Summer is drawing to an end, Grit & Glammers, and I’ll be honest — I always feel a little wistful when it does. Let’s face it: summer is my favorite season. The days stretch long and gold, and you can linger over a second cup of coffee or a porch supper without feeling one bit guilty about it. So these end-of-summer reflections arrive with a small lump in my throat, the way they do every year. Now, fall is my favorite season to get dressed — give me tweed and a good boot, and I’m a happy camper — but the moment September rolls into town, the calendar starts to buzz and the whole year shifts into a higher gear. Between my sixty-eighth birthday and coming home from my fiftieth high school reunion — a whole weekend of name tags and is that really you?, five looks tied together with one red thread, and the reminder that the goal was never to turn back the clock — I’ve been in a reflective mood. So before we go tearing into fall, let’s sit with the summer a minute.
Key Takeaways
- Summer is my favorite season, and I’m always sorry to see it go — even though fall is my favorite season to dress, and September resets the whole calendar.
- Life Beyond Style is my reflective corner of the blog — the writing about everything that happens around the clothes: grief, growth, family, and reinvention after fifty.
- Friendship matters more, not less, as we age — and I’m making real room for new friends as I dig into life in Atlanta.
My End of Summer Reflections: Your Bestsellers and My Fall Cart
Before the linen gets pushed to the back of the closet, I did what I do every year at this turn — I looked back at what you reached for all summer long. I rounded it all up in Sunday’s post, What Women Over 50 Are Buying This Fall, and a few things surprised even me.
The single most-bought piece of the whole season wasn’t a dress or a sandal — it was a swimsuit, the Lands’ End Tugless Midkini. Which tells you everything about how well practical and pretty can share a drawer. Talbots led the pack in August, with Chico’s and Ann Taylor right on its heels, and denim came roaring back after a quiet spring.
As for what’s in my own cart for fall? I’m filling the true gaps. A tweed jacket I’ll wear for ten years. A pair of dark denim that does the work of three. The rule I keep repeating to myself as the Labor Day sales roll in: shop the hole, not the bargain. If you want the full rundown of what’s selling and what I’m eyeing, it’s all waiting for you in Sunday’s roundup.
Why I Started Life Beyond Style — a Place for Reflection
Today’s column — Life Beyond Style started because a closet can only hold so much of a life. For years I wrote about Classic Style — the blazer, the white shirt, the great pair of jeans — and I loved every minute of it. But the bigger stories kept knocking: a long marriage that ended, a business I built and then stood back from, wondering now what, a novel I’d left on a shelf for the better part of a decade.
Life Beyond Style is the room I made for those. It’s my weekly place for reflection — essays on grief, growth, family, and real-life reinvention for women over fifty. When the clothes step aside for a moment, this is what’s underneath.
The Posts I Keep Coming Back To
If you’re new around here, Ladies, a few essays make a good front door — and each one is a little window into why this series exists.
Beyond the Blazer: Reinvention for Women Over 50 is where I first wrote honestly about reinvention — not the glossy magazine kind, but the ground-up rebuild that comes after loss, when you’re relearning how to cook for one and set a smaller table. It’s the essay that started this whole reflective streak, and the one I’d hand a friend first.
Life Beyond Style: Rewriting the Script is where I finally pulled that shelved novel back into the light and introduced you to my leading lady. Sharing those first pages was terrifying and freeing in equal measure — proof, I hope, that a dream set aside isn’t a dream lost.
Atlanta Weekends, Frances Valentine, and a New Chapter followed me into a happier plot twist: more time in Atlanta, closer to my granddaughters, and the pretty-and-practical business of building a life in a new city — Frances Valentine flats and all.
Making Room for New Friends
Here’s the thread running underneath all of it — the reunion, the reflection, the new city. Friendship.
Nobody quite warns us that the friendship pipeline narrows as we age. For most of our lives, it was automatic — school, work, church, raising our children put the same faces in front of us until closeness simply happened. But the years quietly close that valve, and if we’re not paying attention, the circle can shrink without our ever deciding to let it. So I’ve made a decision to the contrary: I’m making room for new friends, on purpose.
Nowhere more than in Atlanta. Being closer to my granddaughters is what pulled me into the city, and rather than tiptoe around the edges of a new place, I’ve decided to plunge straight in. I’ve joined a new book club — nothing turns strangers into friends faster than arguing happily over a novel — and I’ve pulled up a chair at a new mahjong group, where I am equal parts terrible and delighted. Just last week, two new friends from my sorority alum club and I went to see the Odyssey and lingered afterward over a long Italian dinner, and somewhere between the pasta and the second pour we all said the same thing out loud: how much it matters to keep making new friends, and to keep an open heart while we do it.
That open heart is the harder half, Gang. It means going first. It means assuming the best of someone new and being willing to be a little brave at an age when it’s easy to decide you’re all set with the friends you’ve got. But the women I admire most are the ones who stayed reachable — who kept saying let’s get dinner long past the point anyone expected them to. I want to be one of those women. I intend to be.
The Friend I Came Home For
I’ll tell you the truth: the reunion wasn’t really why I flew home to Omaha last week. I went home for Lorrie.
She’s been my best friend since 1976 — high school and long, long after. And do we have stories! The summer we faithfully watched General Hospital before heading to the pool — anyone else remember Luke, Laura, and Scotty? Senior prom in our cute dresses and nosegays, on the arms of our dates. The New Year’s Eve we put the car in a ditch just trying to find the party — we hadn’t even arrived yet. The afternoon at Lake Okoboji we climbed aboard a boat full of strange boys — hitchhiking on a raft, I suppose you’d call it. It all turned out just fine — a different time, a different place — but still. Lorrie was there for every last one. We didn’t stay in close touch through our thirties, forties, and fifties; distance has a quiet way of doing that, of letting the years stack up between visits. But Lorrie and I were the kind of friends where none of that ever counted against us. Every time we found our way back into the same room, the years simply melted away, and it was as if we’d talked the night before.
Because that’s what a friend like Lorrie is. She’s the one who knows me inside and out — who knew my mother and father, who knew my siblings, who knew Mr. Style long before he was my husband, who knew me before I was really me. Before the wife and the mother and the grandmother, before Style at a Certain Age was ever a glimmer of an idea. There are so few people left who were there at the very start, who remember the girl I was before she became this woman. Lorrie is my witness. She holds a piece of my whole story that no one else can.
I knew this visit was different before I ever got on the plane. Lorrie has glioblastoma — a brain cancer — and she’s in an assisted living apartment now. She’s still very much herself, still cognizant, but she’s losing her ability to speak. So I did the talking for the two of us, the way only an old friend can. And I got to do the very thing I went home to do: tell her, face to face, how much I love her. How much I treasure her, and every single year of this friendship.
I’m tearing up just writing this to you, Gang. It was a beautiful, bittersweet afternoon, and I am so deeply thankful I was given it. You can imagine how quickly the name tags and the party chatter faded into the background once I’d spent those hours with the person who has meant the most to me since 1976.
Closing Thoughts
Every season hands you something on the way out, and summer’s parting gift is this: permission to slow down long enough to notice what — and who — matters, and to say the loving thing out loud while we still can. So I’ll wave this one off with a full heart and an even fuller calendar, carrying the good parts forward into fall. New chapters, new friends, the same red thread of a life that keeps on unfolding. Thank you for being here for all of it, Grit & Glammers.
Style has no expiration date — and neither do you.
Life Beyond Style is my monthly essay series on the SaaCA blog. It’s the reflective corner where I write about the life that happens around the wardrobe — grief, growth, family, and real-life reinvention for women over fifty.
Because style was never the whole story. After building a brand and living through a season of big changes, I wanted a place to write about what comes next — the harder, truer, more hopeful things a closet can’t cover.
Start by treating it as something you do on purpose, not something you wait to happen. Join a standing group — a book club, a mahjong table, an alumnae circle — so you’re in the same room with the same people again and again, and be the one to say “let’s get dinner after.”
Start with Beyond the Blazer for the reinvention story, then Rewriting the Script for the novel I set aside and came back to. Atlanta Weekends is a lighter, joyful one if you’d rather ease in.
Look back before you shop forward. Notice what you actually reached for all summer, keep the pieces that earned their place, and fill only the real gaps as the fall sales arrive — one good jacket beats a cart full of impulse buys.
Shop the Post
This one’s more about the reading than the shopping — but if you’re filling those end-of-summer gaps, browse my full ShopMy storefront for outfits, home, and fall pieces, and Sunday’s bestsellers roundup has the whole season’s most-loved buys in one place.
Before You Go
Tell me in the comments: what did this summer give you that you want to carry into fall — and are you making room for new friends, too? I read every one.
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