First of all, my mom died. I bring it up because midlife crises are often the function of our subconscious awareness of decline and death, and my midlife crisis kicked off with an awareness of decline and death that was not subconscious at all. It was very, very conscious.

After my mom’s death I became preoccupied with all the sneaky ways my body and genetics were quietly engineering my own demise. Surely the tumors were already starting to blossom inside me. The amyloid plaques were beginning to stick together and accumulate on my brain. There was a genetically predetermined accumulation of lipoprotein (a) in my veins that my heart wouldn’t be able to fight. And, if medical miracles could bring me back from these battles, injured but alive, then there is the inevitable bodily decay from time to contend with, which had already become visible on my face.

My clock is ticking.

Between learning my mom was going to die and when she did die there was five months. Five months she didn’t spend gardening or painting or playing on the floor with her grandkids, but instead five months she spent in the agony of chemo treatments and emergency rooms. This is the important trigger, fuel, and function of my personal brand of midlife crisis:

There will be no final months to get through the bucket list. We can count on nothing. We aren’t even guaranteed an easy passage. We must stop at nothing to be as joyful and beautiful as possible, right now.

I call this midlife crisis brand Mary Oliver x Mary Orton.

Let me explain.

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One night in the fall of 2023, after spending the day in the hospital with my mom, I watched the movie Nyad about the 60-year old woman who swam from Cuba to Florida. It so happens that Mary Oliver‘s poem The Summer Day drives the emotional motivation of the plot. It also so happened that earlier that day I had come across Mary Oliver‘s poem Wild Geese on a friend’s Instagram story.

“Huh,” I thought, “two Mary Oliver references in one long, horrible hospital day.”

Naturally, a rabbit hole ensued.

I had been aware of Mary Oliver but had never given her work much consideration. She was in the realm of naturalists and lesbians and feminists, which seemed like a nice place to visit but didn’t really appeal as a place for me to set up shop.

But Coincidence has more muscle on your psyche when you’re going through it and after seeing one post and seeing one movie and Googling her poems one time (Lie. Many times), I started seeing Mary Oliver quotes everywhere. The algorithms picked up on my curiosity. My feed became flooded with Mary Oliver “content.” She was now an unlikely influencer from beyond the grave.

I most frequently came across the last few bars of the poem The Summer Day:

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

These words are just ready-made for Instagram. Juxtapose them against travel reels and female-empowerment memes and they impart the idea that life is short, so take your chance! climb your mountain! Carpe diem! Etc!

Except…everyone on Instagram is a little bit wrong. Missing their larger context, the last few lines of The Summer Day are being repurposed as a motivating cry somewhat at odds with their original intent.

The Summer Day shows that quiet living is worthy of our grand poems.

In the poem the author is idle. The most she does is take a loooong look at a grasshopper. She laments that she really doesn’t know what else to do with her time. She asks you if you think she *should* have been doing more.

Should she be building her business instead of studying a grasshopper? Putting on muscle instead of kneeling in the grass?

The Summer Day shows that quiet living is worthy of our grand poems. In the months after my mom’s death, I returned to Mary Oliver again and again. Ever since my first child was born life was feeling frustratingly small. My days were dominated by domesticity. Post kids, setting out on, now rare, grand adventures required meticulously planning, pre-paying, and organizing my time around my husband’s and the kids’ schedule. Carpe diem aliis.

It’s natural to feel resentful about this lack of autonomy. But truth is, it’s good that I’ve given myself over to the Mary Oliver aesthetic. Because it is easy to find joy in the birds, trees, and adventures of my own backyard. Carpe diem can mean buying that plane ticket to Bali on a whim. It can also mean going on a hunt for that tufted titmouse while walking the same 500 steps around the perimeter of the yard. If, and when, I have 5 months left I will probably spend more time seeking out the indulgence of songbirds than I will spend time traveling the globe. It’s not just children–bodily decline has a way of keeping you local.

Mary Oliver awakened an awareness of my yearning for the humble Ohio naturalist aesthetic–it was there all along, overlooked for the more outwardly impressive lifestyle. It’s an aesthetic that is distinctly feminine, distinctly middle aged, and distinctly subversive. It’s a yearning to put myself in a wide brim hat, knees in the dirt, to tend to the rose bushes with care and crinkled skin. For taking my old body out into the morning to sing. To turn to plants and pottery and pets as an outlet for my deep empathy and need to love actively. Of course I still want to travel the world, but I want it just as much as I want to have the time to gaze out my back window into my own small landscape.

In the process of grieving, I created goals for myself. For my one wild and precious life I will:

Which leads me to Mary Orton and a $250 baseball cap.

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Around the same time that I saw Mary Oliver‘s poems trending, an influencer I follow on Instagram was showing off her gorgeously fit, quietly luxurious twill-and-leather baseball cap. I don’t wear baseball caps. I rarely wear hats at all. Regardless—and I’m sure you’re familiar with this phenomenon–I knew right away that I NEEDED this hat. Thus began my surrender into the too-rich-for-my-blood-but-I’m-buying-it-anyway world of fashion influencer Mary Orton.

What I know of Mary Orton is that she started as a fashion blogger and since turned into a primo influencer and designer. She seems to have the social media game down to a science: consistent aesthetic, approachable demeanor, disarmingly funny, and a backdrop of Architectural Digest-worthy interiors.  As someone who had purposefully curated a feed of more pretentious social media cohorts like birding, constitutional law, historical soil maps, etc. I took pains to avoid interacting too much with such low-level beauty influencers and their silly little brands, lest they push out the Carolina wrens from my feed. But jokes on me! Much like the last lines of The Summer Day, soon ads for Mary Oliver’s Chord hats were following me across the web. And by that calculated 10^th impression, I departed from my $300 and that luxury twill baseball cap was all mine.

Lord do I love this hat. I wear it regularly. I feel good in it. I’m always getting compliments on it–a necessary external validation that is critical to such extravagances. And I recognize this purchase behavior as something that a (closeted) retail addict like myself indulges often—the exotic allure and untapped glamour of a product category that I have so far ignored: wide-brimmed-coastal-grandma-meets-Coachella hats had reached critical mass; luxury baseball caps were fashion white space.

Which brings me back to the appeal of Mary Orton for a Midlife Millennial like me. She is not a mom-blogger or It Girl. She is as far away from Becky Kennedy as she is from Zendaya. She is something else that is both aspirational and specifically midlife. She looks rich (is rich), has impeccable skin, is classically beautiful with meticulously coiffed hair (making her founding of a hat brand all the more intriguing!) and she wears clothes that look like Chanel or *are* Chanel. She is not the thing that I aspire be one day, no, she is the thing that I should be right now and convince myself that I already am. She is “arrived.” See me in my nice hat? Notice I am busy and important. I am also “arrived.”

This is the kind of success that is thoroughly modern Millennial. A well-appointed and slightly maximalist interior, children or dogs or better yet both and, critically, a career of hard work behind you. Mary Orton is the model for my midlife aesthetic from which other somewhat extravagant facades (and purchases) have been nurtured. Mary Orton‘s Chord caps opened the door to Sarah Flint’s impeccably made-in-Italy footwear which gave permission for Jenny Kane‘s cashmere sweaters which gave way to a wardrobe full of Madewell basics. And why choose youthful cascading waves of hair when shoulder-length blowouts command the respect you deserve (when they aren’t under that twill-and-leather, that is)? This is the me, now. No, I am not trying to have it all. Yes, I am trying my utmost for my own highest.

So how does one reconcile the pomp and glamour of Mary Orton with the candor and simplicity of Mary Oliver?

That’s the beautiful, multitudinous tension. To be both things at once: powerful and feminine, realistic and aspirational, fully present and endlessly curious. This is the dualism of modern feminism, of being a working mom, of being 40. I am at once youthful and old. I am curious and experienced. I am uncertain and prepared. I am something both, not just something middle.

Or, maybe after all this heavy prose, you think maybe I shouldn’t have spent so much money on a hat.

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?