A Pint of Silence

Greetings Dear Ones!

This might be a long one…It’s been a minute since I have had the band width to sit and write and metabolize a little of the banquet of absurdity that is my precious life here in southern Vermont. A series of unfortunate events—which taken individually seem unfortunate indeed but taken collectively border on the ridiculous—has made my inner efficiency manager extremely thirsty for adult beverages.  The inner fitness guru tells us to get on the treadmill and run, do yoga, eat broccoli, sleep well, (not all of those on the treadmill!) but everyone else in my head says “nah… let’s flop into a pile, binge watch every season of the British version of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and eat rubbish instead.” Internal benevolent dictatorship has succumbed to mob rule.  Prudence has taken to collapsing on her fainting couch and calling for laudanum all hours of the day and night.

It’s gone something like this:

 Each week, a Cosmic Waitress appears and announces that all we have on offer today are mandatory dried shite sandwiches on moldy bread. “Can I have soup instead?” I ask.

“The soup is shite too,” she says, “just warmed up and in liquid form.” 

“I would like something like a summer’s day on a gluten free bun with a side of sweet corn,” I say politely.

“Tough luck,” she says, “All we have left of Summer is the bug bites.”

“I don’t like the crap you are serving me,” I whine. “I’m not hungry.”

“Life is a banquet. You have to eat and this is all there is…” she huffs impatiently as ash from the cigarette clamped between her greasy lips falls onto the plate she hands me.  “But you DO get to choose your sides…. So what’ll it be?”

I survey the menu.  There are two columns—Gritches and Gratitudes.

“I’ll take the Gritches,” I say grumpily.  The gritches turn out to be This is NOT fair, I don’t deserve this, We should have…, Why didn’t somebody else… 

Talk about a lousy meal! Whew!  Gritches are so bitter—it’s incredibly hard to swallow a fully ripe resentment.  I find myself chewing and chewing and chewing…  and the heartburn and gas afterwards…yuck.

I’m making an effort to order the Gratitudes.  Those meals go down much better.  Some of them taste, if not good, at least nourishing in some way.  The rancid umami of a dried shite sandwich is balanced out by sincere appreciation for a saucy bunch of flowers or the piquancy of a melody played in tune.  Any Kindness is like sugar. Luckily, the Gratitude section of the menu is endless.  On particularly tough days, I remind myself of the joys of being able to sit, walk, or stand unassisted and to use the litter box all by myself and to wipe my own bum.  That’s a gratitude that some of us forget about but it’s a pretty big deal to those who can’t.   My dear heart beats without the need of wires or pills.  I am blest.  My lungs breathe without the need of canisters or tubes.  Yippee!  The shite sandwiches seem quite tasty after gravy like that.

It’s not just me gulping and choking—those I love dearly have been struggling lately, and that struggle ripples through our whole network of kinship and community.  Having Bad Things happen makes it harder to do Good things and Fun things and Just Because things that make life so sweet, savory, and yummy otherwise.  Luckily, my animals need feeding every day too and it gives me the chance to sit quietly and wait for a cat to find my lap while I observe the herd munching their hay. There is nothing like the peace that infuses the barn shortly after feeding time, as all the residents settle into a deeply contented chewing groove.  They never actually say Grace before their meals but the Grace is all around them. They are always grateful. (I’m pretty sure that’s how hay manages to taste so good to them.)

“Tell us a Good Story, a Happy story,” say the lambs as they munch. “We need to forget about how Muffin tied her head to her back foot with a stray scrap of baling twine and walked in circles for half a day.”

“Alright!” I agree cheerfully. “It just so happens that the most amazing story came true today!”

“What happened?” they want to know, gathering around for scratches and corn chips.

“Once upon a time, in 1995, there was a band of musicians who played at a place called The John Harvard Brew House in Cambridge Massachusetts.  They played there every Monday night for a few years. They always invited any person who came into the pub alone to sit up at the table in the front with all the friends they had not met yet. The band leader called it the Misfits table and everyone loved it. In fact, two weddings resulted from people meeting at the Misfits table.  One night, the band noticed a young man sitting alone.  His dark eyes were like thunderstorms.  The band leader invited him to join the misfits table but he did not respond.  He just continued his intense staring.  During the break, the bodhran player approached the stranger and realized he did not speak English. This was why he had not understood the invitation. She asked him if he was enjoying the music. He nodded darkly and said “Goot. Very Goot. Record? Record?” She said no, they did not have any recordings. He said again “Record? Record?” she said “Yes, you can record us, of course!” The next week, he was back:  Same intense man, same intense staring at the music.  “Record? Record?” He presented her with two blank tapes.  “Yes,” she said. “Did you bring a tape recorder?”

“Excuse me,” interrupts a lamb, “but what is a tape recorder?”

“A tape recorder was a device that could take sounds out of the air and put them on little magnetic tapes so that we could hear them again later.  The tape wound itself in little reels inside a plastic rectangle.”

“Did the young man have one?” asks another lamb.

“No.”

“What happened next?”

“Well, the bodhran player told him that she would bring her own recording device the following week and record the band then and give him the tape. But the man looked very sad.  “I go home before next week,” he said.  “Where are you staying?” she asked. “I will make you some tapes and bring them to you before you go.” “That will be Goot,” he said. “Very Goot.”  

She went home and made four tapes for him of tunes and songs and sessions and anything she had of Celtic music that she thought he might enjoy. Then she drove to where he was staying in Cambridge, left the car double parked, with the hazard lights flashing, and dashed up the stairs to the little flat on the scrap of paper he had written for her.  She remembers it like yesterday.  She went home and wrote it all down.”

“Wait, are YOU the bodhran player?” the lambs ask.

“Yes.”

“Can you read us what you wrote?”

“Sure.” I fetch my 1995 journal from the suitcase of old writings I keep in the attic.  The sheep nibble the edges as if it is food. For me, it is…

When I arrived, I found the table laden with cakes (the sister had baked all day) and the tea boiling. The flat was tiny—sparsely furnished, no carpets on the hospital tile floor. The mother and father were there too. They had lived there for three or four years with the daughter but now the father was dying of cancer and the son had come to fetch him home to die in the company of his childhood friends and relatives in Armenia—among those left after most had fled the terrors of war. The mother had fallen on an icy walk last week and shattered her shoulder.  Her arm was in a sling. Both parents were in a great deal of pain but warmly hospitable and spoke very good English. They told me how their son had returned from the pub all three Mondays and written poetry—some in Russian, some in Armenian, until the wee hours of the morning—twelve ballads in all. He read one to me in Russian—the cadence tripping like a jig. Another was like a reel. I could hear “Tammy’s Tarbukas” in the back of my head as he read. He seemed much happier and relaxed than he had at the pub, showing me photos of his four year old son. His wife is expecting his second child now. His parents have never met their grandson so all are looking forward to going home.

I was stunned by the peace I felt in the room. The old man was dying and everybody knew it. Tonight, the daughter will hug her father for the very last time on earth. She will stay here working and sending money home to support her family. Without her, says her brother, they could not survive.  He only makes ten dollars a month as an art teacher. The parents will live with him, his wife, a new infant, and a young child and he will try to care for all of them in a place with no electricity, no gas for heat, and only sporadic phone connection. Even the mail does not get through sometimes. I cannot send packages to them.

He said seriously, “In Armenia, Art is everything. Food is very expensive so we have theatre, art, dance instead. Tickets are so cheap that people go to see art of all kinds all the time.  It keeps them alive. You cannot have art without hardship and you cannot have hardship without art. In such times, Spirituality, Fantasy, these are the only real worlds there are.”

Part of me believes he is right. I am profoundly changed by this brief meeting with a man so filled with grace though we only spoke, with the help of his sister’s translations, for a little over an hour. All day today, I feel as if I am in a dream. My dreams were vivid through the night—I dreamt I went back to their empty flat and filled a sterile white refrigerator with silver grey metallic fruit, the color of the tapes. If only Music were enough to live on… He seems to believe it is. He listened like no other person I have ever witnessed before. Tonight, he will be on wings back to his broken homeland and I will be bashing out the same endless, mystical, ancient tunes that have helped generations survive for ages. May they rise like prayers and fill his heart in the dark sky where he flies…

As for me, I am having fiddle for lunch followed by a long drink of Silence.

“I understand how you could eat a fiddle,” says a Fawn, “though I doubt it would taste as good as a corn chip. But how can you drink Silence? I like water much better.”

“Yes!” says Flora, “except for when Fergus and Festus poop in it!” Sheep are relentlessly practical when they aren’t panicking.

“How about your car? You didn’t leave it double parked for an hour, did you?” worried Prim.

“No, I moved the car when I saw the tea kettle,” I said.

“Anyway,” says Fergus, shoving Flora playfully, “I thought you said this was going to be a Happy story.  We must be in the middle because it isn’t happy yet. So far, it sounds pretty sad.”

“Yes, right!”  I continue. “This week, I got a notification from the agency that books me to do educational performances in schools that a person from Armenia had found them online and was looking to contact me!”

“Was it him?” asks Fern.

“Indeed it was! After thirty years, he found me again!  So I visited him at his sister’s house and hugged his mother, who is eighty-six now.  His second son was born the very same day his father died.  The family listened to those silver tapes for years. That second son grew up with those melodies in his ears and they worked their way into his heart and all the way back out to his fingertips again. He plays fiddle, guitar, whistle, bodhran. He grew up to be a professional musician who plays Celtic music in a band he created and he leads a wonderful choir of young people who sing folk music from Armenia and around the world. He has founded a Celtic music festival in the capitol city of Yerevan that happens every year on October 31st. Can you imagine? 

And guess what, my little sheeps!  I gave his mother one of your shawls!  I took your wool, spun it, dyed it, knitted it, and changed it forever into Art.  And now his mother’s aching shoulders are wrapped up in all that Love and warmth.  You have no idea when a Shepherd comes in and knocks you over so that you give just a little of yourself how much might be made of it by someone else.  With simple, tiny kindness, we change the world.”

“That is the BEST story we have heard in a long time,” said the lambs.

Wishing you sew much love, my Dear Ones! How we love, how we give, how we grieve—this is how we reveal  who we truly are. Keep nourishing our world with the Good and tiny fruits of your labor.  No small act of generosity is insignificant.

Yours aye,

Nancy

Little Miss Sky Eyes

Greetings Dear Ones!

If things were going to plan, I’d be at the vet’s right now, dealing with one of my little feline friends who needs to have a cancerous eye removed—a gruesome task for such a beautiful day.  But Fate smiled on the little guy, as he exploded out of the carrying crate, jumped out the nearest open window, flashed four middle claws at me, and disappeared. (I’m still struggling with the grammar on this one—does it read like Fate jumped out the window? Or the cat? It feels like both.) So here I am, plans and carrier in tatters, boundaries escaped, stewing in a brew of frustration and guilty relief.  For a while longer it seems, we all still have our eyes to see this precious golden day.  I’m not sad about that.

There is nothing quite like Vermont in October.  (If one is going to lose some vision, perhaps November would be better—though indeed not if one is voting!)(Please Vote!)

Last Sunday, I took a rare day off from the grim drudgery of slip-covering brides during Wedding Season and went with a friend to the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival in Tunbridge for what we giggled was “a play date.” We feasted our eyes on colors, textures, and fibrous beauty of every description. With over thirty fleeces yet to process from this year’s shearing, I promised myself I was just going “to look.” The drive over Putney Mountain to her house at 6:30 am was like a movie scene: Dawn hit each hill and leaf like a novice lighting director playing with the set before the show.  Heavy mist lifted like curtains as the spotlight shone in random directions on the road twisting like a river through the valleys.  I saw the Sunday papers at the bottom of driveways getting gently covered by falling leaves before sleepy coffee sippers came to fetch them. What if they could not find yesterday’s news before today’s glory covered it completely?

All the towns we passed were nestled in the folds of an enormous quilt of Autumn colors.  There were frequent white churches with iconic steeples stabbing at blue from green commons.  Farmhouses bordered the squares and high on the calico hills, large, empty barns looked down on us with an air of historic holiness to them, like ruined cow-thedrals echoing the simple hymns of life long ago.  Cotton candy clouds spun of maple syrup stuck haphazardly on the satin skirts of the sky.  We emerged from the car in Tunbridge—Artists free to touch and taste and roam within the Painting.

We went from vendor to vendor admiring Gorgeous Ingenuity and Patience plied with Talent. (I bought bottles of homemade hot sauce and an etching of oxen pulling a stone boat but no yarn or wool, thankfully!) In the Unhurried rush that is a festival, Time was piled up all around us—hours of birthing, feeding, cleaning, shearing, scouring, sorting, spinning, felting, plying, knitting, weaving, collecting, deciding… Most folks sold their time for pennies on the dollar.  I think every creative person must.  (Socks with a nine thousand dollar price tag don’t sell that fast.)  And most creative people are Givers who struggle to receive because they do not understand the value of a skill that comes naturally to them.

Everywhere I looked, I saw HER again—Little Miss Sky Eyes.

I met Little Miss Sky Eyes at a Scottish Festival here in Vermont in August.  I was demonstrating spinning wool on a variety of spinning wheels and showing off some of my dear sheep in a small pen next to me.  The dance competition stage was our nearest neighbor so many dancers came to pet the sheep and hear stories.  One of them stayed and got to spin her very own book mark using one of my “cranky spindles.”  It’s a tool I made from a coat hanger and a turned baluster from a stairway. The wire is bent into a hook at one end and a handle at the other that passes through a hole I drilled in the baluster. It’s not a traditional way to spin but it is a very user-friendly way to help unlearned hands experience quick success at spinning. It eliminates the months of “potty mouth” that one must use if one is actually going to acquire this skill for real.  This girl spun a long thread with ease and squealed with delight as I took it off the hook, pinched the yarn in the center and then watched it ply itself into a twist with a sudden, magical twitch. She looked up at me in wonder—with huge blue eyes that exactly matched the color of the sky all around her tightly coifed bun.

“Can I do this again?” she asked. Light was streaming from her being.

“Of course!” I replied, handing over more wool.

After she had made a second one, she said “I finally found the thing that I am good at!”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eight,” came the distracted reply.  She was reaching for more wool.

“I think you are going to be good at many things in time.  Eight is very early to be good at something already. These things take time. Eight is the perfect time for learning something new.”

“Can I make as many as I want?” she wanted to know.

After she made her third piece of yarn, she decided to tie them in a knot and make a bracelet.

“I’m going to need a lot more wool,” she announced. “These bracelets are so good. I need to make one for all of my friends.”

She set to work building bracelets behind me in the back ground as I told my stories and taught people how to spin.  By mid afternoon, she was an expert. A half hour later, she was taking charge of my show. When a crowd would disperse, she would go out and drum up business.

It was hot. I was tired. I was losing touch with my connection to the sense of enormous Privilege it is to Share. Every time I wanted to slump in a chair during a lull, or trudge to the water closet, or spin my own wool in silence, there was Little Miss Sky Eyes darting through crowds piping “Who wants to learn about spinning? Who wants to make a bracelet?”  She ran at the herds of families with children with the energy of a young Border Collie, directing them to my tent. She was spinning up bracelets and telling me I should sell them and split the money with her. She was lecturing grownups about the history of Shetland Sheep in America. She went off briefly now and then and won five participatory medals in the dance competitions yet I hardly knew she was gone. She was always back in a minute with more friends who needed bracelets.  She kept the crowds crowding us all day.

“Don’t you think you should check in with your parents?” I selfishly asked this dear little pest more than once. “They might be missing you!”

“Oh no,” she answered quickly, grinning. “I told them I would be here all day.  It’s the only part of the festival I want to see.  I also told them that when I am old like you I am going to have my own sheep and a real spinning wheel.”

I never met this girl’s parents.  I have no idea who was in charge of her.  I don’t remember her name. I only remember her eyes and the way I felt when I looked into them—like I was lost in a wild blue heat of earnest innocence.  It struck me how she knew already how to justify her joy by means of suave generosity. 

 “I want to be so good at this, I get to do it all the time, like you” she said sweetly. She has no idea that that’s exactly what I want for myself too!  We all want to get so good at something we love that people will pay us to do it for them.

Old… Like me…

She IS me.

And if you are any kind of craftsman, writer, artist, musician, builder, mender, healer, Giver—she is YOU too.  Do you remember that joy of discovering a new skill that would come to define you? The endless energy and hunger that come with fresh Approval? How even that cannot compare to the intrinsic pleasure of doing the thing itself, with no thought of product placement? The heavy relief of realizing you have something of value to give?

Towards the end of the day, Little Miss Sky Eyes slumped down next to the sheep, her arm through the fence resting on the back of a tired lamb.  She looked a little sad.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, offering her a scone.

“My friends don’t want any more bracelets. They say they have enough.”

“How wonderful!” I said. “You’ve saturated the market. Excellent. Now you must make the best one of all for yourself.”

She looked at her bare arms and shrugged.

Together, we spun another long thread. I let her use colors I hadn’t given her before. She wrapped it around the neck of her toy stuffed animal and smiled.

“Can I make another one for my mom?”  

At Tunbridge, I surveyed a field filled with tents within the circle of velvet hills. Each white square housed creative spirits with eyes of sunlight, wanting to be part of the Transformation that true Beauty requires. We know the labor that Love demands. We have learned that progress requires participation and prizes cannot replace the blessing of Community.  At such festivals, we seek each other as teachers, siblings, students, playmates, and pals to nurture and inspire and solace our inner Little Miss Sky Eyes.  

Don’t forget to make something beautiful just for you, Dear One!

With SEW MUCH LOVE for all your Good Work,

Yours Aye,

Little Miss Nancy

Here, Kitty Kitty!

Cat: “A small, domesticated carnivorous mammal with soft fur, a short snout, and retractable claws widely kept as a pet.”

Lady: “a woman of superior social position, especially one of noble birth.”

Cat Lady: “an archetype of a haggard, mentally unstable, willfully isolated eccentric older woman who lives alone with a large number of cats” 

Greetings Dear Ones!

Ever since I heard that “our country is being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies” everything makes sense to me.  One thing’s for sure—it’s not being run by semi-feral women who live at the edge of the woods with a pack of Jack Russells. Or chickens. Or sheep. Or oxen… You never hear about Ox-ladies running for office or taking their goads and making the local school board tow the line.  This is where I seem to have gone wrong. Who knew? For years, despite all the hair on my couch and clothing, and my mentally unstable and haggard demeanor, no matter how many critters felt at liberty to dine off my kitchen counters without permission, it doesn’t count towards my personal power if I am not also forced to sift little poopies out of a box of sand in the corner on a daily basis.  That seems to be the basic difference between a cat and a Jack Russel:  A cat will poop consistently in a little box of grit, whereas a Jack Russell prefers to defecate on antique oriental carpets all over the house. (A pile of clean towels will do in a pinch.)  Jack Russells are basically just incontinent cats who bark and hunt tennis balls. Both will stare into your eyes with utter devotion and then proceed to do whatever the hell they want, regardless of your feelings.  They are the ultimate in addictive/toxic love relationships.

Don’t get me wrong—I like cats. I like all animals.  But I have never been “a cat person,” never mind a “Cat Lady.”

“Who says you are ANY kind of Lady?” asks Prudence loudly. looking at my disheveled state.

Lady or not, I have always had “dogs.”

“We are NOT dogs,” insists Nigel from his basket by the window. “We are canine ninjas in fur pajamas, thugs in clown suits, light-pawed secret service men with keeping an eye on your every move who like to steal butter.”

“I love dogs,” I say, “and whatever else it is you think you are, you adorable little despot.”

I’ve always been a dog person. Cats are the one domesticated animal species with which I have never really bonded. This is not so much by choice as by consequence.  I was married for twenty years to a man who was allergic to them.  My son has asthma. Growing up, my sisters had allergies that meant the barn cats had to live, well, in the barn.  One sister would carry them around in her coat while she did chores and they adored her but none of them were allowed in the house. (We let my sister in occasionally.) I was more into the rabbits and the goats. I carried a rabbit around in my coat while I did chores. (A goat wouldn’t fit.) I would tie a string of baling twine around the middle of my jacket so that the rabbit would not fall out as I worked.

This summer, when I found out that it is actually the Cat Ladies who are ruling the world, I did what any normal, insane, power-hungry, middle-aged menopausal woman who lives in squalor would do. I adopted FIVE of them. Yep! That’s right. The Crazy Cat Lady Starter Pack. It comes with five adult cats ranging in size from 13 pounds to 17 pounds.  They have fleas, they have worms, and they each have a completely unique set of neuroses.  One even has eye cancer and needs to have an eye removed as soon as I manage to catch him again.  The entire pod once belonged to my deceased friend N. who passed away in June. We were unable to locate the ideal homes for them where they would be able to continue an indoor/outdoor existence far enough away from their original farm so they wouldn’t try to go back.  They have been competing with raccoons for their lunch and untouched by human contact for months. A wonderful person fed them and checked on them regularly but they were getting feral. Eventually, he trapped them one by one, took them to the vet (at his own expense), got them vaccinated, and enlisted friends to drive them 80 miles each way. It took five trips. (I’ve been getting a cat a week for five weeks now.)

I’ve needed a lot of help.  Not being a cat person, I have a lot of questions.  “What does it mean when they drool and smear that drool all over you? Are they sick? Did the rabies vaccine backfire?”

“Oh, that’s LOVE!” they say. “They are love bombing you.”

“What does it mean when they present you with a dead mouse?”

“Oh! How Sweet! It’s a Love Offering!”

“How about when they are purring like mad and then suddenly slash you with a claw?”

“They are just overwhelmed by their emotions.”

“What does it mean when they nibble the length of your arm like it was a corncob?”

“Love! Love! Love!! You are so lucky! They love you!”

So….

Let’s just admit it. Cat love is Gross.  This notion of “love” feels like I am being gaslit by my cat-lady colleagues.  At least when one picks up a dog turd in the shape of a canine middle finger, left in the middle of the living room for all to see (where he is not allowed), the communication is Quite Clear.  With dogs, things mean what I think they mean.  Not so with cats.

It’s taking me a minute to realize that sometimes Love is Gross. True Devotion is juicy, bloody, Nasty—a whole lot of work for a discarded mouse gizzard on your kitchen floor.  (Um… YUCK! No thank you!) It also takes a lot of patience to get them to be this “nice” to me.  

Let’s pause and talk about the shop.  Have I told you lately how much I love my customers?  They are amazing people.  It is a privilege to meet so many incredible members of the community who do things much, MUCH harder to help humanity than spending six hours removing three yards of lace from the hem of a wedding gown.  One is the mother of an infant amputee. One is a family services worker with a caseload that has her weeping in court when she has to testify about the conditions a child must endure. Some are veterans, some police officers, some nurses, some counselors, some advocates, some doctors, some mental health specialists…  I am so nourished by our interactions and discussions. I am in awe of the intelligence, skill, and training they have.  But what impresses me more are their hearts—their willingness to get really Dirty and roughed up by the love they bring to their vocations.  

At home, I crouch on the floor, extending a hand into a dark corner, singing softly to a creature who fears me, and hear the words of one customer who recently was called out to restore order in a group home with a person suffering a mental health crisis.

“You cannot teach trust,” he tells me. “There is nothing to explain to someone in crisis; only DOING counts. Caring for others is not the same as parenting. Too many people think they can parent another person. We can’t discuss whether someone’s needs are reasonable or not. A lot of our people are the way they are because their needs were never met.  The only way we can invite trust is to be trustworthy—to see the need and meet it.  We can’t judge the needs, just meet them. People whose needs have never been met are very fragile, sometimes dangerous.”

This is so true with the cats.  I meet their needs for food, for shelter, for security and peace.  I sit and read to them.  One by one, they come to rub and drool and murder for me in gratitude. (I hope they get the mouse that made a nest in the glove box of my car and ate my registration!) Now that I know how to interpret feline affection, I am smitten.  I am grateful for the lesson and the chance to understand once more that we need to hold ourselves accountable consistently and then Wait. Trust is a seed that grows slowly.  These cats need to decide for themselves that they are home now.  It will come from within them when the time is right and the conditions feel authentic, predictable and stable. Sometimes those we are attempting to serve will never appreciate our efforts. Some of these cats are traumatized more than the others.  That’s ok. It’s Good for us to do what is Good anyway, without thoughts of reward.  (The rewards might be unexpectedly yucky anyway.)

Perhaps I will make a half-decent Cat Lady afterall. Most people think I am nuts for taking this on. But we already knew that, cats or no cats. To be honest, I feel more centered, peaceful, and powerful already.  Maybe it’s the way my heart resets itself next to a heavy, furry purr.  Maybe it’s related to the soothing daily zen garden designs I make in the litter boxes—deeply satisfying!  I make time to just Be With, rather than train or “parent” these animals. They arrive as they are. I am grateful to have the challenges I have, which are sweet and furry (even if a bit drooly) rather than the horrors others face.  Each of us hears on the wind a different howl, moo, meow, cluck, cry, or sob—each of us has to decide how we will respond to Love’s invitation to Do Something, no matter how icky it is.

Thank you to all of you Dear Menders, for answering those calls—the unique queries and plaintive meows in your own lives. Thank you to all you Magnificent Cat People, Dog People, Goat People and People People—all you Dear Ones who have the courage and tenacity to keep Learning, Keep Giving, Keep Growing, and Doing What is Right, with the patience to do today’s chores and simply Wait…..

Meow! I love you so much!

Your newest Childless (don’t tell my kids) Cat Lady,

Nancy

Screen Time

Greetings Dear Ones!

Wednesdays seem to slip by like greased weasels these days, so here it is, a few Wednesdays later than expected!  I hope this finds you free and easy, wherever you may be, whatever season you are in.  It’s the “dog days” of summer here in southern Vermont, which means most of us feel like dogs who want to crawl under a screened-in front porch and pant in the shade for a while.  It also means that our night sky has Sirius “the dog” guarding the night sky overhead.  True New Englanders are enjoying “air conditioning” that involves opening all the windows at night and fitting them with portable expanding screens to let in the cool night air. We trap the cool dark all day, shuttering the blinds, pulling the curtains, closing up the windows.

The garden is exploding with produce and a jungle of new growth thanks to the rain it’s enjoyed lately.  Obediently, the normally wild pumpkins are climbing the Pumpkin arch I built them in the spring.  It’s deep summer and fruition abounds.  Winter feels forever away but it’s here—lurking in the pile of logs that needs to be split and stacked, in the full hay mow in the loft, in the daily tomatoes and blueberries to gather and store.  It’s hard to believe one must prepare for Cold Lack in the midst of such hot abundance but I do so with immense gratitude.

I’m trying to be as grateful for the amount of work pouring into my shop—raincoats and back-to-school clothes are rolling into the work rack as grim reminders that September is about to push sweet-corn August out of the way like a schoolyard bully and this whole year might be nothing but a greased weasel.  There are seven wedding gowns hanging on the high rail, and innumerable projects and promises waiting to be kept.  It’s vital for me to stay organized and to communicate regularly with the clientele.  That’s the part that often feels overwhelming.

Life went a little sideways for me a few weeks back when I accidentally dropped my phone into the chickens’ water bucket.  Shortly after, it would not take a charge.  I went to my friendly local Verizon store where two astonishingly talented young cyber wizards spent their entire morning attempting to help a middle-aged woman who prefers pencils and paper navigate the world of utter bewilderment that a single palm can hold.  Stacking three hundred bales of hay by yourself holds nothing to the trickle of sweat that runs down my spine at the sound of a nice young man asking “Ma’am, can you think of another password you might have used?” 

In that marvelous way that Life is always showering me with Abundance, I now have TWO phones.  It turns out that I was eligible for a costly *free* upgrade to an Apple.

“But my Pixel is a real peach!” I protested, “I love my Pixel! I almost even knew how to use it.”

“Well, we seem to be phasing out peaches… and we don’t have a Samsung on hand. But we have an Apple and it’s free with your business account so why not try it?”

“Why not, indeed?” 

Those of you who know me best will howl with laughter at the thought of me keeping track of not one but TWO phones.  My former peach will still work as long as it’s on wifi and plugged in, which is important as every single one of my accounts panics because “a new device has signed into your account, and new authorization codes need to be sent to the old device.”  It’s enough to make one crawl under a front porch and howl like a hound dog.

The only consolation that keeps me from running towards the nearest bottle of Scotch is that my kids will be visiting soon and will be able to help me.  They are of the generation that peers into one of these things every five seconds.  (Forget your high falutin’ morals, J.D. Vance, THIS is why one must have children!)

I may have a mess on my hands, but I still have Hope. That’s what counts, when one has a foot in each operating system and appointments and notifications are falling through the crack in between.  Each phone seems to think different people are coming to see me. (Have I mentioned Mercury is in retrograde?)

“Does your work get more chaos when Mercury is in Retrograde?” I ask the Apple mongers at the Verizon store. Their smiles are just weary smirks.

“Ma’am, it’s Mercury Retrograde every day in here.”  As they say that, an elderly man exits the store abruptly and goes to his car to yell at his daughter on speaker phone.  I can hear her as I pull away—“Dad, please, go back in the store and let them help you.  You actually DO need a new phone.”   I resist the temptation to offer him one of mine.   I’m sure the Good Book says something about “Let the woman screaming at two phones offer one to the man who has none…”

Duality, I am finding, sometimes ends in duplicity.  Every time I open my shop door, it’s a bit of a surprise.  The people I think are coming are not the people who show up.  Sometimes this is not my fault or my phone’s.  “Oh my! Is it Wednesday today?” asks a harried woman. “Was I supposed to be here yesterday? Oops…”

What I am learning about using two systems simultaneously is that each of them does a few things really well—much better than the other one.   “Why can’t we just find one system that works perfectly for everyone?” my inner communist wants to know.

“Because we need competition,” says my inner capitalist. “Especially if it’s the kind where no matter how talented the other guy is, I win.” (I suspect he works for Apple.)

“Because people have different needs and deserve Choice,” says my inner Founding Father.

“Choice is Good,” says a friend. “When we go to a restaurant, it’s exciting to know there are other options on the menu, even if we know we will never order them.”

“Having choices,” as optimistic as that sounds, often becomes laborious and confusing. It’s not the efficient way to do things. Choice requires flexibility, discipline, and above all, education.  We cannot make progress without making decisions.   We cannot make good decisions without understanding what we are getting into.  Imagination is not the same as experience.   These are the rules of life I seem destined to learn again and again.

Flexibility, Patience, and Discipline are the virtues my two phones are teaching me this month.  

“And don’t forget Humility!” snaps Prudence smugly. She loves the idea that if I had only worked harder at math class and gotten into the advanced classes that learned computer programming back in the day, none of this would be happening to me.

Yes… Humility.  I am realizing how much trouble the letter “i” causes—both spiritually and technically.  Pretty much anything with an “i” in front of it these days is causing me distress over my iChoices, my iMotives, and my iSanity.  Putting “i” in the forefront of my business dealings is wreaking havoc with my old principles of simplicity and customer service.  I need more iLearning. I need more iData. I need to figure out how the iCalendar works.  I wrote myself some iNotes about this and promptly lost them.  I no longer know how to close any “Windows.”  Please excuse me while I visit the iRestroom and jump out of one.

As a simple woman crafting a simple life as a seamstress/shepherdess in Southern Vermont, I think it’s in my best interest to put ALL phones into the chicken’s water bucket and call it a day.  That gentleman yelling at his daughter in the car outside the Verizon shop is right: “This is a bloody waste of time!” We don’t need to doom-scroll on screens constantly tempting us with click bait while simultaneously telling us the danger of screen time. (Yes, I am aware that you must be reading this on a screen!)  Having two phones is teaching me the importance of having no phones at all, much the way that consuming two pints of sour beer followed by whisky chasers highlights the serenity of abstinence.

My contented inner peasant is not a fan of progress for progress’s sake. (Do not mention the word “update” to her or she will summon the villagers with pitchforks.)  The evidence speaks for itself: Long ago, people wore clothing made or altered by seamstresses who did not have to spend a portion of their days poking and swearing at a sliver of black plastic they kept misplacing.  People wearing sturdy handmade fashions spread blankets under their apple and pear trees and lay there quietly until they got bonked on the head and discovered the Gravity of Science, which has led to doom-scrolling and other things that ruin an otherwise decent nap.  All the “Progress” since has led to this: middle-aged women and men having temper tantrums and waiting for younger kin to save them.  Oh, give me some “screen time” that means a screened in porch, no mosquitoes, and a pint of fresh lemonade!

It’s Summer, my Darlings! Close down that screen!  Open those Windows to the night. Taste the peaches.  Savour the Sweet Corn. Let the grass tickle your toes. Spend half a minute watching a bug.  Put your damp, rosy face into the soft folds of the neck of an ox and inhale deeply.  Lie down next to a dog during a dog day. THIS is life.  Swipe at mosquitoes, not slender slabs of pocket rot.   Screens are for porches and windows, not people.  I’m a real person—a greased weasel with corn on her breath, a hot and sweaty feral meadow-roamer, a cool and dark Moon bather, filled with genuine love for You, telling you this. It’s truth.

Let the mending continue!  Keep up your amazing work.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Hurry Slowly or Not at All

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.

Today I am wise so I am changing myself.” --Rumi

Greetings Dear Ones!

 As Andy Warhol observed, “They always say Time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”  In a tailoring shop, all I do all day long is make changes—well, except for the long, painful moments when, scissors, ripper, or razor poised, I stare at something until Time stops altogether, terrified to make the first cut—a cut that will forever sever What IS from its past rendition of itself so that a new version can be reconstructed from the wreckage.  Neither Time nor Change is happening then. 

Change is tough.  In my line of work, it’s virtually impossible to change anything for the better without destroying it first.   I have come to see Destruction as the necessary second stage of Progress. (The first stage is Dissatisfaction.)  Dissatisfaction and Destruction are not generally perceived as “positive” events but they are essential to transformation.  It’s like all the folks who insist they want to go to heaven but they do not want to die.  We all must climb the ladder from Despair to Joy, whether we are surviving a recent flood, teaching a teenager to drive, shortening a skirt, observing a political debate—or realizing with sweet relief that bikini season only lasts about three hours in Vermont. 

A customer who is very price conscious comes in and wants a vintage blouse remade.  She wants to know how much this will cost.  When I tell her it’s about the same price as two bean burritos, she wilts visibly.  “Why so much?” she wants to know. 

“Because Time is known as Burritos nowadays and what you are asking me to do is hard; it will take a lot of beans.  Much, much more than you think.  Not to mention, I need a steady supply of burritos to live.”

“What’s the hardest part?” she asks, turning her attention to the blouse.

“The Undoing,” I say. “The deconstruction of brittle stitches in ancient fabric is tricky.  Everything about this is fragile.  Vintage.  You cannot be rough on vintage things.”

She balks at the word “vintage” then sighs. To her, the item is still new. The yesteryear she bought it feels like last week to her.  She agrees that old things should be treated kindly but bristles at my efforts to be kind to her.

“How about if I do all the hard stuff myself? How much will it be then?” she snaps.

“If you can do the hard stuff, why let me do the easy stuff? It’s…well, EASY.  Why bring it here at all?” I ask as gently as possible.   She looks at me warily and stuffs the blouse back into her bag.

“I’ll think about it,” she says, and leaves.  

I have learned to soothe quickly the sting of such interactions, the way one grabs a nearby dock leaf and rubs it into nettle rash.  I “get it” that a lot of people, especially women who “can sew,” think of this kind of service as a luxury they should forgo—that if they were somehow more skilled or simply more virtuous, they would do everything themselves simply because they can or “should.”  And while I champion self-sufficiency and empowerment-through-knowledge (I regularly have people come share my space so that I can mentor them on how to fix their own stuff FOR FREE) I also think most people miss the fact that the hardest part is almost always the part you cannot see: the planning, the care, the tedious work to destroy the problem before creating the solution.  The cutting, the ripping and unpicking—Good Destruction is half the battle.  There is genuine skill needed.

I despair when customers bring in items they have worked on themselves before and have created an unnecessary complication, or devised a “solution” that is not in any way related to the actual physics of the garment.  I want to charge double burritos for that kind of mess.  I had to beg one fellow NOT to take his clothes apart before he brought them in because I learn a lot about how a garment is constructed as I take it apart.  He would bring me random pieces of a puzzle with no idea how they were supposed to fit back together again.  “At least take detailed pictures of it before you do that!” I pleaded.  

One of the hardest things about Change is the paralysis that overtakes one prior to the change.  When I tell people that a certain project will be billed by the hour, I always remind them “Don’t worry! I won’t charge you for the hours I will spend staring at this in a daze, wondering why the heck I promised such a transformation!”

Permanent change is scary.  When possible, I do avoid it. I hide the seam margins I refuse to trim; I put  growth pleats or extra hem lengths into everything intended for children.  I know which of my beloved customers are not going to stay the same size by Autumn. I tread the fine line of Realism, leaving room for Flexibility, Doubt, and the relentless repercussions of Change or cheesecake.

The biggest fear of Change is in making a ghastly mistake.  Yes, I know that “mistakes are how we learn,” but I try to avoid that kind of learning at all costs, the way I won’t let my feet touch the bottom of a murky swimming hole in July.  As a person who once chopped off the legs of NINE pairs of golf pants at the finished length (which is two inches shorter than the cutting length) and spent an entire day splicing those cut bottoms back on, I have learned to measure many times before I cut!  Contrary to popular belief, “Haste” does not save time.  It chews up and spits out the time you didn’t have to start with.  It makes Waste.  “Hurry Slowly” is a better option when one is making drastic, permanent changes.  Take your time.

And… let Time take You.

Time has been behaving rather weirdly for me recently.  For once in my life, I seem to have enough of it.  These days are filled with a strange Grace.  Contentedly, I linger in the garden over watering and weeding; I follow my animals as they graze—singing to them and hugging them, with no forward momentum to the early morning at all—and then find out I can still get to my shop on time.  I am getting things Done.  The garden is mulched; the hay loft is stacked with bales exhaling the sweetness of summer clover, timothy, and orchard grass; the steer have a vast new pasture to roam within fencing they respect.  Even shortening the sleeves on a man’s sport coat seems to take half the time it used to.

I almost don’t know what to do with myself as a person who has Time.  Do I need more work to do? Should I start knitting a sweater riddled with intarsia?  Take up a new hobby? My inner worker bee panics when I spend a half an hour gazing at honey bees returning to the hive.  

“How’s your summer going? Are you busy?” are frequent questions  asked by customers.

“A lot is happening but I don’t feel busy,” I confide to one of my favorites. I point to the half empty rack in my shop. “What’s up with this? I’m actually on top of things! Ever since my friend passed away, I seem to have so much Time on my hands.  But the weird thing is that she didn’t actually take up any of my time!  I talked to her each day in the car, or as I was doing something else. Why does it feel like I have so much extra time now that she has passed?”

She laughs.   Light pours out of her heart and eyes.  She says “I am Lakota.  What is happening to you makes total sense to me.  We would say you are experiencing Wakan.  Those who grieve are enfolded in sacred energy, closest to the Quantum, Divine, Spirit, Love—whatever you choose to call the sacredness that resides in everything.  Our deepest connection to this energy comes at our birth, our death, and when we grieve.  Because the Lakota believe we are all One, we recognize that when you lose someone dear to you, a part of you becomes connected to the realm where Time does not exist.  To grieve is to remember Love.  To align yourself with that Love is to free yourself from the usual attachments we humans suffer around getting things done, believing that we are running “out” of time…”

“But I don’t actually feel sad,” I say. “I feel incredibly peaceful.”

“That’s Wakan,” she says, smiling. 

Time and Change are measured in relation to each other (and in burritos!).  One cannot happen without the other.     Previously, I’ve viewed Time and Change as unsavoury characters lurking out behind the pub, waiting to rough me up as I try to make my way Home.  Suddenly, with Love on my side, they feel like bullies without much punch.  I’m finding that when we sidestep Time, for a moment to be fully present with a plant, an animal, another soul, a mountaintop, or a river, we give ourselves a sip of eternal serenity that defies Change. It is beyond it and above it.

This is peace.

This is Joy.

 In other news, today is the anniversary of me moving to this wee homestead-haven, affectionately nicknamed the Land of Lost Plots!  I’m grateful for the Time, the Changes, and the reminders that neither of them matter too much in the grand scheme of things.  Of course, it’s easy to persuade myself that there is still so much to do. No doubt I will fall back into my hurrying and scurrying soon.  

Meanwhile, let us destroy carefully, thoughtfully, skillfully what must make way for Better, if not Best.   The greatest musicians are those who have learned to harness their dissatisfaction, not so they can live in the misery of self-correction, but so they can be freed to caper, romp, frisk, and frolic and otherwise “play” in Tune for our collective inspiration and delight.   Destruction is but one half of Creation.   Let’s honor gently that which is “vintage” and has stood the test of time, while we seek eagerly a better fit for today’s life. Let us do our work with and for Love.

Let the Mending continue! 

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Peaches & Parables

Greetings Dear Ones,

Thank you to those who have written expressing your condolences for the loss of my dear friend. You are very kind! I appreciate your thoughtfulness and compassion more than I could say.  

In the Spirit of Liberty and Justice for All, I skipped writing this blog last week on the fourth of July so that I could devote a “free” day to the hot, sweaty, mosquito-laden labor of getting some cattle fencing put up.  I’ve been fighting to give the boys their freedom for three years now—bit by bit enlarging their space as I am able.  Freedom, of course, needs strong limits, lest we intrude on someone else’s life, liberty, or property.  It’s never a good idea to let one’s cattle feast upon a neighbor’s begonias. It’s not good for the cattle and it certainly is not good for the begonias.  I think there’s a “Thou Shalt Not…” about that somewhere as well as at least one Robert Frost poem on the importance of good fences.  Now they (the cattle that is, not the neighbors) will have several acres of fresh salad bar to roam, within the perimeter of a .69 (?) joule voltage fence. I may have overdone it on the strength of the fencing but I might not be able to patrol it daily and it needs to be strong enough to not short out, should a daisy lean against it—somewhere between withstanding a daisy and being able to knock down a fully grown bear seems about right. So I spent our nation’s birthday defending and protecting the liberty of my beloved boys, thinking (not for the first time) how intertwined are liberty and discipline.  (My inner fifth grader spent a few minutes reminiscing on my younger brothers daring each other to pee on the electric fence on our family farm when we were young and wondering if anyone of my son’s buddies would be dumb enough to try such a thing here.  It put Prudence right off the idea of roasting wieners for supper.)

“Let’s talk more about Discipline and less about wieners,” interrupts Prudence groaning disapprovingly.  

Every time I work with those two Jersey boys (a.k.a. The Steeroids), their first question out of the box is “Hi! Do the RULES still apply? Oh! They do? Fine. Thanks for clarifying. Yes, we DO know how to behave.”  And they do.  But with cattle as with all critters, especially the human ones, the rules need to be Fair, Understood, Consistently enforced, and there need to be genuine consequences universally applied to all who dare break them.  They usually check to see if the rules apply by trying to break a rule. I call it “testing the fence.”  Those who think they can piddle on someone else’s boundary deserve to get the shock of a lifetime! (The 5th grader is giggling again.) 

One of the best things about living on this dear little homestead is all the lessons it is teaching me all the time. I take nothing for granted.  Each season is unique.  Last summer, I had sunflowers that towered overhead. This year, the chipmunks TWICE ate all my seedlings.  TWICE I germinated the seeds on the kitchen counter, twice they sprouted and grew. I put the tray outside and the chipmunks acted like I had just rung the dinner bell.  

So this is a year with no sunflowers.

But it is a year with PEACHES!!! Yum! It’s been three summers since we had a decent peach crop. Last year, due to an untimely frost, there were no peaches at all. In Nature’s way of Tragic Abundance, there are more peaches than the boughs can safely hold.  They hang there like tiny baby sea turtles. Only a small percentage will make it.  The truth is that each tree can only make about a hundred full-grown gorgeous peaches to full size.  If I leave them all there, I will have hundreds of undersized fruits that won’t fully develop. I can’t bear to go through and pick the gorgeous babies and say to each one “no, not you…” It breaks my heart. (Have I mentioned I’m a terrible farmer?) The best I can do is shake the tree vigorously so the weaker ones drop in a small shower of padded rocks on my head.  The more that fall, the bigger the others will grow.  

The sheep come running for the fallen. Since their one ambition in life is to die, they don’t want to miss an opportunity to choke on prenatal peach pits.  They crunch them happily and say “Can you blame us? It’s ninety degrees, we are covered in wool, and flies are trying to drink from our eyes!  What’s there to live for?”

“Yep, I’m tapping out as soon as I can,” says a yearling lamb heading for some moldy hay that got rained on.  “With any luck, I’ll get me some Listeria poisoning here…”

Life and Death are constantly arm wrestling here at the Land of Lost Plots.  Life tries to get a little leverage by sheer numbers but more peaches will be lost than will make it.  The tree needs to put its energy into making fewer fuller.  Isn’t that the way with us, as Menders?  We have thousands of projects on the go. Editing is good. Devoting our energy to the completion of what is manageable.  We cannot do it all.

 Boy, it’s been HOT here! So hot it caused “a health crisis” for me this week.  I’ve been babysitting a neighbor’s dog while their family is on vacation.  Each morning I take it for a walk as part of my morning chores. A few days ago, I wore my crocs—those rubbery plastic shoes you can slip on your feet—instead of the big heavy muck boots.  When I got back to the house, they were wet and covered in grass clippings so I left them outside the door.  A few hours later, I went to take the dog out again and I could not get my feet into the crocs!   The air was close and muggy. It was a brutally hot day.  I had been working hard on the fencing.  I could tell my hands were puffy from slamming a posthole digger and iron bars into the ground. My feet were swollen too—apparently so swollen that I could not get crocs on!  Crocs! Seriously?  They are big, floppy, sloppy hunks of rubber.  How could they be too small?  How could shoes that were too big a few hours ago suddenly not fit? Next to the shoes, my feet looked enormous.

I panicked. I should not have eaten so much salty food at lunch! Or was it that Birthday Cake I made for America?  I got some water and promptly guzzled twenty ounces to help flush my system then lay down on the floor and put both legs in the air. What if I have high blood pressure now?  What if hypertension is causing me to swell? I put my feet down after a few minutes and checked them again.  The swelling seemed to go right up the leg. In fact, it was noticeably worse in the thigh and buttocks area.  It wasn’t just the feet! My WHOLE BODY was bigger. What was I to do???

I lay there and contemplated phoning the dear Hermit of Hermit Hollow and asking him to take me to Urgent Care.  Would they be open on a holiday weekend?  Should I go straight to the Emergency Room?  My pulse seemed normal.  I felt otherwise fine. What would I say to the doctors? ‘”Hi, sorry to bother you, but my shoes don’t fit—can you do a total work up on me?”’ I drank more water.  I swore off corn chips and cake.  I planned out my funeral. Mentally, I searched my desk for the deed to the house and the title to the car so that my poor orphaned children would not have to live out the nightmare we’ve been having trying to get my recently deceased friend’s affairs in order.  As the soundtrack of Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye” crescendoed  in my head, I wondered who would take my sheep.  What would become of Gus and Otie?  I looked Mortality in the eye and it told me I have too many stunted peaches in my life.  I need to do some pruning and ripening.  I need to set up strong boundaries so that my Happiness can find its Liberty.  

I came to terms with a lot of things… I forgave those who need forgiving and sent Love to those I may have hurt.  I went on Web MD and tried to ascertain my prognosis.

Then I “Googled” a new question that suddenly occurred to me: “Can crocs shrink?”

Yes.

Yes, they can. All you have to do it heat them.  I lay there, legs up, sucking down switchel (water laced with apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, and ginger), watching a fascinating series of YouTube videos showing how you can run crocs through the dishwasher on the hot cycle; you can put them in a washing machine on Hot; you can microwave them; heat them in an oven (NOT recommended!) or put them in a dryer on high with a wet towel. Apparently the polymers that make these things behave like shrinky-dinks when heated.

You can even leave them on a back deck of a blazing hot day in Vermont in July. 

They definitely WILL shrink—at least two sizes or more.  Who knew?

 Isn’t life full of fun surprises and chances to laugh at Nancy? Sometimes I’m not the problem I think I am.  Sometimes Science and Nature are just teaching me.   

Stay Cool, Dear Ones!  May you be fruitful and Free!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

I Like Knowing Where You Are

“The heart is still aching to seek/ but the feet question, Whither?” —from “Reluctance” by Robert Frost

Greetings Dear Ones!

“I can tell you are near the blueberry field,” says my friend on the phone as I drive to work. Sure enough, the call, like my tires, gets a little muddy.  As I reach the top of the hill, our voices are clear again. She laughs a sparkling laugh. “I’m glad I know that road you’re on. I like knowing where you are! I can picture everything.” 

We’ve been friends for seven years and talked daily for more than five of them.   Mostly we chat about the weather and our sheep but we both get easily distracted—by poetry, politics, psychology, teenage Chinese piano prodigies, nineteenth century transcendentalists, agnostic gospels, the life and times of Beethoven, Christian mysticism, astrology, the history of petticoats, civil war battles...These are the bogs into which we wander on our conversational rambles. She is a marvelous storyteller with a lifetime of adventures to relate. As a young girl, she rode her pony along the plowed furrows that were being cleared to create [a giant 4-lane highway].  She galloped through endless apple orchards and swam in the river with the pony.  “It was all farmland then,” she says of her town.  Her farm is one of very few left. She toured Europe and the British Isles with her grandmother in the late 1950’s as a teenager. “We went over on the Queen Mary,” she says, “Grandmother had certain ideas about travel.”  As a young woman, she went west and became a hired hand on a ranch in Idaho, working cattle all summer with a Morgan mare she brought with her from the east.  “That mare was so damn smart—she just did all the work herself.  I could just sit there!” she says. In the winters, she was a ski instructor and a school teacher in a small school house. As a side hobby, with a state license to tend and keep raptors as they healed, she rescued injured birds of prey and nursed them back to health.  

“Where are you now?” she asks each time the hum of the engine shifts from back roads to highway to the stop light in town as I arrive at my little shop.  She can “see” my journey in her mind and checks herself as I go. When she hears the motor stop and the car door open, she says “Well, I know where you are.  Have a wonderful day!” 

She “bookends” the day with another call on the way home, chatting happily until she can hear my tires scrunching on the gravel as I turn the last curve towards my little barn and home.  The daily circle, with all its twists and turns, is complete. She tells me all she has learned that day—what she calls “going down the rabbit holes.” “There are so many amazing things on the internet!” she says delightedly, “I can just keep learning and learning.  I’m going to college all over again.  I listened to four lectures on King Lear today—how wonderful! Except King Lear really was a jerk. Too much like that rancher who took a shot at me once.”

I have to admit, I like knowing where she is too.  When she gets cantankerous about current events, we remind each other that “we are safe, all is well.” She is in her favorite chair, next to her beloved piano, with her darling cats sauntering through the quaint New England Christmas scene, though its June. (It’s been Christmas every day for at least ten years at her house; I don’t feel so bad about my faerie lights and robin’s maternity wreath now!)  A mutual friend describes her perfectly: she is “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Tasha Tudor, a Hobbit, and a Little Rascal all rolled into one.”

I do my evening chores and watch the meadows deepen into twilight.  We have both agreed that this is one of the best years ever for fireflies. They sparkle like the grass is full of stars.  Each flicker says “Here I am!  I am here!” I Like knowing where they are even though my inner entemologist says the iridescence is not just a location device—it actually translates more as the Tinder Bug version of “hey, baby, u up?”

Prudence (my inner “nun of this and nun of that” cleric) is disgusted to think that all the magic in the meadow is linked to sex, that sex is linked to life, that life is linked to Death. She prefers neat, tidy boxes, yet around and around the vast circles go. (She also assumes those robins on their second clutch of eggs in the nest in the Christmas wreath on the back door are married.)

The meadow sparkles with communication.  Everyone is checking in.  It’s time to shut the chicken coop. I count the drowsy hens on their perches.  It does make one feel safe to pause, make sure all gates are latched for the coming ride through the dark of night and “know where everyone is,” even if in a larger sense, I truly have no idea where any of us are at all.  The yellow light of the kitchen window says “Here I am. You are Home.” I head towards it.

Do you call them lightening bugs or fireflies? I guess it depends on where you grew up. I’m only growing up now, so I haven’t quite decided yet.  I’ve noticed I get a big chance to Grow Up every time one of my precious circles pauses on its path, and the slow weight of it crushes the stones (and me) beneath it.  I have been leaking helplessly from both eyes since Thursday.

A week ago today, for the first time in years, there was no call from my friend. And there never will be again. The only time I hear her voice now is in my head, chortling with delight: “I know exactly where you are!”

Yes, dear Friend. I’m still here.

Where are You?

Silent stars and fireflies and the baahs of hungry sheep are the only answer.

Instead of familiar predictability, and wireless calls on which to hang an average, mundane day, something in the firmament has shifted and we all have to find new balance, take on new roles. Friends who never met must meet, form alliances, and decide how to re-home a multitude of orphans: thirty-four sheep, and endless hens, cats, plants, and clutter (so much clutter!) not to mention ourselves!

We aren’t just losing her. It feels like we are dying too—as the parts of us once fed and watered by her laughter, her wisdom, her devotion, begin to wither and beg for the crumbs of “one more time, one more hour, one more day.” But the Gate is closed. She has passed through and it is not our turn to follow.  We must foster and nourish those bereft parts ourselves, like bleating lambs at weaning, if we expect them to survive.  She touched a lot of people in 83 short years.  Among the mourning are souls as young as fifty-six, and some as ancient as seventeen. 

We weep because It is Finished. And We Laugh because It Happened.

We got to live on the edges of an Incredible Story. We each got a part in a spectacular Drama that included Daily Haikus, dining out of dumpsters (“No food can hurt you, if you bless it,” she insisted), a turtle in the bath tub,  raccoons loose in the house, blocked toilets, concerned felines bringing “gifts” of hostile (and very much alive) chipmunks to her hospice bed and spontaneous concerts where she played Chopin like I have never in my life ever heard anyone play Chopin.  She didn’t play; she channeled. She could talk all night about Chopin as if she knew him personally.

“It’s because I understand pain,” she said once, smacking her lips and readjusting her false teeth. “Chopin was all about pain.  A Jacob ewe smashed my mouth with her horns. When I came into a little money, I decided to get the piano voiced instead of fix my teeth. My choice was soup and Chopin—definitely the right choice!” 

One of the highest compliments anyone pays me these days is “You knew N. so well…” It is a gift to Know and Be Known.  It IS the highest of Loves. To Know is to Love; to Love is to Serve—and thus another “Circle” carries Time’s Chariot along.

On a sunny afternoon, the grain-tipped grass rippling like a golden ocean at low tide, with cross currents of wildflowers and bands of darker green, the unknowing sheep continue to nibble. Gently, Grief wraps me in her fond embrace and whispers the wisdom I must discover yet again:  “My Dear One, Love is NOT gone. Love never ends.  It just changes its shape, its skin, its scales, its fur, its fields. An endless abundance of Love is on its way to you Always.  LIFE is your banquet. It is not treasonous to Live, to savour the tanginess of homemade blueberry pie in August, or the hush of moonlight on a November snow.  It’s ok to leave this place where she dwelt.  She is not here. Her relationship with you is complete—but yours with her will never be until you too are gone.  She goes forth with you, always.   Over and over, she will find you—in the beautiful, mundane, most “every day” sorts of things—at the bottom of a cup of Nettle tea, or the sound of a piano; in the hoot of an owl, or the trust of a cat who’s chosen your lap, and every time you hop in your car and remember those calls to keep learning, to keep seeking. Stay in amusement . Hold her name gently in your mouth.  Say it often.  Sing of her to those who will listen.  Take up the Work she left unfinished—write for her, play for her, shepherd and sew for her.  Be her hands. Mend for her.  Then the part of you that feels like it is dying, will Live and Love will teach you who you really are.”

And so it is.

I know right where I am.  I like knowing where you are too, Dear Ones. We are all connected. Thank you for reading, sharing, and for all your Good Work.

Keep Mending my Darlings!  I love you SEW MUCH!!!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

P.S. Ha! It also tickles me how much she would have hated this letter!  She was not one for mushy sentimentality and “fluff.” As a dyslexic and a scientist, she found my writing “too flowery”—but her gardening was such that I feel rooted enough to bloom as I may. I happen to LOVE the fluffy, mushy stuff!  And her leadership in Authenticity is far too compelling to ignore.

For the Fathers...

“The nature of impending fatherhood is that you are doing something that you’re unqualified to do, and then you become qualified while doing it.”—John Green

Greetings Dear Ones!

I’ve spent the crisp dawn hours this morning cuddled in a blanket on the porch, holding a warm mug of tea, and snuggling a small, hairy mammal of the doggish variety.  I say “doggish” because our relationship is complicated (and he’s reading this over my shoulder). For twelve years, he’s been hell bent on convincing me he is not a dog (and therefore should not be expected to dine on anything but “people food” or sleep anywhere but smack in the center of a king-sized bed).  He’s more of a pocket-sized Zen master with the breath of rotting snails. In our current charade, he plays the cheesy “spiritual” guide surreptitiously keeping his eye on the profit margin while I’m the naïve and wealthy client he manipulates  for his own interests. He knows I have fully bought in to the cult of Him—No vet bill is too high; No treats too indulgent.  He is happy to tolerate my lifestyle choices and ridiculous “hooey-pooey” rituals as long as all of his needs are met, which they are, of course they are.  Avidly, he watches the clock so that mealtimes are strictly observed. Guardian, companion, supervisor—he’s in the shop, the garden, the barn—never lifting a paw to help but making things just a little sweeter by his Presence and his selfish demands  reminding us both that we are Alive—physical beings who need touch, affection, exercise, fresh water, treats, and potty breaks. 

“I’m not here for a long time; I’m here for a Good Time,” warns this guru in fur pajamas, hopping and begging for his meat-flavoured heart medication tablets which cost forty dollars a month.

“You have NO idea how good you have it,” I whisper into the fur on his neck. “I will love and serve you all of your days.”  He stares back at me with silver cataract eyes that look like twin moons.

“I See You,” he says returning my blind adoration.

What could possibly feel more like Love than that? 

I will do anything for Love, though the price is often way steeper than a mere forty dollars a month. 

Currently I am facing the immanent loss of a dear friend who is home on hospice care, in a hospital bed in what was once a front parlor. (I skipped last week’s blog to stay overnight with her and help shear her sheep.)  I have been co-supporting other friends in this deep crisis that Grace and Grief brings us.  Sometimes, what Love asks of us is to Let Go of those we love and the ideas we have about how we should love them.  This feels unacceptable.  This feels like the opposite of Love—like we will be plunged into a world of UN-seeing all that is so dear to us.  We are visually specific and tactile creatures.  We want THIS fur, we want THAT smile.  We are unwilling to trade. Anything else feels cheap and treasonous.

I tell my dying friend (who has been a little frustrated with those of us trying to help her) that she will have to settle for Imperfect Love from me.  I’m not good at letting go.  And it’s abundantly clear that I’m not always going to say or do the things she wants me to do.  

“I truly believe we all have come from Perfect Love and no doubt shall return to it, but being Perfect while we’re here doesn’t seem to be part of The Plan,” I tell her.

“You’ve got that right!” pipes in Prudence, the Critical Inner Voice, torn between acknowledging my truth and accusing me of simply copping out.  My dear friend sighs in pain-filled agreement.

“You’re going to have to accept our Love, as it is, in all its optimistic brokenness , with all it’s rough edges and sharp places, in all its well-meaning Failure.  We simply can’t do any better, though we certainly wish we could.  But, honestly, I’m not sure we are meant to.  I think this pain is here to teach us all a little humility, to lend us the opportunities for Grace and forgiveness.  The shattered cracks are where the light comes in, where the humor defies and defiles the fear and makes it ridiculous.”

She nods.  Her face softens. We both take a much needed and precious breath.  I have spent two days designing and constructing a new form of seamless shirt that she can put over her head and tie around her waist so that she will not have to put excruciating limbs riddled with bone tumor into sleeves. Everyone is delighted with the plan, especially her boobs, which insist on sneaking sideways into a gap, coming out to join the bedside party.  They refuse to stay where they are supposed to.  My deeply modest friend is mortified.  We all feel vexation and shame, though for different reasons.  She resents feeling exposed. I resent not being able to fix things perfectly for her.

“I think Anger gets a seat at this table and can be welcomed into this process.  We are all grieving in our own ways and Anger is an important stage. It’s actually a Good Thing that fuses get short, that nerves get shot. It means we are Human and Human is what we came here to be. Somehow, we must make space for this,” I say.

Defeat leads to Acceptance. Eventually, we are both able to toss two day’s worth of wasted work on the floor and laugh.  I am no better than a field mouse with my “best laid plans” against disobedient boobs.  Impatient, inconvenient, incomplete, incompetent, “Gang a-gley” Love for the Win.

For some reason, these current thoughts of Love make me think of Fatherhood and how we attempt to shepherd the souls in our care.   Father’s day is tomorrow.  My son’s birthday is Today!  On this day, twenty four years ago, (which was his own father’s birthday and Father’s Day that year) his father became a father for the second time.  

As a seamstress, I get to observe fatherhood up close more than one might think.  As Jerry Seinfeld pointed out, “You can tell what was the best year of your father’s life, because they seem to freeze that clothing style and ride it out.” But sometimes they need to make a change. There are all the fathers of brides—sent by wives and daughters or other female “management personnel”—to get their suits tailored.  They don’t know how things are supposed to fit.  They trust me (merely because I am a woman) to make them look the way their women require them to look for this occasion.  They have no other thoughts on the subject. Then there’s the guy who took his daughter shopping in a big city for her dream prom gown only to have the ex-wife bring it into the shop with another three yards of a complimentary fabric. He’d bought a size so far off the mark we had to start over and make a whole new dress from salvaged parts and new fabric.  “What do you expect from a guy who thinks this is nine inches?” asks his former bride sarcastically extending her thumb and forefinger to span three.   There’s the man who takes his disabled son everywhere in a wheelchair who has me modify winter zippers  so his son can use them more easily.  There’s the fellow with a soft, wistful light in his eye every time he speaks about his adult son (a mutual friend of ours) living in a far off land.  There’s the freshly-minted grandfather pacing in the hall, holding his teenage daughter’s mewling newborn while she gets fitted for a wedding gown.  There’s another young man who wears his baby in a carrier on his chest as he tries on pants to get them hemmed.  There’s the single father of three who gives his children a snack while they wait patiently for him to get fitted.  I notice they are eating homemade bread and carrots that could only have been peeled at home.  Grocery stores don’t sell whole, peeled carrots like that.  His children sit obediently, silently munching like bunnies, until he exits the dressing room.

I love watching dads being dads.  I love them as they surrender, as they modify, as they construct and reconstruct themselves and their roles within the expectations set upon them.  They are just different versions of a seamster, trying to use their ingenuity to solve problems to make life fit better for those in their care.  Often, they are surprised by the sudden demands put upon them, the failures they fear, and the unexpected waywardness of troublesome boobs.   

My own father always says “A father has two jobs—to fund the bliss and take the blame.” Like all great jokes, it’s mostly true.  (That man takes a lot of blame!)  He’s also funded a lot of bliss—including five college educations and many years of graduate degrees.  After he worked his own way through college—by working three jobs, nights and weekends, he made it so that my siblings and I would not have to do the same.  He prizes hard work, strong ethics, and education.  He generously provided a standard of living he had not known as a child, only to discover he was raising the equivalent of a litter of Jack Russell zen masters who had never known want or poverty, whose ambient level of gratitude was entitled Acceptance.  How could we appreciate what he never had when we had always had it?  It’s not until we all become fathers ourselves that we begin to understand what our fathers have given us.

Some men fund the bliss better than others; some take more blame than they should.  Some fathers do well as Management, others do better as Consultants. Their roles evolve over time.  A lot of them are, like any good Mender, just trying to do the best they can with the materials at hand.  The modern identity issues are intense.  They are supposed to be Stern, yet tender, Disciplined, yet forgiving, Stoic, yet comforting, Manly, yet nurturing…  Masculine but feminine.  It’s a LOT.  And they fail.  In EPIC proportions.  Every time.  As, I believe, we are all supposed to do in our Loving Journeys.  Perfection has so little to teach us (though try explaining this to a Jack Russell whose meal is late!) Mending is for those of us who are imperfect but still willing to try our hands at Love—with hearts, threads, and thimbles, with hands, pens, or pincushions, with victoriously peeled carrots or service that winds up on the floor.  Let us Mend, amend, and keep Mending.

I celebrate this!  I celebrate Love that is never “enough” and yet is the best there is. I love that fathers can be anything from slobs who say “pull my finger” to the dignified guy in a starched collar, leaking a secret tear as he walks you down the aisle, or salutes you as you leave to fight your own battles.   They are our champions and our losers, our teachers and our students, our coaches and our teammates, our financial advisors and our debtors.  They’ll get a lot of ugly ties, golf shirts, power tools and blame tomorrow.  I hope they also get HEAPS of lovely Love—in all its raw, naked, unfinished, resentful, brittle, imperfect, Hopeful Glory. 

To all the dads out there—especially my two favorites: the amazing father of my beloved children, and my own dear Old Dad, I See you. THANK YOU. And I love you SEW MUCH!!!!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Hope For The Graduates

Hope is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

--Emily  Dickinson

Greetings Dear Ones!

A man came into the shop recently, asking to have his daughter’s dress hemmed for graduation.  It turns out he works for an organization that is the parent company managing the building where I rent space for my wee shop.  He asks how the organization might help me. “We want to support small businesses in town, especially those devoted to services like yours. We need you.  How can we help you? What would make a difference to your business?”

I stare at him in surprise for several moments then look around the shop slowly, as if seeing it for the first time in a while—the way one looks at a room one is about to clean and suddenly realize it looks like there’s been an FBI search only you hadn’t noticed until now.

“You look busy; do you need to hire someone?” he asks.

“There’s no space to have another worker in here.  It’s too tight.” I say. (The place is like a galley kitchen with huge windows.)

“Would you like more space?” he asks quickly. “We have bigger studios upstairs…”

I shake my head No. “I can’t afford more space—you guys have jacked the rent again and my dear customers would struggle even more if there were more stairs.  Some of them struggle as it is.  Those stairs are steep for those with bad hips or knees.”

He nods thoughtfully.

After several minutes of silence during which I am thinking, he finally says “Do you even know what you need?”

“I do need support,” I say. “I need a peer group of fellow solo-entrepreneurs, especially women who deal with the general public.  I need people with whom we can co-affirm our worth so that when some jerk forgets to pick up his own damn pants and comes in here yelling at me, I have the guts to make him pay for the pants, instead of guiltily letting him take them for free because he had to buy a new pair of pants when he got to Miami for the destination wedding he didn’t even want to attend. He had three weeks to pick up his clothes and he didn’t, so why did I feel like I owed him something just because he was mad? I can’t imagine him treating a male tailor that way, or even behaving that way in front of a another witness.”

“I was thinking maybe you want to tune up your website,” says the man, shifting uncomfortably. “We just got a grant to help new businesses with websites.”

“No, thank you,” I say suddenly feeling slightly irritated and defensive. “My website is the best thing about this whole operation.  My friend set it up for me.  I like how folks are able to schedule their own appointments online.  It’s simple and works great.”

“How about advertising?” he asks. “Do you need help advertising?”

“What? So I can get more work?” I ask incredulously. “The racks are full. I can barely keep up as it is.  I’m at Capacity. But I can’t hire anyone; I can’t afford to pay anyone; I can’t afford more space. I am literally hanging by a thread.  People are delighted to find me, delighted to have me do their work, NOT delighted to pay as much as a hamburger to have a gown altered.  People literally come in here every day, put on an outfit, ask how much it will cost to change, then decide it’s too much and leave. Often, the next person in tells me I’m way under-priced.  It’s hard to know what to charge. I suspect this is true for most solo female artisans.  Customers are all very nice about it but the fact is clothing is cheap; labor isn’t.  They don’t understand that I can’t stay here, helping all the people who need help, if my work is not genuinely valued. I will go under and yet another small business will fold.  It’s not that I need a better website or more advertising, I need help charging what it REALLY takes to pay the rent and buy my own groceries.  I’m NOT their kindly aunt or mother they don’t value enough. I’m a working woman. This is why, as so many people say, ‘No one does this any more…’  A lot of people assume that women do this work as a side-hustle, as a second income in a home where another bread-winner is supporting us.  This is not true! Their grannies and mothers did it “for nothing,” I can’t!  

He sighs, looked defeated, and turns to go. I tell him his daughter’s dress will be ready the next day.  

Teaching solo female entrepreneurs to value themselves, to give them the emotional resilience to deal with rejection and to persist in their dreams is not something that is taught in most business schools, if anywhere at all.  The only time you hear about it is in four minutes of a graduation speech. LIVING those ideas for the rest of your life takes courage, perseverance, and the ability to manage adult beverages responsibly.  And if you need courage to do what you are doing, chances are parts of it are not fun, possibly even dangerous.  It’s really fun to put twenty-five hours into making a wedding dress someone’s dream come true.  It’s really scary to charge them five hundred dollars at the end. But it shouldn’t be. Sometimes us little Hermit-granny types like me gotta be Fierce!  Our hearts pound like we have loose mice in our bras.  We are not responsible for other people’s bad choices.  We must claim our value.

Everyone needs Courage to stay in business. 

We all need Hope to stay in Love.

I think about Hope—that thing with feathers—and take a visit to the Hope Coop in my heart.  Some of the birds are looking kind of ratty, like they are going through molt.  There’s the hope that my dog would live another year—she’s looking better than she did last time I checked. The Hope that Otie’s scratched cornea heals quickly is also looking sleek and plump.  (He’s doing much better, though keeping the bra-pads on his eye got to be an enormous challenge as the week progressed.)

“Hey!” I say suddenly, looking around, “Where’s the Hope that I would have a beach body by summer?”

“Oh, she died,” croaks one of the bedraggled Hopes at the bottom of the coop, “almost immediately, as soon as you put her in here.”

“Which one are you?” I ask.

“I’m the Hope that your car makes it to December.”

“You don’t look so good,” I say.

“Well, have you heard that funny rattle under the hood?”

“Yes,” I say.  The little Hope turns a shade grayer and coughs a tiny cough for emphasis.

“How about the Hopes for World Peace?” I shout. “For Isreal? For Palestine? For the Release of the Hostages? For all children to have full tummies? For Justice? For Democracy? For Clean Elections that are respected by all parties?”  A bedraggled band of inmates shuffles forth from the shadows.  They are smaller than hummingbirds. 

“We’re still here,” they say quietly. “We’re not dead yet… We could use some Good News and maybe a little mending.”

I gather them up and hold them in hands shaped like a nest of twig digits, skin, and bones.  These heavy hands have work to do and the Hopes feel so frail and downy light.

“Please don’t leave,” I whisper. “I need you.”  

I think about the Greek Myth about Pandora’s Box.  All the evils are loose in the world.  We cannot lose Hope.  She is the thing that remains, that helps us Continue—when the sewing machine breaks, when the car won’t start, when your own hair looks like feathers rubbed backwards, when you shouldn’t have eaten so much emotional support cabbage if you wanted to fit into a swimsuit before October, when the news pundits have nothing but fear to sell, when the bills need to be paid, when you feel depressed, alone, and up against it all…

Hope sings: “Tomorrow is a new day!”  To Commence is to Begin.  There are fresh, sleek and sassy Hopes to gather.  The community we need most is within our own hearts, telling us “What you Do MATTERS.  It has value.  DO IT. COMMIT. It’s worth it in the end.  Just because some crabby, disorganized bloke yells at you, it’s not the end of the world.  It’s the Beginning.”

A new generation of graduates is taking its place beside us to help us continue The Great Work.  Some will want to Farm, or Sing, or Sew.  We must welcome them all and teach them their Value. This is what Hope is for.

Keep mending my darlings!  Feed the Hopes!  Keep them alive and singing in your soul.

I love you Sew Much,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Divisions

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, it’s been quite a morning! I’ve made an eye patch out of an old bra cup and sewn it onto a steer’s head, rounded up the neighbor’s escaped dog, built a section of split-rail fence, vaccinated the herd, and learned that a sheep I have owned for seven years has no butt hole. (Yes, you read that correctly. No Butt Hole. More on this later.)  If I hadn’t already missed you last week, I might be content to flop down under the faded blossoms on the apple tree and stare into the deep blue above until the stench of my own underarms prompts me to move upwind of myself…  There’s no point in showering: It’s projected to be near ninety degrees Fahrenheit and today is the day I have picked to shear the sheep.  A friend is coming to help, I’ve taken the day off from the shop and we cannot turn back now.

Last week, I started writing an “All-is-well-Ain’t-life-Grand” sort of blog celebrating the joys of Spring only to get interrupted by the discovery that I had a sick sheep on my hands. Beloved Old Mr. Willoughby, who had just turned ten and who had the best fleece in my entire flock had separated himself from the herd and was acting “weird,” which in sheep parlance is “I’m planning to die.”

“Please don’t die,” I begged him, when he staggered into the barn with a faintly “neurologic” tremor in his limbs.

“I must,” he said. “It’s been the plan all along.”

“I hate that plan,” I said. “I don’t want to lose you! I will miss you.”

“I will just stop being here and be Everywhere instead,” he said. “It’s a decent plan.”

“No!” I insist. “We will mend you! What’s wrong with you? You are not skinny, you have no fever, no diarrhea, no bloat, no cough, no injury…your eyelids are pink, you have all your teeth… What’s up? Did you have a stroke? Are you just old?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” he mumbled wearily. “I’m just Very Tired.  It’s time for me to go home.”

I called the clinic and a vet agreed to come by the end of day.

I gave him apples and probiotics (Willoughby, that is, not the vet) which he ate politely but he never got up again.  He went Home before the vet could come.

The next day, our beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow used the backhoe on his tractor to dig a fresh grave beneath the maple tree where his mother is buried.  (Willoughby’s mother, not the Hermit’s)  

My heart aches at these transitions.  I would make a terrible Buddhist! I suffer easily and often.  I am Attached to everything.  Any form of division feels hurt-filled.  I am doing mental wrestling with the idea that some divisions are necessary.   

I am, however, delighted to be putting some distance between myself and Glitter.  Prom Season is over!  The shop now faces impending glitter withdrawal.  I am considering opening a local recovery program for people whose lives have become unmanageable due to glitter. “Is glitter ruining your life?  Are you obsessed with thoughts of glitter?  Do you struggle to hide the amount of glitter you have?  When you are in the presence of friends, do you wonder why they have no “sparkles”? Do you need help learning to nourish yourself with food that does not contain trace amounts of glitter? Are you worried about the amount of glitter secretly making its way into your septic system? Are you powerless to change the amount of vacuuming you must do just to keep functioning?”  

In the woods, I am dividing the land—fencing off an area of underbrush for the cattle to clear. Their sandpaper tongues seem to have no problem with invasive roses and buckthorn bushes tangled together with ropes of poison ivy, wild grape, and Virginia Creeper.  There are several acres of tree-choking despair rivaling the Fire Swamp in The Princess Bride. The plan is to have the boys, who use their horns like salad forks, clear a bit at a time and restore some space and health to the area so that it can be a forest again instead of something that kept charming princes away from Sleeping Beauty for a hundred years.   The trick is to move the fence before they begin to snack on the trees. (The cattle, that is, not the charming princes.) 

Beneath a struggling Beech tree, I find some little beauties: a clump of Lily of the Valley—“white choral bells, upon a slender stalk…”  I had wanted to put some in the raised garden beds by the front door but had decided against ordering them from a seed catalogue last fall during one of my “credit card austerity” campaigns.  And here they are! Knowing the boys will just devour them (and they are toxic), I immediately stop what I am doing to dig them up carefully and install them in a raised bed by the front door of the house.  They transplant beautifully and look happy in their new spot.  I divide them along their rhizomes, the underground stems which put out the lateral shoots at intervals connecting sister plants.  The little families are snuggled into fresh earth in rows of cousins, with room to spread out. Every morning, I sing an old nursery round to them:

White choral bells, upon a slender stalk

Lily-of-the-Valley lines my garden walk.

Oh how I wish that you could hear them ring

but that will only happen when the faeries sing!” 

So far, no ringing or singing.  Other gardeners warn me about how invasive they can be but they are in a solid bed with nowhere else to go so they will fill in over time and crowd each other (the lilies, that is, not the old-time gardeners) until further divisions can be made. They are a lovely (free!!!) gift from the forest. We have each spared each other. There is joy in this “division.”  

By now, Dear One, you probably want to get back to that butt hole situation, though you were certainly too polite to say so.

“Rubbish!” insists Prudence, appalled. “Skip it. No one wants to hear about such a vile topic.”

“But this is a blog about every kind of Mending—fences, garments, hearts, and maybe bodies too…”

“This is ridiculous!” mutters Prudence, “Utter tosh!”

“Or…tush… in this case,” says my inner fifth-grader, smirking.

 It all started when Otie came into the barn with tears pouring out of one eye.  He and Gus had been happily munching their way through their new jungle of thorns but a stick must have poked Otie in the eye.  The poor fellow was very weepy and unhappy so I again called the vet.  She agreed to meet me at 8:30 this morning to check him. “Why don’t we vaccinate all the sheep since I’ll be there anyway?  We can do wellness checks and see how the flock is doing.”

Now, I don’t know what kind of rough ceremonies happen at your doctor visits, but a sheep “wellness” check involves being grabbed head and tail and wrestled into a corner unless one manages to drag the doctor and shepherdess around the pen three times first.  Then you get two injections—CDT and rabies—one in the neck, one in the back leg, then we pull down an eyelid to see how pink it is.  Pale eyelids mean anemia, probably due to a high parasite load.  Then we “score” the body flesh by feeling the spine and pelvis to determine the animal’s conditioning. (It’s hard to do this by sight, given all their wool.)  Everybody had good eye color but one ewe was a little pale and not as well conditioned as the others. “Let’s get a fecal sample from that one,” said the Vet.

In animal medicine, we don’t ask the patient to go into a private bathroom and poop into a little cup. Nor can we collect a sample from the barn floor, as it could be anybody’s.  The only way to assure you have a sample from the correct individual is, yes, you guessed it—put on the gloves and go in after it.  This is when we discovered that Miss Molly has no butt hole.

Yep! Weird. I had no idea!  It’s called atresia ani vaginalis and it happens in about 1% of lambs.  Male lambs born with no anus usually die without surgery because there is nowhere for the poop to go.  In female lambs, their bodies sometimes force a compromise so that the poop can find an exit through the vagina.  Her body figured it out without medical intervention and she’s been alive for seven years with no problems, pooping through her vulva the entire time.

“What does one do if a sheep needs a complete asshole?” I wonder aloud. “Do we just go to Congress and grab one of the many belligerent delegates? It seems like there are some Perfect specimens there!”

Otie had his eye checked and did indeed have a scratched cornea, as suspected. We all decided he would be happier wearing a bra on his head for the next two days. (Who wouldn’t be?) We filled his eyelid with soothing antibiotic ointment and I sewed a bust pad in place using strips of linen anchored to his horns.  He submitted gratefully. The bra cup fits perfectly (his eye is a 34A) and helps keep the lids closed, which feels much better for him, and stops the flies from bothering it.  Twice a day, he will get warm compresses, fresh ointment, and vintage Victoria’s Secret strapped to his head. He is On The Mend!

 As I think about Divisions, Separations, Distinctions… I see that some are absolutely vital.  Having an anus separate from a vagina is a major convenience. Having an eye on each side of the face helps us have depth perspective. Having one view only is extremely unbalancing and dangerous, for a working steer or a voter.  Having a working democracy where the two sides to every story can get debated and discussed Respectfully so that compromises can be reached…well, that’s still the Dream, isn’t it? We hear a lot about “United we stand; divided we fall” and I believe that in a larger sense, especially if we unite around the ideals of Democracy and Decency.  But in small ways, Divisions—used appropriately—give us room, invite us to grow, expand, learn, and ultimately make us stronger.  To mend our social fabric is to accept (and choose not to discard) What Is, while still choosing to evolve.

 Sometimes Nature makes some interesting “mistakes” yet always, she finds a way to Mend—including in Death, the ultimate transformation.  Mending means embracing Workable Possibilities so that Shit Gets Done!

Amen.

Keep mending my Darlings!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. The shearing went great!  The sheep are naked and happy now! 

P.P.S. A big thanks to dear Katie K. from “The Artichoke Temple,” who shares this to FB, since I am no longer there, and to anyone else who takes the time to share or comment! Thank you!

Trials

“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a [person] perfected without trials.”—Seneca

Greetings Dear Ones!

The Witnesses are lining up and testifying one by one: first the snow drops, then the daffodils and hyacinths, now the tulips and peach blossoms—each with scents and blazes of color to be inhaled and entered into the record of Evidence. The pears are next and the apples buds, like siblings with a secret, are bursting to tell.  Beauty, in a crisp new suit, argues for Life! I leave the jury box to sprinkle azalea food on blueberry roots, utterly Complicit.

The trials of Life continue.  Seasonal circles carve their turns.  A robin has made a cozy round nest in the evergreen wreath that has been hanging by the back door since December. Winter is the home for Spring.  A fresh egg is laid in the tiny cup of Death.

The outdoor bathing season has begun, which is a darn Good Thing!  After grooming the boys at the hitching post and taking Gus & Otis for a yoked evening stroll, I am covered head to toe in downy cattle fur.  They are shedding like mad.  I could be mistaken for a yeti. Twilight deepens as I fill the buckets.  The evening chores are almost done.  One sheep refuses to enter the barn.  The grass outside is too green.  Like me, he just wants to live outside all the time now. After letting them all in and back out several times, enticing them with three dinner’s worth of grain, I simply cannot bribe them any more without the risk of giving them tummy aches. In frustration, I leave the rebel outside, hoping he will get lonesome, regret his choice, and want to come in later.  The rest of the flock beds down for the night. I trudge—sweaty, furry, furious, and stinky to the cast iron tub behind the house and fill it with the garden hose that runs from the hot tap in the basement.  Soon, I am immersed in Epsom salts and bubbles, listening to Barred Owls claim their real estate and watching the stars appear one by one.  

It’s heavenly to listen, darkly anonymous in my tub on the hill, to the owls and the peepers and the distant traffic from the highway two miles away which provides a vaguely “planetary” soundtrack to the night sky.  The drivers have no idea that frogs and owls and a middle-aged woman like a soft-shelled crab in a cast iron shell are above, on a hillside they pass without thinking.  They are rushing somewhere else.  We are Here. Listening.   The sounds tell us a lot about each other—who is horny, who is boasting, who is warning intruders away from their patch.  There is a balance to be struck between announcing “we are here!” and accidentally inviting our own tragedy in the form of advertising hot supper to a predator.  It reminds me of a story my dad used to tell:

“Once upon a time, a kindly woodsman came upon a little song bird who was severely chilled in early spring.  The bird lay like dead on the path.  The kindly woodsman picked it up and realized it was still alive but just needed to get warmer, so he found a relatively fresh cow turd and tucked the bird into the steamy center.  After a while, the bird felt a bit better and began to sing.  That’s when a coyote found him and ate him.”  

For such a short story, it had a lot of morals, which my father loved to expound upon:  Firstly, that those who get you into deep shit are not necessarily your enemies.  Secondly, those that get you out are not necessarily your friends. And finally, perhaps most importantly, when you find yourself up to your neck in ca-ca, DON’T sing about it!!

As I lie there quietly, thinking of all the parts of my day I am not going to sing about, I become aware of a large presence near the tub.  A dark head, eyes gleaming with worry, appears.  It’s the sheep.  He’s found me. He puts his head over the edge of the tub and begins to take a long, slurping drink of the bubbly water.  I splash. He spooks.  Soon, he is back.  He’s lonesome, afraid of the dark, and hovers near the tub like the regrets I am trying to dissolve with Epsom salts. 

I finish my scrubbing and think about how I long to return to my high school and give a commencement speech, if only to speak to my former self who wanted to be a veterinarian.   They always ask Important People with Distinguished Careers and Achievements so the chances of them inviting an exhausted, naked (but Clean!), rural seamstress who has sheep drinking out of her bathwater are slim.  Nevertheless, I start rehearsing, preparing my case. I want to tell them that Unexpected Things will happen to them—Life is a bigger trial that they think.  Not many of them will get to be veterinarians.  In fact, very few will wind up where they think they want to go but unanswered prayers are often big blessings in disguise—like not having a working bathtub in the house.  The Good News is that everyone has a gift or a skill they can hone.  And hone they must! We need those skills!  They will need to do some mending of hearts, minds, fences, and britches in their time. Skills come in damn handy for that.   

I’ve taken to giving little speeches to the prom girls, especially the seniors, who are heading off to college.  I wish I could tell them the bird story but I don’t.  I tell them that life is a trial.  (Trials seem to be an especially relevant metaphor at the moment.)  Sometimes you get to be the defendant, sometimes the witness, sometimes the jury.  Be aware.  Get your facts straight.  Sometimes you’re just a middle-aged woman who discovers how deafening it is pass gas under water in a cast iron tub. (Talk about confusing the night birds!) Try not to Judge.  You will discover that most people running around hooting and screeching and humming and buzzing are about as innocent as fifth-graders and as territorial as owls.  We are all, as my son once said, “just trying to get over what happened to us in Middle School.”   

To one girl worried that she wouldn’t measure up in “the Real World,” I admitted, “We aren’t expecting as much from you as you think.  Adults can be a bunch of jerks.  You think we would be Responsible by now.  Most of us aren’t.  Show up on time. Do what you say you will do.  Enjoy the little things. These are the Big things.  Be radically Honest and your Good will be plenty Good Enough. ” She was shocked.  No one had ever told her this before.  “Do you watch the news at all?” I ask. “No,” she admits, “I play hockey.”  “That’s pretty much the same thing,” I say. “No matter what, you are Needed, Wanted, Loved. You’re part of this Team.”  She laughs and asks if she can give me a hug as she leaves.

It’s still prom season (last one is May 18th!) but I’m not going to sing about the glitter or the rack sagging under stuff that needs to be done.  I’m warm and cozy under this pile of work.  I hope you are too.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones! 

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. The sheep followed me back to the barn and went peaceably to bed with the flock.  He is safe; all is well.