Getting Grounded

“Where are we? We are in the land of poo—duck poo, cow poo, sheep poo, goat poo…in fact, it’s the British Museum of Poo!” from “Nanny McPhee”

Greetings Dear Ones!

Dawn comes darkly through the heavy mists these days.   The Connecticut River, which is a mere two miles from my easterly-facing windows, drools and turns drowsily beneath its duvet of feathery fog.  The leaves are turning and sleek and cheeky chipmunks are getting very fat.  They scurry everywhere on their little errands.   The grasshoppers are starting to sleep off the last of the summer wine and the bug choir is losing faith in itself.  A few stark trees have already begun a bare-armed revelé in their opening ballet against the sky.  In these sharply grey and golden days, my mind naturally turns to poo.

There are ten little pullets pooping in the mudroom off the kitchen and they are incredibly stinky—it’s time to get them into the chicken coop, which needs to be winterized.  I need to get all the sheep dung out of the back of the car—since the eight-mile ride from Hermit Hollow had  a laxative effect on these wooly ruminants, who treated the vehicle like a moving port-a-potty.  And I can’t wait to harvest all the “compost” (a.k.a. poop) out of their old shed and put it on the future garden spots here…

I am not afraid of poo.

I am a Seamstress, a Shepherdess, and a Mother.  These jobs often require one to deal with a bit of poo, though Prudence thinks we should not discuss this.  I tell Prudence to take a whiff of her smelling salts or pass out.  We haven’t had a good blog about poop in a long time. I’ve been obsessed with the attempt to elevate or encourage myself (and anyone else who cares to listen) during these pandemic times which feel so alienating and disorienting.  I’ve tried to see the Good in everything and extol us to reach Higher, work Harder…blah…blah…blah… This is what I do when I am Afraid.  This is all well and good but sometimes, when things get especially crazy, it’s good to ground ourselves in some richer, um… Organic Material.   It’s wonderful to realize that we are Organic Beings who occasionally (don’t tell Prudence!) actually take a dump ourselves.

I realize that this is a sensitive subject for some who, like Prudence, don’t want to admit these things—sweet, polite, oblivious folks who report demurely to a porcelain closet every now and then to relax on a specialized chair with their pants down while they scan their Facebook or Instagram feeds in order to fill their minds with ca-ca.  So!  If you are one of these people who don’t like poopy talk, read no further. Tune in next week for something cleaner.

Turn back now.

You have been warned.

The following is a true story. It happened to a woman I know intimately—a bosom friend, shall we say.  She had just moved to a little farm in Vermont and awoke one morning to discover the power had gone out.  Power, as we all know, is that thing that enables one to Flush a Toilet.  Think about it.  In every sense of the word, this is Truth, metaphorically, metaphysically, and literally.  It may not seem so to the uninitiated, since toilets do not appear at first glance to require electricity, but they DO require water and power is what brings the water from the well.  In the olden days, that power came in the form of pioneers with buckets, who pooped in outdoor privies so it didn’t matter anyway. Today, electricity drives the pump which pipes it straight to the house.  It is quite possible to flush toilets as long as one refills them with water but if a woman has not pre-emptively gathered buckets of water, or prepared an emergency cistern, she may not be able to flush her toilet.

This is a harrowing revelation to one who normally avoids sugar and dairy products but spent the previous evening feasting on warm apple-dumplings slathered in ice-cream, washed down with raw hot cider—which were now having the same effect unpaved roads have on sheep in a Ford Explorer.  Add a bean burrito for lunch the day before and you can appreciate that she had a SITUATION brewing.  She scanned the horizon for Pioneers with buckets but none were forthcoming.   She thought about using the toilet anyway and leaving the lid down until the power returned but she had no idea how many hours, days, or weeks that might be.  She would most certainly make the house smell worse than the chickens in the kitchen were doing.  Workmen were coming to the house that afternoon—what if they needed to use the bathroom?  What if someone discovered what she had done? It was beyond mortifying to consider.   She was going to have to think of a different Plan.

She did what she does best and tried to ignore the situation—occupying her time by phoning the power company to see when the downed lines might be restored. She listened to pleasant muzak while on hold and tried to distract herself from The Situation.  For a while, her bowels complied.  Eventually, the rumblings could not be ignored. She hung up and thought with panic that she might be forced to knock on a neighbor’s door and beg access to her “water closet.” Then she realized the power was out all over the hill and no one’s wells would be pumping any water. They were all on individual septic systems.  Besides, pre-dawn, before the roosters are up, is hardly normal calling hours even for the best of neighbors, nevermind those on the verge of incontinence.

“If only I had an outhouse,” she thought, glumly clenching her flannel-clad buttocks.  What good is an old-fashioned farm in Vermont without an old-fashioned outhouse? Or at least one remodeled in the image of a trendy “composting toilet,” like those cool kids in Brattleboro have… (Note to self: you must add “outhouse” to the list of things to build here.  Something quaint but functional—with at least two or three holes cut in the plank, and a tiny one for the cat—just like Puppa had when he grew up.)

“This is what comes of drinking too much raw cider,” she thought bitterly.  Raw cider, as all country folk know, turns to scouring powder in the body and is more effective than any colonoscopy prep for making a person whistle-clean from end to end.  She could tell that the countdown had started.  She was on her way to a major blow-out.

Then she had the good fortune to remember the stories of a Dear Soul who travels the world doing incredible nursing and triage for sick children in war-torn countries like Syria and Serbia.  Many’s the time this Dear Soul has had to dig a small hole and poop into it because there is no other sanitation facility available.  It seemed crazy to have to do the same in a non-war-torn part of the back yard—but a great relief to not be shot at, unless deer season had started… had it?  Should she wear an orange vest?  There wasn’t time to find out.  Bathrobe flapping, she put on her wellies and dashed outside.

Where was the shovel? She couldn’t find the damn shovel.  Oh, yes.  She had left it in the blueberry patch when she had been transplanting bushes.  She started to run and then realized it was safer to do a stiff-legged goosestep sort of thing instead.  She made her way to the blueberry patch and looked with interest at the large holes that had been excavated when she moved the former inhabitants to new locations.  This one, right here, would be Perfect.  But no!  It was in direct sight of the neighbor’s kitchen window!  That would never do.   Why had she gotten rid of all the weeds? She was as exposed as a gazelle on the Serengetee . She would have to go somewhere else, where no one could see her.  She took the shovel and darted urgently from place to place around the property.  It was hard to find the Right Place.  One was too hard to dig, others were too close to the house, many had too much nearby poison ivy even to consider… “Who knew it was so hard to find a decent place to take a dump outside?” she marveled.  “No wonder the dogs can’t manage it…”

 In the nick of time, she found a place where the earth was loose, the trees were dense, and astonished chipmunks were few.  As her answer to Nature’s Call echoed down the valley, she got in touch with her inner Victorian who would have been appalled at doing such a vile thing inside a home. (The first indoor plumbing was in cellars, not the “decent” part of the house.)  That’s what outdoor privies are for!  We are supposed to do this outside.  In the long history of human civilization, crapping indoors is a relatively new trend—a blip—a fad.  And she realized her shame was just a story she was telling herself—shame that echoed all the way back to the very first seamstress and her fig leaves—but was probably just some marketing propaganda from a porcelain salesman.  The morning sun crested the hill, warming her backside as she planted her feet firmly in the dirt to hold herself up.  It felt good to be Grounded in the earth. Nature is not something we gaze at during Leaf-Peeping season.  It’s something we ARE.  How Wonderful to be Alive! Outside! Taking a crap in a vast, sacred garden…How wonderful to feel the sun where the sun don’t shine.  (There is nothing quite like the sun hitting a moon.)  This ruggedly optimistic middle-aged woman found herself giggling and stretching, expanding with relief—barely resisting the urge to scratch the earth triumphantly with her hind legs, like a cat covering scat. Taking a shit outside turned out to be the best thing she did all day.

If there’s one thing that 2020 seems to be good at, it’s throwing us each a little bit more than our share of doo-doo. Some of it is even of our own making.  It’s ok.  Powerlessness leads to panic, panic leads to Surrender,  Surrender leads to Serenity, with a touch of poison ivy and concern for our neighbors thrown in for good measure.  It’s like the whole 12-step process in a single squat.   We keep learning humility. We keep finding our balance and getting grounded.  And shit keeps happening!

Have Courage dear ones.  We are of the earth and to the earth we shall return.  May the trees and flowers be all the richer for it.  Keep Merry and Gentle and keep up your Good Work!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. As soon as she entered the house, the power was back on. Of course it was…

Stupid Smart Tools

Greetings Dear Ones!

After all the drama around the shouting match that was woefully and inaccurately entitled a “debate” last night, it is wonderful to write to you this morning from the peaceful quiet of the new sheepfold here at the Land of Lost Plots, where animals don’t act like people!   Well, not rude people. These wooly darlings are placidly munching, burping, and cudding like they are the cool kids at school—those nonchalantly gum-chewing fifth-graders who know where the water cooler is and don’t have to ask to go to the lavatory.  They own this place and they know it.

Getting them here safely was a trick. Sunday, as I drove away from Hermit Hollow with a car full of sheep, and one stepped on the automatic window button, put his window down and jumped out, I made a mental note to check my PCI (personal craziness index). It just might be getting above normally acceptable levels, even for me.   I might need to make a few changes before, as one elder Hermit warns, my whole existence begins to resemble the 1999 Serbian sensation “Black Cat White Cat” (a movie which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, but nevertheless, one doesn’t want to live that way!)  With three sheep in the vehicle, air conditioning and music blasting, and one running loose down the driveway back to his beloved hut at Hermit Hollow, it certainly seemed that way. (Perhaps he simply wasn’t a fan of Scottish fiddle music?) Transporting all four a mere eight miles, in two trips, with the subsequent application of child safety locks on the windows, took more than three hours.  I later took a bath and completely changed colors.

The whole weekend was wildly productive yet exhausting.  My children and two of their friends helped excavate a mountain of debris and trash from two stalls in the back of the barn.  Seeing that rather daunting pile of junk made me think about the difference between what is holding us vs. what is holding us back.  Often, it’s just a series of decisions. What is useful? How can things be sorted, repurposed, or re-homed in order to minimize the amount that would enter a landfill?     In the process, we came across some wonderful tools—rakes, shovels, an antique planer, and multiple broken gizmos for manicuring a “lawn” that now resembles a Covid hairdo with brambles and burrs.  I noted with some amusement that the simpler a thing was, the more likely it was to retain its usefulness.   Complicated isn’t always better.

Monday, I left my newly restored old-fashioned barn and headed to a current job I have taken as a contractor-seamstress.  I have my first Corporate Gig! It’s so exciting!  It’s in an extremely smooth, square building that has been polished inside and out. I have a magnetic name badge and everything.  My inner space-traveler is thrilled that locks click open with a wave of this thing.  It’s only programmed to work until 8:pm so I have to make sure to be out before then or spend a long night wandering fluorescent hallways hung with somewhat questionable modern art.

Along with masks, mandatory temperature taking, and other Covid-19 precautions, they have installed clever devices at the bottom of the doors so that no one is required to touch doorknobs in this place. Once I figure out how to open a door with my foot, which makes me feel like that T.V. horse, Mr. Ed, trying to count to four before I smack myself in the face with the swiftly opening door, I am to sit in the corner of a lab and sew whatever needs to be sewn.   One of the designers is a man who has spent more than forty years working in the garment industry.  He created and maintained the textile machines that resulted in the 1980’s craze for “Cowboy wear” spawned by the popularity of the 1980 hit movie “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta.  Their shirts were sold in Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue and worn by presidents Ford and Carter and Ronald and Nancy Reagan (who wore matching shirts).  He shows me a picture of actress Goldie Hawn, on the cover of Newsweek, wearing one.

I lift up the cover of the sewing machine and am vastly relieved to find that it is a very uncomplicated, old-fashioned, no-frills Bernina.  I exhale audibly.  The woman training me looks at me inquiringly. I explain, “I’m so happy that I am already familiar with this machine.  I was worried it was going to be some new-fangled thing I couldn’t use.”  I scan the lab and see so many machines that confuse me.

“Oh, no!” she says, “ we aren’t allowed any smart machines here. No computers. Nothing that could be programmed or copied.  Stupid tools only.”  I smile inwardly.  I have never met a stupid tool.  Even the most uneducated blind-hemmer knows when it is Friday, or when you are working on a delicate silk that should not be chewed to bits.  They are about as dumb as sheep who can open windows when they choose.  In the end, I hardly use the Bernina—the thing I do most is use a needle and thread—stone-age technology.  This suits me just fine.  Hand sewing is one of my greatest joys, though even a needle can get the better of me if I am not careful!  It absolutely cracks me up to find myself here, in a sophisticated laboratory full of state-of-the-art equipment, being asked to “sew.”  Scientists and engineers are designing specialized clothing and my job is to help make prototypes.  “I’m not kidding you,” says an engineer handing me cloth that has been cut by lasers, “you have no idea how hard it is to find people who know how to sew—I mean really sew.” (He means with needle, thimble, and thread.)  I guess we cannot create the new without the old.

Hands busy, my mind free to roam, I ponder the elegant simplicity of old tools and return to the weekend of barn cleaning and the look of utter joy on a young woman’s face as I taught her how to use a sledge hammer.  She had been painstakingly removing old, bent nails from a bit of rotting fence—hearing them squeak like mice as she pried them from their holes with a nail grabber.  It was a dainty, awful business.

Some situations call for Dainty. Others call for SMASH. “A Lady must be prepared to do both,” I explain as I show her how to whack the boards from the backside of the fence. “You must summon a delicious Rage.  Think of something you wish to release from your life. Get Mad at it and Swing!” I hand her my heaviest sledge.  She pauses, smiles, coils from ankle to wrist like a wet towel being wrung out, and gives an impressive Louisville Slugger to the nearest board.  It shatters in a most satisfying way.  Laughing, we stoop and scoop the shards with our gloved hands.  She looks at me with eyes filled with layers.  “You feel your own power, don’t you?” I state more than ask.  She nods, beaming, wordless.  I gesture broadly at the rest of the fence, which is sagging under the weight of vines in the afternoon sun. “Smash away!” I say.  And within moments, six eight-foot sections of fence are reduced to rubble for the burn pile.  We scrape the Past away with rakes.  We can start fresh—rebuilding with smaller hammers now.

Two hours later, I have taught her how to use a come-along and we have a taut, shiny new mesh fence attached to the old, black locust posts, which stand like Stonehenge in a circular paddock around the back end of the barn.  I’m so proud of her!  Now she can build a good fence and use Tiktok. I can only do one of those.

My reverie is interrupted by the arrival of an earnest young man from some part of the building devoted to making sure people have filled out surveys.  He is here to help me download an app on my phone so that I can sign into a company website and then get two codes sent to two locations so that I can cross-qualify to get into the survey.  They need to be absolutely Certain that a random stranger is not getting into their system to fill out daily two-page questionnaires about Covid-19-related symptoms or risks.   Naturally, my phone, being a very Smart Machine (far smarter than I) does not behave.  It does the equivalent of putting down its window and jumping out of the car.  While the kind young man is trying to sort this out, he is asked for a password he does not have.  “Try asking if it is an Amazonian Swallow or a European..” I suggest.  He is puzzled.  He needs to scuttle back to the mainframe in the cellar to figure this out.  And… to retrieve a password.  “Men have become the tools of their tools,” said Henry David Thoreau long before there were such things as cell phones.

I put my thimble back on and continue to sew and daydream about how exciting it is to have a clean barn.  Within moments, the young man has returned with a printout of things to try. Touching my phone with a thimbled finger does not work so he takes the phone from me without asking.  As his moist fingers poke at it repeatedly, I make a mental note to sanitize the phone thoroughly when he is done. “Why doesn’t your phone work like normal phones?” he wants to know.  “Probably because I spoiled it when it was young,” I say.  “I was lax and let it get away with stuff I shouldn’t have.  Now I can’t control it. It’s like a nasty pony who has learned to bite.”  Learning that my phone is recalcitrant and cheeky is not news to me.  Rather than disinfect it, I make another mental note to flush it down the nearest toilet instead.  That is, if I can paw my way out the door and find one.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep using my old-fashioned skills and tools and doing what I am doing.  To stay sane in a world that increasingly makes no sense, I personally don’t think we need any more “new” tools or techniques. Sometimes, we simply have to keep doing the things that got us this far, the things that will ultimately get us where we want to go.  We need to put our hands and hearts to our older, most simple tools and just keep going.  Let’s revisit Kindness, Patience, Integrity and Civility while we're at it.

Looking around at the current state of our country and the current state of our world, it’s not even a question of how smart or stupid our tools are—How smart or stupid are we ? Can we use any tools we have to create something better than we’ve got now?  Oh, please…

Let the mending continue!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Just

Greetings Dear Ones,

I confess.  I hate the word “Just.”  As seamsters and tailors, we heard the word “just” nearly every day: It “just” needs a stitch or two; it “just” needs a tuck; it “just” needs a new zipper…  and these items, in order, are a child’s woolen sweater from the 1970’s that has been completely chewed by moths, an ornate pair of jeans with heavy top stitching that needs to come in two inches at the waist only (not the bum, she needs all the room she can get in the bum), and a down parka from L.L. Bean that has three linings.   I “just” want to smack these people who say “just.”   “Just” is a way of minimizing their desires to make them look more manageable—as if we have no idea what they are really asking us to do and could be convinced by their blithe, blind, and cheery optimism. 

These people have no idea how their choices are impacting others.  Don’t get me wrong—I have no problem doing this work for people—I love this work—it’s why I chose to go into this business. (Ok, not really…I chose it for the glamour, fast cars, and sex appeal! …um…They’re on their way, right?) I just get irked when people think they are asking for a little, when actually, they are asking for a lot.  They think something “just” is something minimal.  It isn’t.  “Just” has other meanings too…

When we think about how our choices are impacting others, that’s when we get to the heart of a similar word: Justice.    Both words come to us from the Latin root: jus, or justus , meaning “law.”  (Laws, of course, are those things other people should follow.  And a lawyer, according to Ambrose Bierce, is “one skilled in circumvention of the Law.”)  “Gimme a break,” says a bellicose man with whom I was working yesterday. “Everyone knows Right from Wrong. Everyone.  We think of Justice as the morally right and fair state of things.  But we wouldn’t need it if everyone just did the right damn thing. They know what to do. They just won’t do it.” Clearly, this fallible aspect of humanity thrills him as much as treading in un-bagged dog poop.

But what is the “right damn thing?” What is “fair?”  To treat everyone “the same” is not the same thing as treating everyone fairly.   If one man needs his trousers hemmed four inches, shall I trim all trousers four inches? That would be absurd, though it would definitely simplify my work!  When one of us has a headache, we don’t all take aspirin. (Unless of course, that person is Prudence! In which case, we should all take valium.)

Justice is like medicine that seeks to help a body balance itself into healing.  I tried to tell my children when they were very small that medicine had magic powers that only grownups could understand—it was too dangerous for children to touch—that’s why I had to keep it locked away.  My very sensible young daughter short-circuited my long-winded explanation with this gem: “Mummy, I get it.  Medicine is stuff that if you take it when you are sick it will make you healthy but if you take it when you are healthy, it will make you sick.”   Yes. Precisely. Take it from a four-year-old:  Medicine is only to help the body recover its balance.

Justice is the quest for balance.  Charging too little for our work is just as unethical as charging too much.  I met a man yesterday who showed me pictures of his wife’s craft projects.  “She could charge money for this stuff but she doesn’t know how,” he said sadly, with the look of one who sees needed revenue escaping out the door in the form of gnomes made from clothespins.

We are all trying to achieve our balance.  In the shop, what is out too much must be taken in, what is in too tight must be let out, as people notice the shifts in their own equators.  Balance is not static—it’s fluid and continuous. 

A younger person I am extremely fond of calls me for advice.  I tell him to talk until he is done talking and to listen carefully for his own wisdom as he speaks. He does. At the end of it, without a single word from me, he has come up with a plan he feels good about.  He is sure he knows what to do. He feels like he is embarking on the Right Path. It is a hard but noble and virtuous path.  I am proud of him but I am biting my cheeks to keep from giggling.  I have given him no advice.  He pauses, senses the mirth, and asks what is funny.   I tell him to call back in 48 hours and I will tell him. This frustrates him but he agrees.  He calls in less than 48 hours and admits he chose a different path.  “Well, that’s why I was laughing,” I admit.  I knew that path would not be a long one.  It seemed a steep and joyless route.  In choosing it, he was struggling to disconnect his feelings from his reasoning.  Nothing dooms a path faster. Intuition must balance logic.   “I’m glad you chose the difficult mess that is Joy,” I tell him sincerely, “rather than the straight and narrow.”

“Do you think I am stupid?” he wants to know.

“Finding your truth involves a lot of mistakes,” I say. “Mistakes are not stupid in and of themselves.  I won’t think you’re stupid until you keep making the same ones over and over without learning.  That’s the only thing that can ever be called stupid.  Make amends when you need to and keep learning.  And no matter what, say Yes to Life when it calls.”

To me, that’s what justice is.  It’s not making things “fair” or equal or even.  It’s not even about righting wrongs, which is often impossible. It’s about seeking the Truth behind wrong turnings, mis-guidings, and “mis-takes” (taking what we should not have taken).  Sometimes, we need help around mending things we should not have broken.  This is where laws, traditions, precedents, and the elders’ wisdom are helpful—not necessarily so we can make as “new” but so that we can make “better.”  (I can’t help thinking of that meme that says “I want to be fourteen again so I can ruin my life in different ways.  I have new ideas.”)

Yesterday was the Autumnal Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere.  Night equals day.  For one brief time, the scales of Light were balanced.  (I fell over anyway.)  We enter the zodiac of Libra—symbolized by the scales of Justice.  It’s time to harvest what we need and return the rest to the soil from which it sprang. 

I love the stark boldness of the seasons here in New England as Nature changes her face. The maples are causing a riot of color on the hills as chilly night caresses  on their bare legs send up their flaming blushes. I celebrate the coming longer nights, even as I lament the lack of sunshine.  Thorn-torn and ragged, I am tired of the heat of summer, of chaff on my neck from mowing, of fingers stinging green with weeding.  I am ready to be done with poison ivy! I welcome the prospect of sitting by my kitchen wood stove, knitting, spinning, dreaming of the gardens to come.  (Dreaming of gardens is my favorite part of gardening.)

There is still a lot to clean up first. Life is messy and there are consequences for our actions—like leaving that hoe where I could step on it.  We live, evolve, and grow by continually shaping each other through our choices.   The way I Give is influenced by the way you Receive (or refuse to); the words you choose are influenced by the way I listen (or don’t).  Like my dear young friend, we discover truth at the pendulum swing between wrong and righteous behavior.  Righteousness with no compassion can be every bit the problem that Compassion with no righteousness can be.  We need balance. 

We are like garments needing to be whole: We need a left.  We need a right.  There is no sense hating one or the other. Both are necessary. We need our male and female energies. We need our heads and hearts to partner.  We need intuition and logic to inform each other.  We need to come together as a whole and balance.  Not so that we can stand perfectly still and “just” look pretty.  But so we may Dance.  

Let the mending continue!  Thanks for your Good Work.

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Fourth Dimension

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” –Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Greetings Dear Ones!

There is a blur in my peripheral vision these days—a streak of something flashing past.  I’m pretty sure it’s called “September.”   I am in a constant hurry but September is outstepping me.  I’ve taken to eating my homemade breakfast sandwiches in the car on the way to work to save time.  Only, I’m going to have to stop this practice because I’m getting way too much fiber; I’ve absentmindedly eaten nearly three paper towels in the last two weeks!  

A frazzled customer enters my shop and says “I read your blog most weeks and I know that you hate working on grotty, dirty jeans, so I’ve washed these for you.  I don’t want to wind up in one of your blogs!”

“Thank you,” I say, “That is so kind of you.”

As I watch, she pulls them from a plastic bag. They are still WET.  My eyes widen.

“I see you washed them, and that is just marvelous, don’t get me wrong… but you didn’t think to dry them too?”

She hangs her head.  “I didn’t have time.”  We both laugh.

“I’m going to wind up in the blog, aren’t I?”

“This very week,” I promise her. “Hell yeah.”

Seriously, who isn’t in a rush in September? The light is waning at each end of the day and Fall is bearing down on us here in Vermont, where we spend most of the summer getting ready for winter. I’m under an intense amount of pressure this year, trying to get the new homestead ready.  I call all this nesting and storing of food “operation Field Mouse.” Someone very dear to me calls this “the Fall knot.”   He explains that The Knot is that tension we feel in our bellies when we think about getting the wood stacked, the hay into the barn, the winterizing of gardens and projects and food and we realize that Time is running out.   When the snow flies, we need to be Ready.  “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late” says Ford in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor—though the context is not the quite the same, it fits. (We fantasize about being able to put our boots by the fire then and Rest and be Thankful, not preventing our wives from sleeping with knaves.)   Winter Prep is not just a “bread and milk” thing one hastily purchases at the drop of a storm warning. When one lives deep down, next to the dirty roots of Life and jeans, there is a lot to do at this time of year.   Each extra skillet-fried hour of Summer is a blessing.

I call a local farmer to buy hay.  “Why don’t you come tomorrow or Friday?” he says.

“Tomorrow IS Friday,” I tell him. “Shall I come tomorrow?”

“WHAT?!?!” he splutters. “Tomorrow’s Friday? Geez…What’s today then?” He sounds startled, like Count Reugen’s machine  just sucked a day of his life away.  We live by Seasons not days around here.   And this is the season of Hurry Up! We agree to meet at 8 am the next day, which is late for both of us.

The hay has been a major disappointment. Last year even the first cut was green and leafy and the sheep gobbled it up like it was candy.  Normally, first-cut hay—the “first” crop they cut in June, is a little too stemmy for sheep.  They prefer second-cut, which is often finer.  If they don’t get what they want, they push it around their plates and waste it like sulky teenagers who have no idea how much groceries cost. 

So many things go into getting good hay—most of it is the dice of the gods. Will it be wet enough to grow, dry enough to harvest? This year was a drought.  There is no second cut to speak of.  The farmer from whom I manage to purchase fifty bales (I need a hundred) tells me he is getting out of the hay business.  This makes me incredibly sad on so many levels.  He’s in his nineties and still nimble enough to climb a hay mow and throw bales to me below.  He helps me load fifty bales into my trailer.  As I’m ready to drive away, he says appreciatively, “You know, you’re pretty rugged.” I want to gush “and so are you!” but that seems weird so I don’t.  I will just carry that highest of compliments with me in my heart and smile all day.  Something in me does not wish to tell this man that his strength is unusual or surprising.  Those in their nineties have enough reminders that time is passing.

I rush to work and pick up a project I’ve been laboring over for weeks.  It’s an Aran sweater knit by a mother for a cherished son in the 1960’s.  I pause, hay still in my hair, paper-towel still stuck in my teeth, and realize that Finally, I am holding Time in my hands and it is Still.  This work, done by a woman I will never meet, is just incredible. Her HOURS, nay DAYS, are here still, made visible in the Flawless perfection of her tension, gauge, infinite patience.  I read this sweater eagerly, as if it is an old newspaper from a bygone era.  My task is to knit new cuffs, collar, bottom ribbing, and neck, as they are all worn thin and shredding gently.  The body of the sweater is still perfect.  The elbows have been neatly darned but they are shot and will need patches.  Finding yarn to match this project has been a disastrous waste of time.  I have gone to every yarn shop and spinnery I know, despite my reluctance to shop during the pandemic, on the quest for yarn that matches this.  In each shop, I pore over the sweater with ladies who, thankfully, are wearing masks and thus unable to drool on the knitting.  We all agree that this is a fun project but that matching the yarn will be impossible.  The tiny bits of lanolin in the original wool have yellowed and aged the thing to a rich patina that cannot be matched.  In the end, I have to spin it myself, from my little ewe called “Willow,” ancient herself, who happens to match just right.  It’s a miracle.   But it’s a miracle that will take time. (Most miracles do.)

In the steady rush of days whizzing and rattling past, it’s impressive to hold a piece of work in my hands and see that it has stood the test of time.   Another wonderful treat I have this week is the privilege of working on a Civil War era quilt that needs some stabilizing. I have stamped my foot and insisted I “only work on clothing” many times (a woman emailed me recently to entice me into fixing a backpack for her, saying she was going to wear it as part of her mother-of-the-groom ensemble! Ha!) but this quilt is a special treat I could hardly refuse.  I think about the hours these women put into these stitches—the love, the creativity, the ingenuity of making all these geometric pieces comes together so cleverly and beautifully. 

It is said that Time is our fourth dimension.  There are three spatial dimensions to an object—the length, width, height.  But there is also this dimension of these articles that have endured, like farmers, over many generations.   The progress of existence in irreversible progression from thought to Becoming to Being to Enduring.   It makes me pause my hurry and lose the moment to AWE.  It is the journey of a soul as much as a quilt.  Barns full of hay, sheds full of wood—what are these but hourglasses in disguise?

The Fabric of time puzzles me.  I picture it like this big quilt on the table before me.  It stretches in all directions but it can be folded, suddenly, by a thought or scent or image, and our emotions can hurl us backwards through the years and connect to another time, another patch on the fabric.  Time is part of the International System of Quantities—things occur in both Time and Space.   And it can be used to define other quantities, such as velocity.  Ben Franklin called it “money”—as in “Time is Money,” which I think is really only for the hard-hearted.   How does one ever really put a price on Time?  Time, as anyone who has lost the Love of a Lifetime will tell you, is priceless.

There is so much more I would like to say right now… but sadly, I am out of Time!

Keep up your Good Work, my Darlings!  Hurry Slowly.  Remember to savor the good stuff.

Yours aye,

Nancy

Wisdom

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Greetings Dear Ones!

There is a man who, when I call to tell him the latest dumb thing I have done, laughs and laughs and laughs.  No matter how I have presented the latest melodrama—as a farce, a tragedy, the apocalyptic end of my world (or an unfortunate cheesecake) as I know it, he laughs.  He listens in deep, cheek-bitten silence until the mirth bubbles up and over both of us like a dishwasher accidentally filled with laundry soap.  He tries to take me seriously, especially if I am either in tears or a red-haired Rage with every frazzled follicle on my head standing on edge. He tries. He just can’t.  He asks leading questions such as “what happened next?” or “let me get this straight…you drove the truck into the what?” just to keep the facts in view, never to question my motives or my sanity or make me feel like any half-wit might have known better than to eat a two-day-old burrito she found lying under the back seat of a car and wash it down with solar-heated Kombucha.  He’s on my team, never the self-appointed coach, or arm-chair quarterback yelling from the sidelines. I love that laughter.  It makes me feel safe again, no matter what crimes against Nature, Humanity, or dairy products I feel I have committed.  In his chuckles, I find witness, relief, absolution.  The Laughter heals me.  The only time he gets stern is when I begin to worry “what the neighbors might think.”  And by “neighbors” I mean absolutely anyone from the guy asking me to tailor his bespoke suit, which recently arrived from England, to that kid with the heavily tattooed feet who just wants her shorts patched, and yes, even my actual Neighbors!  (I even worry what other people’s dogs think of me.) Then, the only thing he ever says that constitutes “advice” is to say “Since when does someone else’s opinion about you matter to you more than your own? To Whom do you really have to answer?   (Just the fact that he says “whom” makes Prudence adore him.) Trust me, hon, what other people think of you is none of your business. Stick to the facts.”

This is tough medicine for someone willing to hand sew a zipper into what is basically a dress made of metal, just to keep someone happy.  No matter how I try to swallow the idea that other people’s opinions of me don’t matter, it never goes down smoothly.  I operate on the idea that every customer is Right and that they know best.  In actual fact, you and I know they don’t know best.  They might (occasionally) know what they want, but it is often not what is best.  They have crazy ideas and they need gentle, mothering guidance to say what they are attempting is not possible, not healthy, and certainly not fashionable.  I shouldn’t feel so guilty about trying to protect them from themselves.  But I do.  My job, as a service provider, IS to make them HAPPY.  Very Happy.  Not just happy with the work I do, but happy with their whole day, their whole life and the blessings of Fate that landed them in Vermont for this magical moment of our interaction. I want them happy they are Here.  Even more Dangerously, I want them happy with ME.  That’s when I know my ego needs a trip to the hedge clippers.  That’s when I have gone too far.  That’s when the trouble is sure to start.  Because that’s when I find I cannot say NO, even if I need to.

No matter what we each make in our little workshops, our primary craft is Soulcraft.   How can it be otherwise? There is so much to learn from the mistakes we make, the frontiers we encounter, the relationships we create with the people we are attempting to please, and the two-day old intestinal grenades disguised as bean burritos we really should back away from carefully and handle with tongs until they can be safely detonated by a bomb squad.  Everything is evolving and changing—especially non-refrigerated food items.  From these experiences, we gain Wisdom, along with deep gratitude that the toilet paper shortages have ended.

The word “Wisdom” is an interesting word.  The Greeks, in the time of Homer, used the word sophia (wisdom) to mean “skill,” as in the skill of a craftsperson like a carpenter or seamstress.  Whether one makes barrels or bed sheets, skilled manual labor involves a systematic encounter with Material—from which an understanding of the natural sciences emerges.  There is no denying the geometry involved in sewing! Sewing is a language of shapes, as are carpentry and many kinds of engineering.  A good seamstress can envision a series of puzzle pieces lying flat on a cutting table as encircling a body and becoming a garment in the way that a good carpenter can look at a pile of boards and see a house or chicken coop.  Craft knowledge entails the “ways” of the materials—that is, their very natures—which way the warp and weft will run, how cutting on the bias will affect the drape of the material.  Through pragmatic engagement, we learn universal truths about angles and divisions and symmetry and, most importantly, that you cannot keep cutting something and expect it to get longer!

In modern times, the concepts of “wisdom” and “knowledge” have been unhooked from each other and remain connected to Nature only in science.  In religious or spiritual terms, Wisdom has taken on a more mystical meaning.  It has been cut off from its concrete origins in Nature and made to represent ethereal realms of thoughts, ideas, severed inner knowings. But where do these “knowings” come from?  I would argue that they come from Experience.  I know that young children under the age of five cannot begin to “play” music unless they have played with music.  They need to experiment—to bebop around to their own rhythms and dance moves.  They need to explore concepts of tone and tempo in their physical bodies, through practice, through embodied manipulations.  No less than Aristotle backs me up on this:

Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts.  Hence those who dwell in intimate association with Nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

Over and over again, as one “who dwells in intimate association with Nature” (Nature which, as we speak, is attempting to eat my house!)Experience teaches me what I can and cannot do.  Explaining this to my customers in clear, compassionate, forthright ways actually takes better care of them than attempting to do what I know is risky just to please them.  They have no idea how hard or easy some things are.  I do. I love the phrase “I’d rather turn you down than let you down.”

Thanks to a series of local small business initiatives and word of mouth, people are learning of the existence of my little shop space.  As more and more people emerge from their Covid shelters and realize the change of season means repairs need to be made to their winter long-johns, I am getting a steady stream of emails and phone calls inquiring what I can and cannot do.  I need to stick to the wisdom of Facts: “Yes, my love, I can adjust your waistband and hack your jeans all the way up to the crotch. No, you will not look like J.Lo in Daisy Dukes…” Without fail, the projects I agree to do for dear friends, just because I like them, or worse, because I want them to like me, have a way of not turning out well.  This leads to unpleasant amounts of soul-growth opportunities and tear-stained cheese-cake eating. 

Over and over, in little workshops everywhere, we keep learning to Tell The Truth, Be Ourselves, and honor others with Honesty, not opinions.   Now, if only we could get politicians to do the same!!!

Thank you so much for your Good Work.  Let the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Thresholds

I’m a dweller of the threshold and I’m waiting at the door, and I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more. –Van Morrison

Greetings Dear Ones,

We did SO much work here at the Land of Lost Plots two weekends ago!  I got totally worn out and needed a week to recover.  Some of it was actually even three-dimensional work, though the true heavy lifting of it turned out to be spiritual for me.  Two dear friends came and camped on the land—one in a tent, one in a tent-hammock, and helped my daughter and I find what we came to call “the spiral path” around this place. 

The land around my new home is anywhere from waist-deep to neck-deep (depending how tall one is) in weeds and brambles.  The women who came to help, both in their mid thirties, agreed that it is as magical and darkly confusing as an old fairytale that makes no sense until you realize it is actually a map of the female psyche.  For one thing, there is no way into the house except through the garage, which seems weird.   This place, with its slightly slanted barn, the mythical meadow we never actually found, and the deep, dark tangled gulch running steeply through the center, could be anybody’s psyche for sure.  It is the stuff of giddy daydreams and ghastly nightmares. There are doors, but they don’t go anywhere reasonable.  (One of the first things I did after moving in was fall out the front door onto a rock that is way too low to be a step and sprain my foot.  I had to crawl back inside and hop on crutches for a few days.)

The ladies arrived Friday night.  “What is our goal? What can we do?” they wanted to know, as they unloaded baskets and armloads of newly canned garden produce and summer squash and turnips and homemade pickles.  While we feast on both their fresh garden abundance and the energy surge they bring, I say “I don’t care what we do—we just have to do Something.  It’s like a tangled necklace.  We just have to start picking away at something to see what can come free.  Let’s try to make some sense of this by what gives way first.”

We decide to start by creating a fire pit so that we can drag two cords of rotted wood away from the side of the house and burn it (the wood, that is, not the house). We want a fire pit anyway so that we can sit around it and play fiddles and chat.  To get to the wood, some of which has actually turned to compost we could shovel rather than logs we could lift, we have to saw through brambles as thick as broomsticks. 

“Where should we make the fire pit?” we wonder.  We all agree that making it someplace convenient to the house, where we would not have to drag the wood too far, is an absurd idea—not nearly as much fun as exploring the twilight for a fairy circle, a little glen, a remote location with an opening in the canopy to the other world, where we can watch the stars.  I pause and feel grateful that I am not dealing with Practical people.  These women are strong and wise and magical.  Intuitively, they align with the priorities of having a fire pit and getting an outdoor claw foot bathtub operational over the need to build some front door steps or clean the garage. 

One friend, dressed in a linen dress, work boots, and gloves, fires up her husband’s weed-whacker and buzzes a trail through the grass.  Shadows lengthen around us as she meanders downhill until she comes to a level place that we all agreed “feels right.”  I fetch the push mower and the two of us hack a wide circle in the brush.  The stalks next to the ground are like straw.  We’ve had a drought this summer.  I worry about sparks.  With a pang of anguish, I think of friends in California who are displaced from their homes, sheltering in fear of the fires raging there.  I don’t want to be the one who burns down Vermont.

I run uphill, fetch a shovel, and cut a bulls-eye of sod out of the center of our circle.  “We need rocks around this, and at least four big buckets of water—one for each of us,” I say.  I lumber back up the hill for buckets and water while the other ladies bring chairs and wood.  I point out a place where they can go to find rocks that will be the right size for our pit.  They are large grey hunks of granite in a disorderly pile near the edge of the driveway.  They begin to peel them from the dirt that has scabbed over them, ripping roots away to free the stones.

“We must Name these rocks,” says the woman with the weed-wacker, her bright eyes glowing bluer than the rim of the fading sky.  “Rituals are the things that tell us about transformation.  We cannot transform anything without simultaneously transforming ourselves.  There are four of us—let’s each take three stones and carry them to the circle.  These are three burdens we are tired of carrying.  We must name our burdens and decide to carry them no further.”   Ok, she didn’t say it exactly like that…she was far more eloquent…but that’s as close as I can remember. 

I fetch a metal hand truck from the garage.  These “burdens” are actually just a little too big for us to carry so we go one by one, down the path alone, using the truck.   When it is my turn, I load three huge stones on the hand truck and head down the winding path, dragging the stones on wheels behind me.  As the pitch of the slope increases, I realize too late that it is really dumb to be in front of the Burdens, which are pushing me faster and faster down the hill, until I am running wide-eyed, blasting past the fairy circle, past our circle of earth, past our water buckets, into the weeds beyond.  One by one, scratched and laughing, I drag my burdens back to the circle, name them, and lay them down. 

Gradually, we have all the elements assembled—the fire, the water, the stone, the air—and we four humans who are made of a delicate recipe of each.  We nestle in to the camp chairs on that line between earth and sky and talk about our lives, our hopes, our burdens.   The pandemic has been hard on us as women, artists, and craftspeople—we share our fatigue, our fear, and our gratitude for having made it thus far.  We acknowledge the symbolism of letting our old burdens be the boundary around a new spark.  These are dark times.  We are here to bring Light and keep each other warm.  This is our own private Solstice.

We talk through the night until a new day.  I listen to the wisdom of those far younger than I and marvel.  They talk of what they want to “birth” into this world on the threshold of becoming—their babies, their music, art, and stories.  A dog crawls into my lap and he and I dwell silently as possibilities get explored.   We gaze at the dear faces in the firelight. The youngest is no longer a child.  She is a radiant Maiden.  The Maidens are ready to be Mothers.  With a sudden start, I realize I have been the maiden, been a mother.  It’s my turn next to be the Crone!  To the shock of those around the fire, I announce abruptly, out of context, that it is my intention to be a Badass Crone.  “Check my Facebook profile tomorrow,” I insist.  I’m going to update my job description to read “Badass Crone.”  We all agree it is time to go to bed.  The Crone is getting wound up.  “We are each called to step across the threshold of what we already know into a world of challenges in order to measure ourselves differently,” I shout as they stagger towards trees, hammocks, tents.  I go inside. This badass Crone sees no reason to let a perfectly good bed indoors go to waste.

The next day, we set out to explore the land beyond the fire pit.  We make a strange processional—there are four women trudging along in a variety of what each terms “work clothing,” which includes everything from canvas trousers, to yoga pants, and a 1950’s vintage Moo-moo and boots—followed by a small dog and a socially awkward rooster with separation anxiety named “Bertie” who thinks he is a house pet.  The brush closes around us quickly. As we slash our way along the path, we come upon a new threshold.  At this moment, the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping and turning back.  What feels like defeat becomes instead the realization that to continue the way we were going was just going to lead to more poison ivy, a lost rooster, not to mention possible self-inflicted machete wounds.   We pause.   The Crone loves the choice to stop doing what we have been doing, to honor the emerging wisdom that is telling us to turn around, to breathe, and feel the sweat trickling between our skin and clothing choices.  We always have the Choice to stop living in discomfort, to stop doing what we have been doing just because we have been doing it, to overcome our cruelty, which is rooted in dedication to an old idea, and choose a clearer trail.  Lack of comfort is usually a sign that we are on a threshold of new discoveries—or about to have to carry a rooster. (Trail-blazing Soul work is not for the light and fluffy.)

__________

Mere hours/days later, I find myself at yet another threshold: the loss of a dear friend and cohort of the past 28 years.  As I spiral my way through the grief, I see that it is a coiling path with many doorways leading me over old familiar ground as I make my way through a series of memories—most of which make me hold my sides and laugh in tear-streaked howls.   Like the time she and another friend had to go to the local emergency room dressed as Cleopatra and a jungle explorer  (complete with gum boots and coconut bra) after a Halloween party at my former home… Or the time she and I drove to Portland, Maine after midnight, after hosting a house concert, to run a half marathon the next day. We were so late to the race we had to start running from the parking lot to the starting line after the gun had already gone off.  It took us six miles to catch up to a one-legged woman on crutches (who, it goes without saying, was Magnificent).  Or the time we went out to lunch and accidentally threw our car keys away with the picnic wrappings and had to get local officials to come unlock the municipal trash cans. 

What I love best about this dear friend, apart from the fact that she was constantly tidying up and making tea for everyone,  is that she was always getting caught in the act of being herself.  She was Herself, Always—from the time she spent half an hour kicking a car in a public parking lot because her key didn’t work (turns out, it wasn’t her car!), to the time she accidentally brought a group of realtors to what they thought was a broker’s open-house on a sale property but turned out to be a mercy meal after a family’s funeral instead.  (Imagine laying granny to rest and coming home to discover her house crawling with realtors because someone had gotten the address wrong!) She was a source of Light and a profound influence on me through many stages of my life.  Her follies, which delighted us all so much, actually made it ok to be Me, by giving me a window to accept my own.  She was my dear companion through my own journey from maiden to mother to crone.  I miss her more than words could ever say.

Now, her spark has gone out, but not before she ignited other sparks.  So! Who will tidy up and make tea and make us laugh now?  We will. We must.  Whether we be mothers, maidens, or crones, it’s our turn to keep a firm grip on our car keys and Step Up.  Gaps are being made, spaces created so that each of us moves one step forward to take on a new role, a new growing edge, a new part in the pageantry of Life.  Though none of us could ever be like her, what we need most is to be Ourselves—moo-moo dresses, machetes, and all. What each of us is being asked is “Hey, it’s your turn now—Are You Available?”  We don’t exactly know where we are going or what is at the root of this jungle mess of a world we find ourselves inhabiting… nor do we need to have the answers to any other question… Just this: Are you available? Do you have the capacity, energy, capability and willingness to show up where you are needed, where you may be called?  Put down your burdens; they aren’t worth carrying.  Make some tea.  Imagine what shape your love will take next.

Chardin says, “The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.”  (And its portals are DOGS, right, Nora?) Love is how we continue to hold those who have left us.  Love is how we reach for those yet to come. Love is how we dance, Right Here, Right Now by the fires of our dreams.  True Love is our threshold.

I’m off to don a moo-moo and machete.  This is one Badass Crone saying “I love you so much.  Let the mending continue!”

Yours aye,

Nancy

A little Skin

Greetings Dear Ones!

Did you ever notice that when you are shopping for a certain kind of car you start to see that car everywhere? Or when people find out you like antique spinning wheels and treadle sewing machines, suddenly they become the theme of every gift anyone ever gives you?  I had a friend who mentioned she liked roosters and ever after, for years of holiday seasons, she was gifted with ceramic roosters, napkins printed with roosters, wreaths decorated with roosters, lamps made in the shape of roosters… Some would say that this is the Law of attraction at work, while others might say the Universe has a warped sense of humor.  (What else can account for the 1990’s proliferation of garden gnomes?)   And yet, no matter how many times we mention how much we adore gold bullion, winning lottery tickets, or a good working team of oxen, they all seem a bit thin on the ground?  It’s because Abundance sneaks towards us obliquely, where we least expect it, where we Observe Mildly without investing our Longing. 

In any case, to focus on the art of Cherishing better, I have been on a quiet little treasure hunt.   I have taken my eye off the horrors of What I Wish could be Different, and instead, watch from the corner of my eye…  Evidence is mounting that we are doing a better job of being kind to each other than anti-social media might have us believe.   Suddenly, without making too big a deal of it, I am seeing little random act of Kindness everywhere, as proliferous as summer goldenrod in the fields.  These are the things that touched my heart and taught me a bit more about Cherishing this week:

For the past month, a mother has been using my shop in the evenings, borrowing the cutting table and machines after I was gone for the day, to build the most beautiful and unique quilt for her son, who was leaving for college.   She had saved all his old T-shirts—each one commemorating a precious event or era in his life, from concerts to camps, school teams, and the like.  Her boy is now off to his new future, wrapped up in all the love and joy of his past.  On those bewildering days when a young man might come back to his dorm and wonder, amidst all the disorienting changes one is apt to experience away from home, who he is and where he came from—there will be this quilt, a second skin, waiting to ground him like only a loving parent’s hug can do.

A beautiful woman, who is also a very adept home-sewer, came in and gave me more than a dozen lovely summer dresses to hem for her.  “I want my legs to show a tiny bit more skin.  I am not the frump these dresses say I am! And I am outgrowing the thinking that I ought to do everything by myself or for myself,” she said, “Of course, I could do these, but I decided to honor your professional capacities and to honor myself in the process.  It’s taken a long time to realize I am worthy of being served.  Just because I can do something shouldn’t mean I have to.”  I melted.   There was so much power stepping into that statement.  Instinctively, I wanted to offer her a discount because of the volume she was bringing in. She batted it away.  “Do you hear me?” she asked. “I am worthy of full price.  For me to value myself and my time, you must do the same; that’s how this thing works.”  Wow. Good lesson!

A young, somewhat haggard man came in with a pair of torn work pants to mend and his wife’s jacket, which needed a new zipper.  “If you don’t have time to both things this week, would you please do my wife’s jacket first?” he asked plaintively. “It’s her favorite jacket and I hate to see her shivering.”  I glanced from his frayed clothes to the look of tender pity in his eyes and realized I was witnessing a marriage vow with real skin on it. (And yes, it's already time to shiver in the evening in Vermont!)

A gentle, soft-spoken man with velvet eyes came to collect his order and saw a complimentary mask hanging from the hanger.  He offered to buy it but I insisted I give them to all the customers.  “I have been wondering where to get one of these,” he said. “I want to get one for my husband who has to wear a mask all day long and they cut into his face. This looks like it will be so much softer on his skin.”  He was more excited about the fact that he had found a mask for his partner than that his jacket had been mended!

On and on the cherishing lessons came--the woman paying for her daughter’s bridesmaid dress, the inspiring friend setting up a recurring Zoom discussion on the book White Fragility,  a summer music camp imaginatively setting itself up on line to continue to nurture the community, each and every person I see wearing a mask and smiling….

I recently came across a wonderful story, shared by author Terry Hershey, about a little boy having nightmares.  To paraphrase, the little boy kept visiting his mother’s bed all night long and saying he was scared; he did not want to be in his bed alone.  She repeatedly sent him back to bed, telling him he could never be alone, as God was everywhere and always with him.  This failed to comfort him and eventually he returned and said he preferred “someone with skin.”

The story made me smile for so many reasons—not the least of which is the shear RELIEF that I no longer have those broken nights of sleep every parent endures, and those pointless 4 a.m. negotiations with “monsters under the bed.”   My heart goes out to both that boy (whom I remember being) and that mother (whom I also remember being).  This is partly why I used to put my children to bed with a series of prayers, bribes, lullabies, and live animals to keep them company.  (If skin is in short supply, fur will do!)

When I look at the Cherishing moments of this week—the gentle gifts of self I was privileged to witness, they all involve Skin.  I love that a middle-aged mother-of-many loves herself enough to show a glimpse of her knees.  I love that she lets my hands do her work.  I love that a young man has all the T-shirts of his youth, and the imbued love of his mother, still next to his skin, whenever he wants it.  Our tender human skin needs clothing for warmth and protection—like jackets when we shiver, and dresses for celebrations. 

It’s hard, during these Covid times, not to connect in touch, in hugs, in skin with each other.  Most people tell me that hugging is what they miss the most.  Yes, we get to “see” each other, “hear” each other—and stay what is ironically called “in touch” all over the world.  But we miss each other’s skin.

If we think of God as “Love,” yes, Love is everywhere.  Energy is everywhere. Ideas are everywhere.  But it is never anything we can touch, taste, see, feel, hear, or smell until there is skin involved—be it the skin of our hands or by the skin of our teeth.   It seems sacrilegious to think that an exhausted, flawed human near the end of her rope, could be preferable to “God” but to those of us who are frightened and need some comforting, skin makes a big difference. Cherishing is how we put our own skin in the game, no matter what color it is.  I am in awe of the way my fellow humans are doing this in kind little ways all around me.  All I had to do was notice and jump in.  Love has no hands but ours.  Thanks for your Good Work!  Let the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Cherishing School

“Cherish (verb): 1. Protect and care for lovingly; 2. Hold something dear; 3. Keep a hope or ambition in one’s mind.”—Oxford English Dictionary

Greetings Dear Ones!!

Yesterday, I managed to hack and slash my way into the blueberry cathedral and harvest a quart of the tartest, sharpest berries ever to dance on a tongue in purple stilettos.   As I savored the repeated contraction in my salivary glands, I gazed around me, upon the wheat field… the peach orchard… Pickett’s last fence… and decided that this place is like the Battle of Gettysburg all over again.  It’s going to take a bayonet charge to turn the tide of this chaos.  Col. Joshua Chamberlain, where are you now???  The peach trees look a little bombed out already.  Many of them are completely dead. I lie down next to the mower, which I have been dragging backwards through the grass because that is the only way I can move it, and dream of bees.  These trees need bees.  I’m SO looking forward to keeping bees again in the coming Spring.

Keeping bees with my children and attending “bee school” with them at the local community college, was one of the highlights of our homeschooling experience.  My son thought nothing of putting his bare hands into a gently humming miracle of golden, honey-scented, Happenings as we pulled out frames to study our colonies.  We saw new bees chewing their way through the wax caps of their cells; we saw the queen being fed and groomed; we saw endless running about and hurrying in the honey factory. It was magical.

Once, we had a colony go rogue and become nasty.  Apparently, they were going through queens like Henry the VIII. Angry sentries would fly out and sting anyone who came near the entrance of their hive—they especially targeted unfortunate husbands who did not feel the same way about beekeeping as we did.  When he had been run off his own property more than seven times and had ruined a variety of cell-phones in the process of abruptly consigning himself to the nearest swimming pool to escape, I was given an ultimatum.  Something needed to be done or the hive had to be destroyed.   I called a local Stinging Insect Guru. (Hey, Kids!  There’s a job you might not hear about at the college employment fairs!)

This guru listened to my story and told me exactly what to do.  There was just one problem.  I didn’t want to do it. I was now terrified of this hive.  I didn’t want to go anywhere near it.  I confessed this to him and, I am ashamed to admit, I even asked if I could just pay him to take care of this for me? That’s when he hit the roof and began to speak to me in a manner that sounded (to me) a lot like yelling, though he later insisted he never yells.   “People like you make me crazy,” he said with way more force than necessary, “I don’t mind getting calls from people who need help, little old ladies and people who have infestations they never asked for but YOU are responsible for this and you’re just scared and that is NOT the same thing at all!!!  I have no respect for you. Put your big girl pants on right now and ask yourself if you are a bee KEEPER or a bee have-er.  Then suit up, get out there, and DO WHAT MUST BE DONE.”

I hung up and cried.  His fury startled me.  He was AWFUL.  He was RUDE. He was MEAN… but worst of all, he was RIGHT.  So I had a big, snotty, sorry-for-myself sob session, then I put my big girl pants on and went out and did what needed to be done.  I waited until the more aggressive field bees had left for the day, then I blew more smoke into those hives than a freshman dorm sees after Parent’s Weekend, draped damp towels full of sugar water over the boxes as I dismantled the hive, then put the boxes of brood onto my other hives with layers of newspaper in between the boxes.  By the time the bees chewed through the paper to get to the foreign bees, whom they intended to fight, they had already acquired the scent of the new queen and calmed down.  All the colonies thrived after that.   With healthy queens in place, Peace was restored to the kingdoms.  

The Stinging Guru was right; that bastard was a fantastic teacher and I am grateful for the lesson to this day.  There IS a difference between merely “having” something, in name only, and cherishing it to the point that one is willing to do hard things in its service.  

I think about this with regard to my new customers.  I don’t want to “have” customers—I want to “keep” them. Cherish them.  I have decided to enroll everyone I encounter in my own private Cherishing School—so that after they graduate from having their clothes hemmed or mended, they will leave feeling seen, heard, cared for, and helped in whatever way is best for them, to the best of my ability.   Prudence is excited about Cherishing School.  She wants to be the new Head Mistress and give everyone punishments to write.  She is ready to Scold.  I tell her that yelling really only works on the Desperate, Honest, or truly Courageous—those able to face the truth of their consequences honorably, which is pretty much only down and out addicts and housewives with rogue bee colonies chasing their husbands into swimming pools—people  at rock bottom.  For everyone else, it’s going to have to be something more subtly persuasive—like true Gentility. 

A customer comments to me that the current political climate is getting so fraught “I can’t stand up for my own beliefs without being made to feel stupid by the opposition.  Anything I say gets an argument.”

“And do you listen to their arguments?” I ask.

“Hell no,” she says dismissively. “They are NUTS.  Why would I do that? But I’m sick of the yelling so I just shut up.”

“Instead of listening?”

“Yes.”

Hmm…. What I notice from my little corner of the workshop is that in every interaction with our fellow beings on this planet, we are showing each other in our behavior, attitude, and expectations what we have previously learned about Kindness.  We reveal how we have been treated by how we expect to be treated. Most of us don’t expect to be cherished.  It’s time we teach each other that lesson.  So, how do we begin? Well, how do children learn to speak a language? By being spoken to in that language.   They learn music because their parents sing to them and dance with them.  They learn kindness because others have displayed kindness to them in ways that are meaningful to them.   

This week, I had another fun customer.  He wore a mask, but that’s as far as he went in obeying my protocols.  I could not keep him in the dressing room.  It was like trying to keep weasels in a milk crate. He kept slipping past me, insisting he did not need to try anything on, as most of the stuff was his wife’s. Instead, he pushed his way through to the work table and spread out all his garments so he could show me how to do my job.  I don’t want to tell you too many details about him because I don’t want you to judge him… (Oops, now I’ve judged YOU.  Sorry!) But let’s just say he was from a nearby city and state rather known for “pushiness,” not to mention blatant support of the WRONG baseball team. (Bless their hearts!)  He wanted everything done yesterday but “by five p.m.” was a reasonable compromise.  He and his wife were going on vacation the next day and needed the stuff immediately if possible—or two weeks after they returned and had re-quarantined themselves.   Then he asked if I could meet him at the local food co-op to save him a return trip to my shop and up all those stairs.  He had other errands to run.

I could not stop laughing.  He was so fantastic—like a character out of a storybook who is sent to test the wizard.  Granted, I had enjoyed our exchange about as much as discovering I had finally smacked a pesky mosquito only to realize it had fallen into my own water glass… Still, after I got done sterilizing every surface of my shop and washing my hands, what impressed me most was his Innocence.  His inner radio channel was set to a fairly primitive dial and that was all he could hear, but that was not his fault.  Nothing had ever happened to wake him up or make him understand he could change his dial.  Yelling would never do it—he was too used to yelling. He tuned it out.  I decided that if ever there was a candidate for Cherishing School, it’s him.  Clearly, he is the way he is because he has a Cherish Deficit.  The easiest people to cherish are usually cherished by lots of people and therefore are not as closed off and brusquely defensive as this guy.  (Of course, the Easiest of All are those who have learned to truly cherish themselves…but that goes without saying.)      

I met him five hours later at the co-op with everything neatly done, on hangers, in a bag, with complimentary face masks holding the hangers together at the top.   He stared. His eyes welled a little.  “You people in Vermont are so nice.  Sometimes I can’t believe it,” he said, “I love it here.” He paused and surveyed the heat waves rising in the parking lot with far-away eyes.  “It’s different.”

I melted too.  It certainly is.

It’s a privilege to be kind. I’m lucky to be the amused/bemused witness of how people respond to kindness.   I try not to dwell on the implicit sadness around the fact that there exist people who are shocked by generosity, good will, attentive service.  Some of you reading this might actually be judging me for being too sweet to a customer who will now expect big things of me all the time—I might be creating a rod for my own back by spoiling people.   I don’t care.  We need more kindness in this world.  Especially when it is unexpected, lavish, and surprising.   And anyway, I’m NOT that sweet.  I’m actually a slightly rotten person, doing nice things just to see what happens next and getting caught in my own experiments.    I’m curious.  Are you?

Welcome to Cherishing School, My Darlings!   It’s a new research facility dedicated to exploring what happens when we suppress the urge to give each other the finger and instead give each other a hand.

May the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

The Land of Lost Plots

“Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for its own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one’s thoughts” Mary Ellen Chase

Greetings Dear Ones!

I woke up this morning in “The Land of Lost Plots” to find several trees down, including a towering cherry tree that had a long low bough out to one side that I had already picked out as the perfect site for an old fashioned rope swing.  I was going to make the wooden seat wide enough for two, like a courting swing, with nearby hammocks for arboreal-minded guests.  There was going to be fresh-squeezed sugarless lemonade and everything… But now, there’s going to be a hella lotta prime cherry firewood instead.  Life isn’t giving me lemons or lemonade—it’s giving me cord wood.  And I’m grateful!! Lemons won’t keep me as warm in winter as cordwood, and winter lasts about eleven months a year around here…

Yesterday, one of the strongest, most enthusiastic Hermit Hurricanes came to visit with his weed-whacker and managed to hack a swath of land around three sides of the house, until he ran out of string and the remnants of Hurricane Isaias overtook him and started to prune the trees.  Both have cleared a bit of breathing room around the house, which is looking a little less like a forgotten cottage in a fairytale and more like someone who just decided to shave after ten years and forgot how.  It’s Rough.  Last week, I took my little push mower, set it at the highest setting and gamely plowed a path to the barn.  It was ninety degrees out and I mowed until we both ran out of gas.  In the process, I ran over a lost boot—a really sturdy, size 10, steel-toed work boot someone had left in the meadow.   This land is full of overgrown garden plots, mysteries and surprises.   Taking a brush mower around here will be like sailing into an unknown harbor and having no idea where the rocks are.  Who knows what sunken traps or treasures lie beneath these waves of grass?

I can see lilies, peonies, and phlox struggling to avoid strangulation by rogue bittersweet and marauding wild grape.  They are putting up a diminishing fight as they bow backwards into the engulfing green.  There is a bramble hedge only a Knight in armor could sunder with swords to reach the sleeping blueberries locked within the walls of their keep, over which sagging rafters, grey as driftwood, signal a missing roof once upon a long ago… It’s like an ancient blueberry cathedral in ruins.

Decades ago, this place was dearly loved and cultivated by an endlessly energetic Gardener.  I can read her love in the still-thriving patches and plots of raspberries, grape, blackberry, and fern.  I know her name was Nell and I know she sewed (her antique treadle machine is still in the attic) and she kept sheep and spun their wool.  She was into photography, chickens, beekeeping, and Feeding Others.  I feel her welcome and her presence as I now take up the work she left behind.  

She was happy here.  I am too. I wander the mini orchards of apples, peaches, pears.   Small fruits cling to the branches—it’s just about harvest time for some of the peaches but they are tiny, Unencouraged.  Everything needs pruning, clearing, amending.   The land, like my own Spirit, feels simultaneously abundant and ravaged, full of Possibilities and in need of Enforced Tenderness.  Who doesn’t feel like this these days?

As always, my mind turns to how my exterior world is so often a metaphor for the interior landscape of one’s thoughts.  (I am quite certain there ARE random, abandoned, size 10 boots all over the place up there! Prudence trips over them and tuts in disgust. )  This property is crying out for Good Boundaries, weeding, prioritizing, and  Sensible Efforting to make the dream come true.  It’s a Big Dream.  I love working (I tell myself I have just bought myself an outdoor gym) but I feel a little overwhelmed—like if I pause and gawk too long, the weeds will snag me, drag me under, and eat me too.  (Was that the grizzly fate of the mystery boot wearer?) I keep wading through grass, like it is water in a bay at low tide, searching for a life jacket to rescue my hopes.

And THERE it is, on a scrawny peach tree, sagging apologetically into the wind. There, on the end, on the tiniest branch, clings a clump of yellow velvet the size of an egg.  There is the flesh and seed of New Life. There is the future… It comes at the weakest part, the smallest, most hopeful growing edge, not the strong trunk.   The sweetness is located at the most vulnerable part of the tree—the newest and bravest part—the part where the tree is Reaching.   This thought is like a boot I have just hit with my mower.

Trees need a few years before they fruit.  They need good soil and strong roots.  They need to endure a winter or two.  They need to Establish themselves and claim their space.  And ever, no matter how thinly, they need to keep reaching.  So it is for us Spirit Farmers too.  

I think about the sewing shop and how starting a business is very much like growing a tree or re-creating a homestead on land that has gone feral.   It is true for growing the Life of our dreams as well.  There is something to be said for the patience it takes for things to bear fruit and that a harvest is not only about picking the peaches and apples in front of us, but tending them all year long, before the buds even turn the trees to bee-bridesmaids in Spring. There is water that needs to be hauled, manure that needs to be valued, collected, spread as mulch.  The soil needs to be fed before we can be.   

For musicians, this means doing all our drills, all our daily practice, all our twenty or ten thousand hours that we plan to commit to whatever level of amazingness we are willing to risk being.  For cooks, this means waiting for the flavors to meld, holding back on the spices, then going for it when needed, always stirring and watching, “listening with the nose.”

There is no end to the Process.  There IS NO END to the work.  We must live within one day only, like addicts, content with all we cannot do, finding peace where we are.   We need the balance of strong roots and a sinewy, muscular core that holds up in hurricanes.   And we need to reach, to risk, to hope.  At the tips of our outstretched fingertips—that is where the fruits of all our laboring will be.

A recent customer says to me “I love sewing. I actually sew a lot but this bridesmaid gown and getting something to fit myself while I’m in it is a bit beyond my scope, that’s why I have to come to you.  I’m glad you’re here.  I know I could never sew for other people—it’s too scary.”  She is acknowledging my bravery.  She’s right.  I acknowledge it too.  I have spent years “Reaching” for these skills, learning from failures, enduring winters of “no harvest,” for this Sweet Moment when I can offer this beautiful young woman the fruits of my labors.   It’s a Glorious Sweetness indeed.  There are few things sweeter than knowing you have what it takes to help someone.

I know of many people, especially recent graduates, who feel so stalled by the disasters occurring in our world right now.   Jobless, Rudderless, they feel stuck, depressed, Unencouraged, Overwhelmed.  I get it.  I feel that way too… A LOT.  2020 feels like the Year of Lost Plots for all of us. May it also be the year of Surprise Fruits! All I can say is Stay Vulnerable. Life is about seeking our edges.  Keep Reaching! My Darlings, keep reaching like it’s a Yoga Class where you have supreme confidence in your leotard and you haven’t overdone it on the beans for lunch.  Go to the edge where you can grow the most and see what happens next.   Who knows who you may one day feed.  It might even be you.  Let the Mending Continue!!

With so much love for your Good Work,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Painful Clarity

“Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.” –Ovid

Greetings Dear Ones!

One of the most savage and shocking injuries a seamster can sustain, apart from the obvious yet PURELY HYPOTHETCAL ones that spring to mind—like dropping an iron on one’s toe, sitting on the wrong side of a pin cushion,  or accidentally ironing your own boob (if it’s a hot night and one is doing last-minute, late-night ironing naked and the ironing board is set too high and/or the boobs are set too low)(NONE of which EVER happens…) is to have a chunk of his/her/their/my/our finger ripped off without warning as it gets caught under the buzzing needle.  It’s as sudden as a wasp sting and mutely stunning as a mousetrap.   It’s only happened to me a few times in my life and each time it occurs, I am amazed at how swiftly my body is able to short-circuit rational thought and decide instead to do exactly the Wrong Thing—namely, pull the punctured finger back hard, with all my force, while the needle is still in it.  If we could only pause, breathe, take the foot off the pedal (before I have stitched myself up to the wrist), calmly wind the needle to the upright position so I can dislodge the needle, not the flesh, I would only sustain the mildest of puncture wounds.  But No.  Lizard brain, which seems to think we can just systematically re-grow any body part that happens to get ripped off in a panic, has taken over and the results are very messy indeed.  

A friend of mine recently confessed that this had just happened to her for the first time.   As soon as she began telling me the story, my own finger began to ache with digital PTSD.  I could literally feel her story as she told it—the sharp bite, the pull, the sudden regret followed by shock and throb...  My body is really keeping the score on this one!  There is a white sliver of scar tissue through this finger that will store the memory forever.  More significant than my friend’s pain was her incredulity that such injuries can happen.   “Who knew?” she said, “I’ve been sewing for so many years!  I had no idea this could happen. I’ve never been afraid to sew!”

“It usually happens when we are really tired or really distracted,” I say, offering no help at all to no one what-so-ever.  She nods kindly anyway.

“I have a new rule: No sewing after 1:am.”

“Pain’s a great teacher, isn’t it?” I ask.   She nods wryly.  “How swiftly we regain all of our clarity and focus after such a zap!”

All I can say is that I am grateful to be a seamster and not someone who handles large saws on a daily basis! Our best tools can be very dangerous indeed.   We seize their power at our peril.  Pain reminds us to Pay Attention.

Pain, swift and shocking, is often the thing that plunges us from unfocused complacency to the momentary terrors of survival.  Hopefully, we wind up in the Center, with our dial reset at the Focused-Respect-with-a-dash-of-Gratitude that is Mindfulness.  This is how it is with those of us who work with sharp things that can bite us without warning.   We cannot be too afraid of our tools to use them, yet we must respect them!  It is the circular and recurring dance of the craftsperson—from Masterful to Humble, Radiant to Grateful, with the Innocence and Wisdom of a Fool.

I am a great respecter of pain.  In my deepening old age, I have learned to see it as the friend and teacher who bestows Clarity.  I am grateful for the ways it shows me the appropriate margins of my Free Will, scorched boobs and all.  I believe that Life is absolutely perfect and miraculous.  I look down at the deep pink scars leaving their trail of acid heat and pain across my torso as the shingles gradually heal and marvel that my body, which has learned how to get sick, also knows how to heal itself so wonderfully. 

I welcome these symptoms as a Gift (not a favorite gift, of course--more like that blue, port-a-potty-scented candle one gets in the neighborhood holiday swap).  They are the reminder I needed that I was too stressed out, stretched too thin, ignoring vital needs.   I thought, as I sometimes do, that I could manage the Unmanageable.  I forgot.  I needed to get “bitten,” as by a sewing machine, or Shingles, to wake up and remember.   I truly believe that everything that happens to me is for my Highest Blossoming and expansion—or at the very least so that I can stumble past the pile of boxes littering my new home, temporarily dubbed “The Land of Lost Plots,” and lie on the floor and rest.  Sometimes we all need to slap a post-it note saying “Out of Service: Closed for Maintenance” on our foreheads and call it a day.  This is NOT procrastination.  Procrastination is about unhealthy “baggage” and deep Resistance.   These are healthy boxes.  And they can wait.  I must rest.

REST is about faith that we are safely where we are supposed to be and there will be plenty of time and energy to do what must be done.   My physical condition is serving me and helping me bring love and attention to the parts of myself that I have neglected.  I don’t get to decide exactly what happens, but I do get to decide how I accept it—whether I shave my head and move to Bora Bora, or decide to wait it out on the couch, sipping lemonade and reading a book I’ve been dying to read.  Ailments are accelerated opportunities to stop judging ourselves and take care of ourselves instead.  They give others the chance to care for us.  They give us opportunities to Receive.  I am so grateful for the care I have received—the works of mercy from my loved ones to feed me and help me do all my chores. 

When I was young and suffering, I was told crisply to “offer it up for the souls in purgatory,” the idea being that the pains we encounter and endure in our mortal flesh are a chance to win glory for others; by uniting our suffering to Love, we participate in Salvation.  Being possessed of enough Imagination to qualify as a character in “Anne of Green Gables,” my young self could only picture what looked like a train station with numbers rolling and flashing up high on a wall, while crowds of anxious, disheveled souls looked at the lottery tickets in their hands and scanned for a match.  “I just need one pious, decent kid to get a splinter in his knuckle and I’m IN!” croaks a bag lady at the front hopefully.  “Not me,” sighs a dejected man, “It’s going to take  a crabby, middle-aged woman six month’s worth of fibromyalgia and all the blind fury of getting locked out of the IRS website four days in a row for not remembering her username and password to get me past those pearly gates…” And so they languish, in the eternal train station, waiting for the Living here below to step on a stray leggo in the dark and “offer it up”….

Our connection to our own pain is a connection to others. Any act of love we bring to this aching world brings Light.  We do not use pain to forget who we are, but to wake up and Remember. I see the news and I think—I/we did not come here to be a person of power, privilege, or prestige.  I/we came to be people who Love.  

This pandemic is hitting us all very hard.  There is not a soul who isn’t suffering in some way—small or large—physically, financially, emotionally.   It’s like our country has become not a melting pot, but a mending basket of so many things that need healing and fixing.  I know it feels overwhelming.   We are facing some huge tears in the fabric of society as we once knew it.   However, we can learn from our pains, individually and collectively, and we CAN “offer up” some of our discomfort (like the wearing of a mask) for the saving of another, even if we don’t know who it might be.   We have untold opportunities, like never before, to do some real Good and make some positive changes around how we value our lives. We can start with the littlest things and go from there, learning as we go.  And it’s ok to rest!  Thank you so much for your Good Work.

Let the Mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Not My Food

“I do NOT eat cheese unless seriously provoked!” –Ava Montesi

Greetings Dear Ones!

I have been obsessing about food lately.  For one thing, I was originally scheduled to be in Florida last week, cooking for 100 hungry fiddlers and cellists attending the Mike Block String Camp.  I was excited about taking my spice tote, knives, and pots on a plane and finding out how we would all fare.  As fate had it instead, I spent the weekend moving into my dream home and surviving on Cheerios and Gatorade.

As far as the move goes, this is the story I want to tell: “Once upon a time, a gentle woman decided to move all of her belongings from one location (storage) to another (farm in VT).  Everything went smoothly. Nothing got broken, not even blood vessels.  The movers showed up and were so helpful. It was so relaxing.  She knew where her keys were at all times.  There was no Nor’ Easter hosing them like a fire hose as they unloaded in the dark—wait, it wasn’t dark!  It happened all within the sunniest hours of the day. But no one got sunburned!” (Can’t you just hear the Disney orchestra swelling in the background, as little birds chirp sweetly, and the narrator—who has one of those Epcot 1960’s advertising voices—relays the information confidently and soothingly… ) “Her children never had to deal with a crabby, tactless, third-shift mom who snapped at them ‘please for the love of all that is holy, stop asking me why I kept [this thing] and just move it over there!’  There was never any bickering and all bladders and stomachs were magically synchronized….”

But no… That is not the story. 

The REAL story is that my four children, two of whom I gave birth to, two of whom are mine in spirit, worked like sled-dogs for fourteen hours at a time.  For a woman who sees love as Service, I could not have felt more loved as they bent their backs again and again to haul the endless loads.  They never complained; they never quit.   Together, since the movers never showed, we learned how to pack a truck and we did a darn good job. The piano arrived not only intact but mostly in tune.  Only my desk has to be glued back together.

Feeding everyone during a move is very challenging.  A dear friend was waiting at the house with a wonderful spread for us as soon as we got there.  She had beautiful bread and a generous variety of vegan fixings for sandwiches.  One young woman, made a plate of just the fixin’s and explained that bread is just “not her food.” I was curious. “You mean like you are gluten intolerant?” I asked.  “No,” she said, “It’s just not something I eat.  Like dogs don’t eat cat food—that kind of thing.  Of course dogs most certainly enjoy eating cat food, but it’s not as healthy for them as dog food.” I nodded.  “And sheep will happily gorge themselves on chicken feed but it will kill them if they bloat.” 

As happens when I hear a new idea, I expanded it as far as it would go.  I looked at the boxes stacked around the rooms and thought of Marie Kondo and the spark of joy my possessions were supposed to give me.  I must admit, the spark was damp. I looked at a couch and thought “You… are not my food.  You do not feed my spirit. You will have to go…”

As I go through the boxes, one by one, and dust off memories—I ask “are you my food?  Are you giving me heartburn?”  It’s very useful. 

The notion of what “feeds” us even carries over into the shop when I go to work on Monday.  A woman brings in some summer dresses to be altered.  “I just love this one,” she says wistfully.  I’ve worn it until it’s tired.  It’s so old but it’s so comfortable. Then I bought this new one and it’s just not right.”  She gazes unhappily at herself in the mirror.

“Madam,” I say, “This dress is not your food!” She looks startled.  “I mean, it’s not nourishing your spirit and making you glow with health and strength.” Understanding dawns and she agrees.  She tries to say this is her fault, that she has changed shape due to the stress of the pandemic.  I wave that aside.

“Let’s hear none of that!” I say crisply.  “Clothing needs to feed us, not swallow us whole and make us disappear. You are you and this dress needs to fit you not the other way around.”

“How would it be if I brought in a dress I love that fits just right and had you copy it?  Could you do that?”

“Yes.  Yes, I can,” I told her.   It makes me think back to a time in the other shop when we had to make six denim dirndls for a woman who lived on a Christmas tree farm.  Denim dirndls were clearly her food.

“I don’t know where I bought this dress and I they don’t seem to make them now but I would rather choose my own fabrics and pay someone local anyway.”  Something in her brow softens.  She pauses and considers me very kindly.  “I’m so tired of picking through what’s out there and feeling like those are my only choices.” 

I nod.  We are going through so many shifts right now, it’s hard to consider yet one more, but I do believe (and dearly hope!) that we are going to come to our senses and stop destroying our planet with disposable “fast” fashion (like “fast food”) that is not even nourishing to our creative spirits.  We want, and deserve, better quality that is more sustainable—even if we have to pay more for it.  The right dress will make us feel like we just ate something healthy—not like we need to dive headfirst into the nearest box of Swiss Cake Rolls to numb the pain.  I feel stronger, braver, and more satisfied when I wear things that are “my food.” The right shirt can be a long-time cherished companion if made well, of durable material.  We want things that can sustain us for the long haul.

On my way home, I stop at a friend’s house for a socially distant visit in her lovely garden.   Excitedly, I inform her that I am going through a phase of seeing the whole world as “food” that nourishes our spirits (or doesn’t.)  She understands immediately.   We talk about ourselves as if we too are “food.” We start talking about relationships and heartbreaks we have endured in the course of our lives.  We talk of our children and our hopes for them.  We talk about ourselves and about how, as matriarchs-in-training, we often feel obliged to “feed” everyone else first.  We forget to feed ourselves.  We feel hurt when what we have to offer others is “not enough” or “too much.”

I wish someone had told me when I was younger, that I am a perfectly delightful batch of brussel sprouts but that not everyone likes brussel sprouts and that’s OK.   It would have eased the sting of rejection in ways I could understand.   I wouldn’t have spent so much wasted time and energy trying to turn myself into a cheeseburger. There is absolutely nothing “wrong” with brussel  sprouts.  Some people (like myself)  Adore them (“especially roasted with olive oil, salt, and garlic!” says my inner chef, beginning to drool into the keyboard), others call them “fart bombs” and would rather move pianos on a daily basis than eat one.  The beautiful thing about Life is that it is a smorgasboard of opportunities and choices.   My favorite movie character, “Auntie Mame” says “Live, Live, Live!  Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Sadly, once in a while, we meet someone dazzling, someone fantastic, who offers us the most delicious crumbs we have ever tasted.  We hunger for more crumbs.  It takes a while, given the nature of intermittent reinforcement and the addiction it creates, to realize we are never going to get more than crumbs from this individual.  A big piece of the pie is never going to be ours.  That’s when we need to walk away and say “Sorry, but crumbs are not my food.”

We are not here to weaken and starve. Life is our Feast!  We each get to make the choices that are right for us.  Just think, if all our possessions, our clothing, our relationships and our own prayers and practices are nourishing us and making us stronger than we have ever been before—what shall we do with all that Strength?  What then? Who would we love better? What would we change?  Just think of all we could Mend!  As a society of caring, daring, loving souls, we could create the kind of Buffet where everyone gets fed.  

Let the mending continue!  I love you so much.

Yours aye,

Nancy