When we moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1997, I asked people how they dealt with the cold. Someone said, “Buy a warm coat.” So I did. A cherry-red down coat from L.L. Bean, rated to -40 degrees. It slid on and off easily, which was important because our son was two years-old, and I was pregnant, and my life was filled with tippy cups, and diaper bags, and mittens and snacks and Matchbox cars that had to accompany us everywhere or there would be a meltdown. In short, it was a time of life where I did not need more aggravation.
The coat looked bulky, but it was just fine and socially acceptable enough. It was an armor against the cold, literally and figuratively. When my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, we all took the train to New York, slept sitting up, and the coat was a coverlet over us.
My sister is fine, the toddler grew up, we moved many times. We remodeled 3 different farm houses, and the coat become a barn jacket long ago. Even with regular washing, the dirt somehow burnished it, the darkness worn to a sheen, especially the bottom of the sleeves. The zipper is busted and unfixable. For a while, a bobby pin helped the slider go up and down, but it’s completely stuck now, and I use snaps to shut the coat. L.L. Bean will fix anything, and I believe they replaced the zipper once, but it seems crazy to ask them to do it again: the shell is ripped in odd places, and all of the pockets are completely worn through or ripped off. I can still put tissues in the inner breast pocket, but this is inconvenient in the cold when I’m wearing gloves. There’s no good place for a box knife, which I like to keep in a pocket because I need it for cutting baling twine, or chipping ice out of latches, and just because.
The coat has seen me through wrestling with frozen hoses, helping with lambing, checking on sick ponies, one of whom needed to be tended every 90 minutes. She’d gotten wormy, then colicky, and I’d go out to the barn when it was -20 to syringe her, alternating between corn syrup for calories and vegetable oil to get stuff moving through her gut.
My coat is not my only article of clothing that verges on the antique. I still own some shirts that predate my husband, which is to say that right now I’m wearing a shirt that’s more than 30 years old. I bought 3 of these heavy Henley shirts at a yard sale in Washington DC when I was visiting with my poet friend, Jody Bolz, who was giving me good advice about this poet & printer I’d met at a writer’s conference. This would have been somewhere around 1990, and the shirts were used then. They are warm and long enough to tuck into my jeans; I see no reason to get rid of them.
Yesterday, it was 3 degrees outside. I pulled the coat out and put it on over my Carhartt’s. I snapped it up. I tell myself that I should probably get a new one, but I think it’ll do for another season.
Elizabeth Oness is a writer & musician who lives on a biodynamic farm in Southeast Minnesota. Her poems and stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, The Tahoma Literary Review, and other magazines. Her stories have received an O. Henry Prize, a Nelson Algren Award, and the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. Her books include: Articles of Faith, Departures, Twelve Rivers of the Body, Fallibility, and Leaving Milan. Elizabeth directs marketing and development for Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press, and is a professor of English at Winona State University.