A letter from a reader

I've been the black sheep of my family for 64 years. Now it's on my sweater.

I have never written anything like this before, but people keep stopping me to count the sheep on my sweater, and I have run out of short ways to explain the black one.

So here is the long way.

Two Sundays ago my granddaughter Lila, who is six, climbed into my lap after supper and started counting the sheep across my chest. Top row first, then the bottom, tapping each one with her finger. When she got to the black one she stopped, looked up at me, and said it the way six-year-olds say everything, completely certain.

"Grandma, that one's you."

Her mother laughed so hard she had to put her coffee down. My husband, Hank, said, "Well, she's not wrong."

She is not wrong. I have been the black sheep of my family for all sixty-four years of my life. What Lila could not know is that a year ago, nobody would have picked me out of the flock.

The one my mother worried about

I grew up in New Jersey, the middle of three girls. My older sister Carolyn was the good one. She kept her room neat, married an accountant, and has lived four miles from the house we grew up in her whole life. I love her dearly.

I was the other one. I cut my own bangs at nine with the kitchen scissors. I wore my father's old army jacket to school for most of tenth grade. At twenty-three I moved to Vermont with a carpenter named Hank, and my mother called it "the Vermont business" for the next ten years. I taught art to seventh graders for thirty-one years, I painted our front door purple, and every Christmas my mother asked me, gently, why I couldn't be a little more like Carolyn.

I was proud of every bit of it.

And then, somewhere around sixty, I went quiet.

I retired. My hair went silver. And my sweater drawer slowly filled up with plain things. Crew necks with nothing on them. A zip-up fleece. Sweaters you could wear to the dentist or to a funeral, and nobody would remember you at either.

I did not notice it happening until last Christmas, at Carolyn's house. I was standing by the cheese plate when a neighbor of hers, a perfectly nice woman, turned to me and asked, "So where's the sister who ran off to Vermont? Carolyn says she's a real character."

I was standing right in front of her.

How it happens

Here is what I have worked out since. Nobody tells you to disappear at sixty. It happens one sensible purchase at a time.

You retire, and there is no room full of twelve-year-olds to wear your earrings for. Somebody says the word "age-appropriate," and it sticks. The stores hand us plain sweaters with nothing on them, made to go with everything, which is another way of saying they say nothing at all.

And it works. Nobody comments on what you are wearing, which is exactly what you were going for, right up until you notice that nobody is commenting on you either.

It is not that we stop being ourselves. We just stop wearing it on the outside, and after a while people forget it was ever there. Sometimes we forget too.

What I had wrong

After that Christmas I thought the cure would have to be something loud. A streak of color in my hair. Big earrings. Announcing myself at parties.

But I have never liked announcing myself, and I do not think black sheep ever do. They do not announce anything. People just notice them.

Think about a real field of sheep. Nobody counts the white ones. Your eye goes straight to the black one, and then you smile, because there is always one, and it always looks perfectly content about it. A sweater with a sense of humor works exactly the same way. People spot it before you have opened your mouth. They smile. And then they ask. And once somebody asks, you get to tell them who you are.

That was what I had wrong. I did not need to be louder. I needed something that would do the introducing for me.

I did not need a new personality. I needed my old one back, somewhere people could see it.

Mine is the Ebba

In September my daughter Molly sent me a link. No message, just a little sheep. She has known me her whole life.

It was a sweater from Wentworth & Rowe, a small family shop on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, that has been there since 1998. This is the first fall they have sold online, which I will come back to.

Mine is the Ebba, in green. It is a soft, lightly brushed knit with raglan sleeves, a crew neck and an easy, relaxed body, the kind of sweater you pull on for a walk in the cold and forget to take off. Across the chest walks a little flock of fluffy white sheep with black faces and thin black legs. And one black sheep, with a white face, second from the left in the bottom row.

The white sheep are textured and soft, fluffy enough that Lila pets them, and the black one sits among them looking completely unbothered, which is the whole idea.

I wear it with a white T-shirt underneath and my old jeans. That is all it needs.

What happened when I wore it

The first Saturday I wore it, I stood in the coffee line at the general store in town, the same line I have stood in nearly every Saturday for forty years. The woman behind me, in a barn coat, counted under her breath. Then she laughed and tapped my shoulder.

"Which one are you?"

"Guess," I said.

She pointed at the black sheep, and then at herself. "Me too."

We talked all the way to the register. In forty years of Saturdays, no stranger in that line had ever asked me anything except whether I was in front of them.

Then came Sunday supper, and Lila, and her finger on the black sheep.

And then Carolyn called. Molly had sent her a photo. My sister, who has been the good one for sixty-seven years and has never once been called a character, asked me where I got it. She ordered the light blue. I asked her if she understood which sheep she was signing up for. She said, "Susan, I always wanted to be the black sheep. I just never had the nerve."

That is when I understood what Lila had seen. Being the black sheep was never about being difficult. It was about being easy to find.

Three things I have learned since

One. Being the black sheep does not expire at sixty. It just goes quiet if you let it.

Two. Let something else do the introducing. A sweater that makes people smile does more than any speech. People will ask. Let them.

Three. Wear it where you used to disappear. The grocery store, the coffee line, the dentist, your sister's Christmas party. That is where it works best.

One more thing, since the button on this page takes you to all of them: the Ebba is one of sixteen sweaters Wentworth & Rowe make, with pine trees, a wildflower meadow and rainbow stripes among them. Mine is the first one you will see.

About the price

I want to be plain about this, because it was the part that made me hesitate.

The Ebba is $69.95. It was $233.95.

I have spent more than that on plain sweaters I could not tell apart.

Here is the reason, as far as I can tell. For twenty-eight years, the only way to buy from Wentworth & Rowe was to walk through their door on King Street. This is their first fall selling online, and they are marking it with a sale, the way a shop does when it opens a new door. I looked for the catch and did not find one.

I read the small print before I ordered, and I expect you are reading it now. Shipping is free in the US, and you have thirty days to send it back if it is not for you. That was enough for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If we were sitting by my woodstove and you asked me, this is what I would say.

Go and open your sweater drawer. If you cannot tell one from the next, and neither could anyone at the last party you went to, you have not lost yourself. You have just been dressing like one of the white sheep.

You were somebody's black sheep once. Most of us were, at least for a while. She is still in there, and she would like to be found.

Two practical things. The First Fall sale is on now, and the most popular sizes go first. And the Ebba comes in six colors, green, gray, pink, navy blue, beige and light blue, and even the beige one has a black sheep on it. If the sheep are not you at all, there are fifteen other sweaters behind it.

Lila has counted them every Sunday since. It is still me.

Susan