Dressing for Vacation When You're Home

A version of this post was originally published on naturallynoracrochet.com

Sam and I are likely going to have to cancel the biggest trip we’ve ever planned with just the two of us. Every five years, we try to take an extended time away just for us. This year we will celebrate fifteen years of marriage and had planned a week in Maui. As it stands now, that trip is looking very unlikely, with domestic travel bans looming on the horizon due to COVID-19.

I won’t pretend this isn’t breaking my heart. So, I put on this dress this morning and went out back to pick ripe oranges from our tree.

On our fifth wedding anniversary, we were given an entire weekend to ourselves. We left our toddler, now nearly eleven years old, with my parents and drove up the coast to Big Sur.

I saw Big Sur from the backseat window as a child, marveling at the knife-edge balance between forest and sea. I camped there with close friends a few weeks after graduating high school, a first trip with no parents to manage things like food and tents and navigation for us. We had cv radios on loan from my best friend’s dad so we could talk to each other from borrowed pick up to borrowed pick up…pre-texting, pre-cell phone, Eagle One calling Fox Two.

With a weekend to get away, the first chance Sam and I had since becoming parents, Big Sur felt right. It is a magical place.

Steep, craggy cliffs topped by Coast Live Oaks, Monterey Pines, and Coastal Redwoods harbor chilly McWay Creek in which to wade. This modest, lively little stream makes its way through the state park, eventually arriving home to the Pacific in the form of a breathtaking waterfall straight from cliff top to pristine cove, a true California icon.

One night we sprung for a special dinner out and landed at a restaurant called Nepenthe, which embodies everything you’d expect from Big Sur, traditionally a haven for those who think and live differently-artists, poets, those seeking expressive lives in community with like-minded people. The heaviest jacket I brought wrapped tightly around me, we sat on the terrace perched 800 feet above the waves and ate diver-caught scallops before our meals chilled in the evening air coming in cool and misty. Yep, it was that good.

The way this place bridges the wild to the settled, the brine to the woods, the spirited to the earthly speaks to me. It’s pinching a sage leaf between your thumb and forefinger, then searching for a perfume that could possibly capture that pleasant sharpness. It’s walking in a stream until your feet ache with cold, then slipping on black booties to eat a meal served suspended over the sea. It’s a sturdy black linen dress that drapes for life and movement, then tells a subtly feminine story with bishop sleeves and gathered detailing.

The invitation to share a piece like the Sabine dress, from the small, conscious, independent clothier Sugar Candy Mountain was enough to pique my interest. After a carefully considered acceptance of that invitation, I was able to learn more about their roots and their story, and I became convinced that this collaboration was meant to be. You see, the founder of this small company spent part of her childhood in Big Sur, where her mother would sell her own handmade goods in the store annex of a restaurant called (you guessed it) Nepenthe. There, she says, is where her interest in designing clothes began.

The Sabine dress is a piece I would have worn as a very young woman, and I can imagine wearing as I age, as well. It emotes an artist’s eyes for the world, like O’Keefe in the desert.

Wearing this dress will always feel like Big Sur to me, and perhaps that is why clothing means something to me at all. It’s in the way it makes you feel, about yourself, the world, and your place in it.

It’s the way it can bring a specific time and place, a feeling, into my current moment, even when the greatest escape that moment holds is an orange tree in the backyard.