Orange rug skirt

Tonight, I am snow bound. We were going to be attending a family gathering 45 miles away, but the gathering was canceled under more snow. So instead, I will write a true story about my mother, my university, and my favorite wool skirt.

In 1963, my grandfather worked for UNESCO. When my mom was 16 years old (and obviously not yet my mom), her family moved to Turkey. She left her friends and her junior year of high school to pick up her schooling half way around the world. In Turkey, she enrolled in an American high school along with her older brother, and finished high school that year with him, before turning 17. With nothing better to do, she decided to go to university a year early. The university she decided upon? The American University in Paris. After enrolling, she found an elderly French woman to live with, packed up, and was out on her own. Age 17. That was back when my mom was cool.

The very next year, her family had moved from Turkey to Nigeria back to the conservative state in the American mountain west where my mother grew up. She decided to move back to be near family again, probably more for financial reasons than any others, and transferred to Good Old Dude's University. The year was 1965.

Now. Let me put some things into cultural perspective. My mother was now turning 18. She had lived a year in a far away country, followed by several months on her own in the City of Lights. She had been making her own rules, living life intelligently, and she was bright, thoughtful and opinionated.

G.O.D. University was not much different then than it is now, only a little stricter. Their dress code, for example, in 1965, required that the girls who attended must wear only dresses and skirts. It was a sin for girls to put their legs into two tubes (trousers). Women's legs belonged in a single tube.

Here in the mountain west, it can snow a lot. My mother (who was still not yet my mother) found the winter of 1965-66 to be particularly snowy. Those of you who don't have much experience with legs in a single tube may not be aware that skirts can be quite drafty. They don't warm your legs quite as well as individual leg wrappings.

To compensate, my mother sewed herself a skirt. This skirt was made of heavy wool, burnt orange striped, and draped from the waist down to the ankles. She also knitted herself a fuzzy sweater, although I'm not so certain of the timing on the sweater.

I like to picture my mother walking around the campus of G.O.D. University, clutching her books to her chest, fuming over G.O.D.'s regents and their ridiculous, pointless rules, the orange rug skirt shielding some of the wind, but unable to block it all.

The next fall, my mother transferred to the modern, public university 50 miles north, where she was able to get some use out of her Parisian trousers and make her own rules again. There she completed her first degree, and then a master's degree a few years later. She married a local man, and settled into the local community, and raised eight local children. The strains of bearing children were too much for her waistline, and the orange rug skirt no longer fit. Several years along, however, when her oldest daughter was about 16, she gave the rug skirt and the fuzzy hand knit sweater to said daughter, and told her of Turkey, of Paris, and the reasons why she left G.O.D. University. The daughter took the stories to heart. She dreamed of visiting Paris, of getting a master's degree, and wondered about G.O.D. University. Her mother was more than cool -- she was intelligent. More than opinionated -- she was informed. And who was G.O.D. to think that a skirt could suppress an opinion?

Sixteen years have passed. I have been to Paris, lived in New York, and spent the last ten years in climates that are inappropriate for a heavy orange wool skirt and fuzzy sweater. Last Saturday we had our first real snow here in my mountain state. Sunday I pulled the orange rug skirt out of a box, and the sweater out of the closet. It has come full circle, this rug skirt. Even back to the shadow of G.O.D. University, where I have been working -- me, the feminist -- for a whole semester.

If there is any consolation in the cold, it is that I can wear the rug skirt again. It is my favorite by far. Here at G.O.D. University, it shields some of the wind, if not all.