A letter from a reader

At 64, I had spent ten summers saying no to things because it was too hot to get dressed

I am writing this out on the back verandah with a glass of iced water and the pedestal fan going, which tells you a fair bit about what this letter is about. I am not a writer, and in thirty years on a front desk I never once thought it was my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on.

But three different women asked me about a dress at the cherry blossom festival at the Japanese garden in Cowra last weekend, and I have explained it enough times since, at the shops and over the front fence, that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

It started last October, on the first properly hot Saturday of the year. Graham’s sister Lyn had booked a lunch, the forecast said thirty-one, and I rang her at nine in the morning to say I had a headache. Graham was standing at the back door with the car keys. He waited until I hung up, and then he said it.

Di, you have called off more things on account of the heat than the cricket has.

I told him the cricket did not have to find something to wear, and then I sat down and counted, and he was right. Two Christmas barbecues, the carols in the park, a christening, and more Saturday lunches than I would like to admit. Ten summers of saying you go, I will stay here with the air conditioner.

I did not choose that. That is the part I want to be clear about. Nobody decides to stop going to things. It happens quietly, one hot Saturday at a time, until one day your husband is standing at the back door with the keys and you are the one with the headache.

How it happens

I used to love the heat. In my twenties I had a yellow sundress I lived in from October to March, and I wore it to the beach, to the pub and to my own engagement party.

What changed was not me. It was the shops.

Go and look at what they make for a woman our age when it gets hot. It is either cut for a twenty-year-old on her way to the beach, or it is a smart top in a fabric that turns into cling wrap by morning tea. In between there is a rack of three-quarter pants, which nobody has ever felt lovely in.

So you choose. Either you are cool and look like you have come round to read the meter, or you look presentable and you have wilted by eleven. Cool or decent. After a while it seemed I could have one, never both, and on the hot days it was easier to have neither and stay home.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect I am not the only one.

I had decided I was simply not a heat person any more. Some women sail through a Sydney summer, I would say, and I am not one of them.

It turns out that was never the heat.

It was what I had on. A top that clings and a waistband that digs will make thirty degrees feel like forty. A dress that is soft and light, that sits loose and lets the air move, with a hem down past your knees so you are not thinking about your legs on a picnic rug, feels like a different day altogether. And if it is a proper colour, it reads as somebody who meant to be there. That is the whole difference, and it took me until 64 to find it out.

Then Noeline pulled one over her head

I do water aerobics at the Epping pool on Tuesday mornings, mostly for the chat. Noeline is seventy-seven and has been in the back row since before I joined. In the change rooms one morning in September she pulled a green dress over her head, gave it one shake, and walked out into the car park looking like the only cool person in Epping.

I asked her where it was from before she had found her keys. She told me, and I ordered mine that afternoon.

The dress is called the Sara

It is from Thompson Sydney, a small Australian boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

The dress is called the Sara. A sleeveless midi with a plain round neck, in a fresh green like the lawn after the first spring rain, with little clusters of daisies and sprigs worked into the fabric in the very same green, so there is something to look at up close without it shouting from across the room. It comes in a blue as well, which I will come back to.

It is soft and lightweight, and it stays comfortable right through a warm afternoon. The fit is relaxed, so there is room to sit and stroll and bend without a second thought. It slips on in seconds, and the midi length gives you easy coverage without any fuss.

Nobody had to invent anything. They just remembered that women our age get hot too.

What happened in Cowra

Graham drove us out on the Saturday for the cherry blossom festival, four hours with one stop at Bathurst for a pie. It was twenty-nine degrees by lunchtime, the kind of day I would have rung in sick for a year ago. I wore the Sara with my flat sandals and a straw hat.

Three women asked me about it. One on the little bridge over the pond, one in the queue for an iced tea, and a young woman volunteering at the gate, who said her mum would love it and took a photo of me from the neck down to show her.

When we got home on the Sunday evening, Jenny from over the road was out watering her roses. She has never once passed comment on anything I have worn. She looked over the hose and said I looked like I had been somewhere. I have decided to take that as a compliment.

What I noticed more than the compliments, though, was that I forgot about the heat. I walked every path in that garden twice, sat on the grass by the pond with a sandwich, and did not once go looking for shade or a fan or an excuse.

On the way home we stopped at a bakery in Orange, and I wore it again on the Tuesday to walk Banjo under the jacarandas on our street. Same dress, same woman, a garden festival one weekend and the dog walk the next, and right for both.

Three things I have learned since

One. The sizing is honest. It runs from an S all the way to a 5XL, and it is the same relaxed cut the whole way up, not a different shape once you pass a certain number. I wish more places would bother with that.

Two. You stop planning the day around the shade. It is light, it sits away from you, and it moves when you move. I did not realise how much of every summer I had spent working out where the nearest air conditioner was.

Three. It goes both ways. Flat sandals and a straw hat for a day out in the country, or dressed up a little with my good earrings for a birthday lunch. You would never know it was the same dress.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Sara is $65.95. It was $132.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because you can walk into any shopping centre and pay more than that for a top that will stick to you by lunchtime.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they run a spring sale to make room for the summer stock coming in.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. Real people, mixed opinions, mostly very good.

Then I ordered the blue one as well, for the days when the green is in the wash.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sitting out on my verandah with the fan going and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If you have started saying no to things once the weather turns, not because you do not want to go but because there is nothing in the wardrobe you can stand to wear in the heat, then it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a dress will change your life. It will not. But there is something in saying yes to a hot Saturday and enjoying it that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The spring sale is on at the moment, and the middle sizes are the ones that go first. And with summer on its way, the first of the warm-weather stock is already going out the door.

I have not called off a single thing on account of the heat this spring. Graham says the cricket is now ahead.

Dianne