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When I was 19 my grandmother, whom I affectionately called Sapphire, pulled a piece of nothing-special-tartan fabric out of an ancient red wooden trunk and handed it to me. I’ve had my share of fancy silks, cashmere, and linens but it’s been this simple and rough plaid I’ve carried with me for 20 years, dreaming of something meaningful just for me. Every 10 years or so plaid comes back around and into style, but for Sapphire & me - it never went out. Tartan gets me every time.

The gown I planned just never got around to getting made. Nevermind the lack of occasion to wear it, I just kept having things come up as an indie apparel designer does: wedding dresses for friends and clients; an apparel line that wasn’t going to design, sew, or take photos of itself. I trotted this fabric along through it all: the fledgling stages of my business, love, heartbreak, moves away, moves back home, the shuttering of my business, the move our dream fixer-upper homeplace, and right through the death of my sweet Sapphire. It remained stored in that old red wooden trunk Sapphire eventually gave me. Somewhere in those years, I reached out to a photographer I’d long admired. What I wanted to share was the whole of it: the road I’d traveled, a lot grittier and more tender than the bits I’ve shared here. I trusted her to capture images of the deeper meaning of this gown just for me:

What would you wear if it were just about you? Not the great love you were marrying, or the ceremony of someone else you were attending. What would it look like if it was just you on your mountaintop, reaching out to god, saying, asking, praying: after every hard, ugly, and beautiful thing -I’m good enough for me. May I continue to be.

It takes a long road to arrive at that place. I hope we all get there. I hope when we do that we’re wearing our finest dress, trimmed in gold, crimson train flowing out behind us. Maybe a wool coat, talismans pinned on for reverence of the road traveled. Maybe we lose the cameo brooch that was our gran’s, pinned to the back of that gown somewhere on that mountaintop and maybe we see that loss more like a benediction than something to curse. Life takes its price and it gives its harvest reward too. When we get there I hope someone that can gently hold our souls takes pictures so that we don’t forget that this world keeps turning.