The Curated coat (similar)
Zara sweater (similar)
Zara jeans (similar)
Flattered boots (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: National Gallery of Ireland – Dublin, Ireland
I can’t look at these photos without the lyrics to songs about rain running through my mind. It’s silly, but true. As I type this, the words to B. J. Thomas’ 1969 hit about rain are playing on a loop in my head…
He’s right – I know that from experience. I complained about the rain every year that we lived in Vancouver, the last two in particular, but that never stopped anything. In fact, I think it actually rained more those two years, though that was likely related to the effects of global warming and not mother nature trying to teach me a lesson about letting go of things you can’t control. Winter is my least favourite season in any climate, but constant rain in Vancouver wore me down, particularly in those last two years.
In Dublin, on the other hand, it was a welcome change of pace. Still not the weather I hoped for, admittedly, but the gale force winds that arrived in Irelands with us blew it in and out so quickly that we were rarely caught in it for long. It was really only in the ten minutes when I wanted to take photos of this outfit that the weather seemed set completely against me. The moment I pulled out my new Chanel bag, which I’d otherwise been jealously protecting from the inclement weather by carrying it in my Longchamp tote, rain drops began to fall. I backed up, to make sure I was under the covered doorway, and we stubbornly took the photos, anyway.
The weather, equally stubborn, held out only for as long as I did. The rain clouds blew away the second that my beloved handbag was tucked safely back into my tote.
There was a younger version of me who would have been frustrated by these events. Not all that much younger, to be honest – I wrote in detail about her struggles in early 2018, which was five years ago (and thus longer ago than I’d like to admit, but also not all that long ago considering that life was recently suspended for about two and a half years, which means that our collective sense of the recent is a bit different than it once was… or so I tell myself, to explain why things that happened five years ago still feel like yesterday.) I suppose I still am, in the moment, but I can laugh about it, too.
In the grand scheme of things, capturing my outfits perfectly just isn’t worth worrying over. I do this for fun. And fun is important, but if mother nature decides to literally rain on my parade, well… I can move my parade elsewhere, or reschedule it. It’s amazing, how much simpler so many things can feel when you let yourself off the hook a little bit. For me, it was letting myself off the hook that was the hard part – when I finally figured out how, everything else just sort of fell into place.
I’ll never stop the rain by complaining… so I’ve stopped trying.
