christmas picnics coming, I would not leave it too long.

The chair is still in the boot. I have not needed it since.

Dianne