Yesterday afternoon I took Martha to Steinmarts. I took her to Steinmarts because she had been in town for a full three hours without making the pilgrimage to the mothership, and when Alex and I got home we found her sipping on her nineteenth cup of coffee and looking like she was ready for a shopping adventure.
I only had to utter half the word – “Stein” – before she threw on her turquoise jacket and grabbed her purse and walked briskly to the front door.
On the way to the Steinmarts Martha ran through her list of “a few things I’d like to find.” As long as I have known her – which, at this point, is the better part of thirty years – Martha has had a like-to-find list in her head. It changes, of course, depending on her fashion and decorative needs, but sometimes the like-to-find is a three-piece suit (jacket, skirt, pants) that she could wear to church and to weddings and to lunch with the girls if, you know, they were going somewhere nice.
Sometimes the like-to-find is a set of salt and pepper shakers with the same color of blue as those dishes that Rose gave her, you know the ones in the pie safe in the breakfast room? The ones with all the pretty colors?
Sometimes the like-to-find is a collarless black jacket with two buttons – but they have to be big buttons! not little buttons! – that she can wear with the red skirt from Dillard’s that’s not really a red-dy red but more of a burgundy-red, only not a true burgundy because she’s never really owned anything in that color, but the red-dy red skirt has sort of a high waist and so it would look cute with a short black jacket, but it really only needs to have two buttons to keep it a little dressier because if it had three buttons it would look more like something you’d wear to work in a bank or maybe even a law firm!
You really just never know.
Yesterday’s like-to-find list was a sofa, a wing-back chair and a small patio set, so I knew from the get-go that we weren’t going to be find any of it at Steinmarts. But I also knew that the siren call of the short, three-quarter sleeve jacket is strong and irresistible. And since I couldn’t take a page from The Odyssey and tie Martha to some sort of mast to help her resist the siren’s call, I opted to completely enable her.
Which is why we were in the Steinmarts for over one hour.
At one point Martha asked me to look at a black and white coat that she found. It really was cute, and I gave it a thumbs-up, but when she put it on, it was way too big in the shoulders and the sleeves hit her fingertips.
“DO YOU SEE?” she said. “DO YOU SEE HOW THIS ‘SMALL’ DOES ON ME? IT JUST WON’T DO! IT WON’T DO! IT’S JUST TOO BIG!”
And I’m standing there thinking that if I tried to put on that ‘small’ coat and worked with all my might to squeeze my arms in the sleeves, a movement of a mere fraction of an inch would turn the whole thing into something that resembled the Incredible Hulk’s t-shirt.
Seriously. A light breeze could blow in Huntsville, and those sleeves would fly off of my arms like rockets.
In the end Martha didn’t find anything – she felt like most of the clothes were “beigey-taupey” and not really anything she was looking for and certainly not anything on the like-to-find – but on the way home she told me a story about a yellow jacket that she recently bought.
I’ll spare you most of the details, but the gist was that Martha got an incredible deal on this cute little jacket that had a little bit of fringe on the sleeves and was sort of a bright yellow, but not a mustard gold! oh no! not a mustard gold! Then she said, “I know you write on the blog that I say things are darlin’, just darlin’, but this one REALLY WAS, Sophie, IT REALLY WAS.”
And then:
“Do you know what it was? Do you know? That jacket was darlin’ plus. It was DARLIN’ PLUS! It was SPECIAL. DARLIN’ PLUS!”
And I’ll have you know that in that very moment a single thought came to my mind: in a day or so I’m going to tell the internet about darlin’ plus. And when I tell them, they’re not going to believe it.
Because “darlin’ plus”? WHO SAYS THAT?
My mother-in-law. That’s who.
So in conclusion, internet, I just want to tell you something.
You aren’t just darlin’.
You’re darlin’ plus. Oh yes you are. YOU’RE DARLIN’ PLUS.
And you can hold that in your heart forever and for always.
Love,
The Daughter-in-Law of Martha / Mother / “Martie”
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