Freedom

“Seek Freedom and become captive of your desires.  Seek Discipline and find your Liberty.”      –Frank Herbert

Greetings Dear Ones!

It has been snowing through the night—just a couple of inches.  The whole world looks like someone cut into a down coat and it exploded all over the shop.   This morning, there is no dawn, just a gradual whitening of the sky, like someone turning the volume up on a camera setting.  The top half of the trees look like black scratches against white, halfway down becoming white scratches against the dark of the surrounding woods, like an Escher painting. The only spot of color is the blood red of the barn, but even that is muted, more like dried blood than fresh.  As I make my way there, towards the steamy warmth of the sheep, I wonder where the coyote is right now.  A bedraggled, mangy looking fellow has been hanging around lately.  The well-upholstered Jack Russell by my ankles is ready to give him what-for.  He’s barking before he even has anything to bark at.

The coyote does not seem to be doing nearly as well as his sleek neighbor, the grey fox, whom I have also seen grocery shopping around the barn.  The fox looks self-assured and sassy. The coyote looks confused and juvenile—like an adolescent whose single mother got sick of working three jobs to bring home dinner just to find he hadn’t made his bed and had left his crap all over the den while she was gone.  He’s obviously out in the big bad world to fend for himself now and doing a terrible job.  His coat tells me he’s doing more learning than winning.  He is easily scared away by his ferocious plump white canine cousin.  But he’s still Alive, still pulsating with Hope and Hunger in 18 degree Farenheit temperatures, which is as much as any of us can boast these days.

I say to the annoying creature yapping ecstatically at my feet, “You! Little Mister Tough Guy, you wouldn’t last a night out here!”  He pauses, mouth in a laugh, and blinks at me impudently with bright, mischievous eyes.  The slight arch of his brow informs me that he’s stopped barking because he wanted to, not because I said so.  He’s definitely one of those simpering yes-men relying on regular meals and his favor with the Queen to bolster his swagger.  Deep down, there is no way he wants to be Wild.  He likes wood stoves and down duvets way too much.  Ill-mannered captivity suits him to a T and he makes the most of it, wool carpets be damned.  

“Do you want to be wild?” I ask the sheep.  “Are you resentful of living within the boundaries I set and living on the dole an Outside (in this case, it’s Inside) Authority grants you in your station?”

“Everyone wants to be wild,” says one. “Or so they think. We make a trade when we live in community and get some advantages and lose others.  We’re very glad you are on top of this coyote situation, for example.”

“That coyote is no danger to you where you are,” I reassure them.  “He might be a nuisance in the Spring, when there are lambs about, but right now, he just wants the mice and voles eating the seeds in the hay.  Perhaps he wants a chicken too—but they are safe in their coop. He’ll have to snack on chipmunks and dip.”

“Well, no one serves us cookies in the wild,” says another, rooting hopefully in my torn pocket.

“Are you not afraid of cookies?” I ask.  

“Who’s afraid of cookies?” they want to know.

“Lots of people,” I say. “For some, they are a gateway drug to captivity and shame.”

“That’s too bad,” they say. “Tell them we will eat their cookies.”

I sigh.  I love cookies just as much as the sheep do.

“Cookies or no, sometimes I wish I was Wild,” I admit to them.  “Too bad I cannot digest bark.”

“But bark is delicious,” they insist. “Especially pine bark.”

That I have moved to this homestead in Vermont, to be Free, to escape suburbia,  to be a Feral Woman at Large (and growing larger, thanks to the cookies) in the wilds of the Green Mountains, only to see my days perforated by buckets slopping into my boots as I drag water from the well  to my fellow captives every few hours, is the kind of Irony I delight in.  Is there such a thing as Freedom without rules? Without commitment? Is there such a thing as Commitment without Freedom? What is the music that compels this dance?

I check my calendar of appointments on my phone. I have only one but it is a big fat nail, smack in the middle of the day, locking it down so that nothing on either side can wiggle.  That woman, coming to my shop today at two o’clock  p.m. to have the moth holes repaired in her sweater, has no idea that we are Married.  Our courtship was a brief series of phone calls, one email, and a re-schedule via the website template. Hardly personal, not the least bit romantic, but a Contract of medieval gravity none-the-less.  Wistfully, I gaze at the new-fallen snow, hear the call of the hills, and I want to set off into the wilderness either to be or track prey, I’m not sure which.  I’m that wild…

In this moment, I think of two things--a friend’s comment “The self-employed get to work any eighty hours a week they want!”—and Birdseed.

Many years ago, when I was a young bride in a new home, I hung a bird feeder in a tree.  A neighbor who worked for the local Audubon society commented “Well, that’s just fine.  But now you are going to have to feed those birds.”

“Isn’t that what a birdfeeder is all about?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “But you will create a dependency in the birds so now you cannot let that feeder go empty. Ever.”

“I won’t,” I promised faithfully. And I didn’t. I married the whole flock of sparrows on the spot and our mutual bliss lasted many years.

I think about that Loyalty, Fidelity, Service now, as I contemplate my customer base.    I have lured them to the shop with a different kind of “birdseed”—the promise that I can mend their clothing, hem their trousers, and feed their hunger for disco pants remade with yoga waistbands.  The only way to create Dependency is to be Dependable.  Yet there is a price to pay; we capture ourselves when we seek to domesticate others by feeding their needs according to our own desires.  It’s the eternal dance of the Co-dependent.

Sometimes we Creative Types feel so heavily wedded—to an overwhelming polygamy of chores, Beings, appointments, relationships, and tasks that takes us away from the part that cannot be domesticated—the part that wants to roam, explore, create, view, sniff, howl, or disappear silently into the woods.  This, I am convinced, is the part that brings us our art in the first place. How do we honor that bedraggled coyote within us that is reduced to poaching  on “the civilized” for survival?

In my New Year’s quest to be a better writer, I have joined a support group.  Without us really stating it as such, our first discussion touched on the dance between structure and inspiration, imagination and the creative process, Ferality and Captivity.   Like that African proverb that says “The threads of many spiders can take down a lion,” (FYI, I’ve probably misquoted that but you get the idea…) we are bound by many threads—many little ties, a thousand tiny vows—that keep us from tossing our manes and galloping away with ourselves.  The fantasy we nurture is that total freedom will be all it’s cracked up to be.  Seeing a live coyote—I wonder.

Certain relationships look like entirely too much captivity for some folks—whether they are the Birds or the Birdfeeder  doesn’t matter—it’s too costly a bargain.  As my daughter said recently, “My private opinion is that these people who claim they don’t know what Love is haven’t had a dog.  They [dogs] teach us that all our chores surrounding their care reward us with vast quantities of joy we otherwise couldn’t have experienced.” She is asserting this as one who has just adopted a cat, which I find hilarious. When I point this out, she reminds me that she does not have the time or resources to invest in a dog.  Cats require less work and can be just as loving.  “The point,” she insists, “is that our personal investment in connection is what creates the bond we call Love. Some people have never known that…”

I think this is true of sheep, customers, children, lovers, and anyone to whom we choose to give our hearts, whether they ask us to or not.  Whether our commitments come in bird-feeder-sized (weekly), cat-sized (daily), dog-sized (multiple daily), or  child-sized (minute-by-minute-round-the-clock), the “work” is mostly good and occasionally vexing—with the extreme (yet rare) impulse to gnaw our way out of our own clothing and escape naked into the woods.

Being Wild is a rough and mangy business—just ask the malnourished coyote.  Being captive is hard too.  A Marriage without love is not worth it but Love can be a Savage business, especially when the one we are seeking to love is Ourself.  Balancing Creativity with the demands of captivity is not for the faint of heart.  Just ask the Writer who had to get off our Zoom call the other night because her little daughter had just pooped in the tub.

Well, my Dearies, as Frost says, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep” but we have “promises to keep” and “miles to go before we sleep.”  There is a full moon out tonight—join me for a howl or two—then get on with your precious work of Loving and Mending.  We all need YOU.  Thank you for your Good Work.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Grassitude

Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love. Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.  Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s an exciting day today.  I could barely get to sleep last night.  Finally, at long last, I own a sewing machine that makes automatic buttonholes!  You just slip a button into the holder and the machine calculates what size the buttonhole needs to be and makes it. I know, CRAZY, right? Yesterday, I made a little woolen waistcoat and deliberately designed it with too many buttons just to play with this feature on the new machine. 

You might think I am a little dotty about tools.  I won’t disagree.  However, I will say that at the heart of any good tool is some sort of leverage that helps focus power into a more useable format.  Being a relatively small mammal, with only average strength in my teeth and forearms, I will take all the help I can get.

Tools are just ways of harnessing power—power that might otherwise have been wasted in kicking the side of the lawnmower when it won’t start, or in mopping the bathroom floor when the toilet won’t flush.  Harness power in the right way, and it’s very useful.  Let it run amok, and the next thing you know…well… it might involve creatures with horns running through your house. (Sadly, in light of recent events, that doesn’t pertain to just me anymore.)  Usually, tools used well help us get things done with less effort and more efficiency.  It’s taken me a long time to see that Power, like money, like energy, is neutral—it’s all in how we use it that matters. 

I have a fun new neighbor who has never before owned her own home.  She comes over to talk (masked and standing ten feet away) about tools and tell me her latest adventures with squirrels in her attic.  We commiserate about the secret ways we use garden implements that are probably against some sort of code.  (I had just gotten done making washers for a leaky sink out of old rubber gloves.) We’ve both been on a fixing rampage lately.  We are both too house-poor to hire professionals to do things so we are um, getting Creative, if not downright Inventive.  As I continue to prove to the Good Hermits of Hermit Hollow, “any tool can be a hammer.” My Neighbor tells me about how she pried a board off her porch so the water from the roof could run through the space instead of being fed into her cellar, where it was creating a swamp.   I help her find where the squirrels are getting in and she asks if I have some tools she could borrow.  I offer her my hot pink tool bag and apologize ahead of time that the screwdriver is a mess.  I’ve been using it as a chisel. I needed to move the strike plate on a door so that it would latch properly and, unable to find my chisel, I just drilled a ton of tiny holes in the wood until it resembled Swiss cheese and then chopped it all out with a screwdriver.  Probably the most useful thing in the tool bag is all the old baling twine.  It comes in handy for everything.

Her eyes glint as she stores the information away for later use. “You know,” she says, “You need another blog.  We’ll do it together.  It’ll be called ‘How Real Girls Fix Shit.’”  I can tell that, despite all the problems she is having, she is also really excited about being empowered to fix things.  It’s adorable to see how excited she is.  It’s fun to use tools, even if it is the wrong way.  I remember my dad, a masterful furniture maker, telling me that the two most important things in his toolbox were WD40 and duct tape.  “If it’s supposed to move and it isn’t, try the WD40.  If it’s not supposed to move and it is, then use the duct tape.”

I love fixing things.

I loved junior poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s poem today—especially the line where she says our nation “is not broken, but simply unfinished.”  I could not agree more.  In my profession, if it’s not fixed, it’s just not finished.  Going forward, we need all our tools—fancy buttonholers and mangled screwdrivers and everything in between.  If we work together, we will have all the power we’re going to need.

We’re going to need emotional and spiritual tools too.  

I find a lot of these, along with the mowers and weed-whackers, in the barn. This morning, as every morning, I went into the sheep pen to sit and be Present with things—grateful to see my breath hang in the air and remind myself I am a little animal, alive Right Now, with other little animals—social animals with no concept of media or distancing. I sit on my little milk-crate-tuffet in the corner and they push all over me for scratches and cuddles, even after the corn chips are gone. They think nothing of staring deep into my eyes and belching lovingly into my face.  They never say “excuse me.” Etiquette really isn’t their thing…

Incidentally, the sheep have had incredibly fresh-smelling breath lately.  It smells like they are burping up Pine-sol but it’s really just Christmas tree.   They have carefully stripped all the flesh and skin off this thing, peeling it with their razor-sharp lower teeth (sheep have no upper teeth in the front of their mouths) with the efficiency of expensive kitchen gadgets.  Now, just the pale ribs and spine remain, like a beached sea creature in their paddock.

I tell them that a new day is dawning in America today. “A new dawn dawns every day,” they yawn.  “Now what?” they want to know.

“Love means Work,” I say. “We need to gather our tools. We need to do a lot of repair work, starting with ourselves. We need to soften the hard edges of our words, meet hostility with gentility and kindness, cultivate Curiosity, and practice Gratitude.”

“Gratitude?” asks a young sheep curiously.

“She means Grassitude,” says an older sheep knowingly.

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you are knee deep in the tender shoots of spring and the sunshine and breeze are in total agreement to make the temperature just right and the whole fragrant meadow is in bloom and you can’t bite or gulp any faster—each chew is more delicious than the next but you don’t have time to taste it in the rush.  Every now and then a bit of clover or a dandelion bud explodes mid-bite and drags a rainbow of flavor across your tongue, but you ignore it as you continue to snarf your way across the field with your friends.  You hurry and hurry and hurry, anxiously thinking that where you are is ‘good’ but inside you are panicking because somewhere else might be better and you can’t help wondering if everyone else is getting something you aren’t.  Later, when you are lying in the shade, Calm, you begin to Ruminate on your full belly.  You see how vast the meadow is and know you are Always provided for.  Then, you burp.  You taste each bite again, slowly, and you chew thoroughly, extracting all the Nourishment.  You realize, as if for the first time, how Good it all is.  It feels good to rest, to breathe, to turn the volume down on the ambient anxiety that had your wooly undies all wadded up… You just breathe…. and chew…. You know that everything is going to be OK.  That’s grassitude.”

“Ah yes,” the young sheep smiles. “I remember now.”

Well, Dear Ones, may we all remember… Gratitude invites Grace and there is SO much to be Grateful for today.  I am grateful for YOU.  (and ewe…and ewe…)(sorry, couldn’t resist!)  Let the mending continue!

With sew much love,

Nancy

Listen to the Cricket

If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” –C.S. Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones!

I did a very bad thing this week.  It wasn’t a terrible thing, but in the same way that one rain drop does not cause a whole flood, it was definitely going to lead to worse things over time and get me into situations that would lead me down slopes more slippery than my daily trip to the barn with sloshing water buckets.  Taken to an exaggerated extreme, such slopes could lead one to take candy from strangers, then babies, then who knows where the trails of depravity lead…perhaps to the Capitol Building???

I’m not even sure I could explain what I did to those of you have never attempted to make piping for a shirt.  Piping, by definition is: “The ancient Scottish link between music and noise” AND also “a narrow fold of material used to decorate edges or seams.”  For our purposes, it is that little bit of color that sticks out around the seams of cowboy shirts…

Anyway, the details don’t really matter.  The sequence of what happened went like this:

1.       I did not research what I wanted to do.  I charged ahead without doing any genuine fact-finding.  I was arrogant enough to think I could wing it.  The truth is that I have not made piping for a long time (such shirts have been out of style since the 80’s) and I needed a refresher.  Two minutes on YouTube or a phone call to a fellow Seamster would have done the trick.

2.      I cut a whole lot of fabric the wrong way.  I cut it way too small.  I did not allow for the necessary slack, for a Margin, for error.   It slays my sense of cosmic humor when the biggest error is in not leaving room for error.  To make it perfectly, I needed room for it NOT to be perfect.  Ha! (Pause to slap the knee…)

3.      Within minutes of attempting to get my zipper foot to sit next to the cord, I found myself in a desperate fight for alignment.  The more I struggled, the more things shifted out of place.  (How much more metaphysical can we get?)

4.      A little voice said, “pssst… excuse me…but this is not working. You cut the fabric strips the wrong width.”

5.      “Shut up, little voice,” said I boldly, “I am going to make this work.  I cannot be bothered cutting new strips. That took me a whole ten minutes of life and I am NOT going back there.”

6.      “But LIFE is a Spiral Path, Dear One—it’s time to return to the beginning and begin again,” said the Gentle Voice. “There’s even a C.S. Lewis quote about this very thing!”

7.      “Be GONE, Little Voice” I bellowed, hunching closer to my task, unwilling to admit defeat. “I got this.  I’ll be fine.”

8.      For forty-five minutes, I laboriously inched and squinched (that is a word in Nancyland. You get it by combining squeezed + pinched) my way along the cord, begging to the two edges to meet peacefully next to the cord.

9.      Occasionally, things slipped out of control and I stitched right over the cord. (A big no-no.)

10.   I had to use tweezers to make it perfect.

11.    After nearly an hour, I was trembling, nearly blind, and bathed in sweat from having nearly caught my fingers in the needle several times.

12.   I had to face reality.  This was Unmanageable.

I HATE REALITY. I want to kick it in the shins.  Especially when it is not the reality I wanted.  Grundalina stumbled off in search of cookies. The inner teenager slammed doors and used curse words she’s not allowed to use. Prudence lectured. The inner child sobbed.  She wanted to play something way more fun than “Let’s be a seamstress” today.  Underneath their caterwauler, I heard the little voice whisper, “Do the Right Thing. You’ll feel better.”

So I did. And I did.

The moral of the story—for those of you who do not detest such things—is:

Help yourself out. Check your facts, REAL facts, which sometimes involve measuring things with sticks with numbers. Be clear about what you are attempting to do. Seek help or collaboration.  Very rarely is any one of us the wisest or most experienced in the room. LISTEN to that help.  Especially when it comes from within.

Our lives, our little daily lives—I’m NOT talking about revolutions or governments or corporations--but our own daily little tiny lives, demand great courage and actions that sometimes don’t have the luxury of endless thought or research or committee meetings for all concerned.  Sure, we are going to be hasty and make mistakes. We are going to leave the house without socks on, reverse the vehicle through the garage door without opening it first, and pour orange juice instead of milk in the coffee.  “Mistakes you can repent at leisure,” sniffs Prudence haughtily.   Usually, as soon as we realize we make a mistake, we try to fix it. 

But sometimes we don’t.  

And that’s when we deliberately choose something Bad.   That’s the moment we could choose something that builds the Courage Muscle instead.

My customer will have no idea I wasted fabric, as we had plenty (thank Heaven!!)  I will not charge him for the wasted time.  But a crime has been committed: Against myself.  I ignored my own inner voice and robbed myself of at least an hour’s pay and my own self-respect. This is not petty theft. I knew what I was doing was wrong and YET I CONTINUED.  I thought, in my narcissism, that if I willed it, it would turn out ok.  It didn’t.  AND I KNEW BETTER.   Respecting ourselves means listening to ourselves tell the truth, then believing what we hear. 

Being willing to say “I am not doing very well; I know I could do better,” is one of the most validating things we can do for ourselves—if we mean it honestly and are not brokenly trying to shame ourselves, or cajole others for pity.   If we cannot listen to ourselves in little ways, how can we listen in bigger ways?  How can we build trust in ourselves?  If we cannot hear our own voices, how will we hear the voices of others and realize that we are the same?  How can we build unity in our neighborhoods, communities, nations, and world if we don’t realize we are fundamentally the same?  This is step one towards treating each other as proper equals.

With horror and astonishment, we look at the misdeeds of those in power and say “they should have known better.” Well, they did.  We say “they should have done the right thing.” Yet they didn’t.  Some still won’t.   They have incredibly flabby Courage Muscles.  (And shirts with no piping…)

I’m sad.  I want them to fix our world.  But then I sit down to make a shirt and realize I ain’t got a mere “mote” in my eye. I lie to myself every day.  I say I will clean out the fridge and exercise and play my scales and practice the fiddle and harp and fight tooth decay and that mold that is under the sink…. And I don’t.  I pretend I can handle things I can’t. (Like when I thought it might be a good idea to put two hundred pounds of chicken feed on a sled to get it down the icy hill to the barn and it left without me.)

Eventually, I was proud of the shirt I made for that man.  It looks beautiful.  He will never know the struggle I had with the piping. I’m glad I had the humility to start over and make it better.  It was worth it. 

Most of us will never get the chance to live our messy lives out there in the open on the big screen for others to judge (And there’s a mercy! I’d have to scrape my boots for sure.)  But in the quiet of our little workshops, we can be in dialogue with those soft, little, inner voices—the Crickets of our conscience—who tell us how we could rise up and be Magnificent in the tiniest of ways.  As a dear friend put it recently, “If enough of us were half-decent raindrops, we could get together and make a drink for a new flower.” 

Most of us have one of Prudence’s maiden aunts in our heads, crying out “Enough of your half-assed-slap-dashery, you Wastrel!”  We hear it directed at ourselves; we shout it at each other. This is not the message. Go deeper. For there is nothing like hearing that sweet little Cricket whisper “You are Enough. You are a Unique and Precious Being who is dearly loved.  Share that—that which is the best within you—with this aching world.”  If you can’t hear it for yourself today, then hear it now, from me, an unknown, obscure fellow Slacker in a little shop in a little town in a little state in a great big hurting country. If an angry leader can say it to a mob of murderous lunatics, I can say it too:

You are so dearly Loved. Thank you for doing your best—especially when no one sees the cost but you. Gentleness will be our strength. Get your courage muscles ready—we have a lot of Mending to do.

Yours aye,

Nancy

Forward Momentum

“It’s not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it’s about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

Greetings Dear Ones!

Let me start by expressing deep and sincere gratitude to all who took the time to write me a message last week.  Some of the most heart-warming thoughts came from people I have never met, in countries, states, or counties I have never been to.  I am deeply moved by how far apart some of us are geographically and yet how close in spirit. Membership in our tribe is not bound by the externals of governments, geographical locations, race, creed, color, age, or gender—but by what we choose to cherish.  Thinking of us all as “best friends we have not met yet” cheered me a great deal. Thank you!

This is especially heart-lifting, given the waves of fear and anguish I feel about what is happening in my country/our world right now.  I’ve had to spend a lot of time with my sheep lately to stop watching the news and to ground myself in normalcy and Good Manure.  When I told my wooly pals that there were beings wearing horns snorting and rampaging through our nation’s capitol building Wednesday, they looked shocked.

“Were they looking for cookies?” they wanted to know.

“I’m not even sure they know what they were looking for,” I admit. 

They look thoughtful.
“Horns, you say?” asked one.  “They must have been sheep…”

“I’ll bet they were either sheep, or maybe wolves trying to dress like sheep,” says the oldest ewe, knowingly.  “They do that, you know. You can always tell because they get the fluff all wrong.”

“But were they Devils?” I want to know, “Devils also have horns.”  Instantly, I realize too late that I have insulted the wethers (who have horns). They look at me as if I must be being sarcastic.  I’m not.  I’m secretly very afraid of horns.  To me, anything with horns could be a devil.  I have a friend whose teeth were knocked out by a set of horns.  

“Were they playing fiddles?” they ask mockingly.
“Touche,” I say.

“They were mostly sheep with a few wolves who are just planning to eat those sheep later,” decides the youngest one with fearful eyes.

We are all silent then, pondering.  Normally, the ewes are chatterboxes—running back and forth nervously asking a bunch of silly questions:  “Are we going out? Are we staying in? Is there anything to eat that is different from the stuff we have already been eating all day? What’s in your pockets, girlfriend?”  They are like those people on a tour bus who have to know everything first so they can then inform everyone else.   Today, they were subdued.  Perhaps they have not forgiven me for another scary-silly thing that happened the other day. 

We’d gotten a lot of snow followed by a lot of rain followed by a steep drop in temperature.   As a result, the ground was covered with a six inch crust of frozen grizzle, for lack of a better word.  It’s like poured concrete to try to shovel and slick as glass.  Getting down the hill to the barn with a full bucket of water in each hand is no joke.  The dogs and I had managed to skitter our way, finding toeholds in old boot prints as we went.  Once at the safety of the dirt floor of the barn, I opened the gate to the sheep pen to let them out to roam the field and nibble brush.  For some reason, I assumed they would walk out daintily, like wooly ladies and gentlemen.  NO.

They blasted past me in a mass rush I have only before witnessed at Italian train stations when the doors slide open.  They stormed out in a block, as if they were stuck together with Velcro.  They had picked up a lot of speed by the time they hit the ice.  Four went down at once and slid several yards, scrambling, as if they had been bowled, or used in a curling match.  The rest screeched to a halt at the dirt margin and watched in horror as their companions tumbled, struggled to right themselves, and then, well, sheepishly tried to ice skate on tiny hooves back to the shelter of the barn.  They kept falling over.  The poor sheep, deprived of friction, behaved like true Newtonians, which is a scientific word for when a Jack Russell sneaks into your car and eats an entire box of Fig Newtons you happened to leave there, then gets trapped inside for several hours. It was a mess.  

One of the blessings of my odd little life is that I get private viewings of things like sheep attempting to ice skate.  I don’t set out to create these situations; they just happen. But the sheep were not amused.  No amount of cookies could mollify them.  Luckily, no one got hurt.  They are all like fluffy pillows with a stick at each corner for legs and I am so thankful that none of those slender sticks were snapped.

It made me think about the dangers of Momentum and the mad rushes I get myself into in the shop.  Each project needs a certain amount of preliminary force and to get it over the hump from “undone” towards “done.”  It helps to make a certain amount of progress very quickly before letting something sit for a while.  I hate it when I get to an order and completely forget the details of what I am supposed to do.  I curse the former self who thought she could remember the curve of a woman’s hip or the length of a man’s arm without writing it down.   The old saying “well begun is half done,” seems very true to me.

Very often, Progress begins backwards: Step one is destruction.  We cannot underestimate the significance of the destruction phase—whether we are cutting up old shirts or brand new fabric, we are making Transformation irrevocable and undeniable.  There is no going back.  To stop with simple destroying is unthinkable.  As craftspeople, we embrace the idea that ruining something is only the first step towards creating something we believe will be better.  Yes.  We are gamblers.  Many people stop right here.  They cannot cope with the fear of wrecking something.  It takes exquisite Faith and Vulnerability to say ‘I dare to change this (thing) into something else.’   Many people who fear change—in their fabric, in their relationships, in their country, don’t appreciate how necessary the release of “the old” is in the creating of the “new.”

However, destroying for the sake of destroying is NOT something creative souls do.  It is the work of toddlers, cowards, and sheep who should never have discovered the back kitchen door was open.  When I work, I need to keep strong the envisioning of a Good Outcome and immediately to begin the positive steps towards reconstruction.  If I pause the project during the “take it apart” phase—I get demoralized and find it doubly hard to gather momentum when I come back to it.

That’s why I hate it when people bring me a bag of shreds saying “here—I tried to fix this only now it’s a mess…” [translation:  “Now, that it’s a load of total crap, I bequeath it to you. It’s all yours. P.S. please make it perfect!”  or WORSE “I thought I’d do you a favor and save some time by starting the job for you”—like the woman who chopped the sleeves off her husband’s shirts and wanted them made into short-sleeves, only she had cut them off too short.  The poor man was going to have to wear capped sleeves the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1960’s.  I wound up having to splice the old sleeves back on and start over…  If there is a mess to be made, I kind of like to have a choice in how it’s made.  It’s often much harder to fix someone else’s botched attempts.

Sometimes, we can’t help it.  Life hands us other people’s mistakes.  Our work, and the joy of Mending something or making it even better than before, is in using our creative Magic despite our lack of control around how it arrives at our station.  Like the charge of the Light Brigade, “Ours is not to question why/ours is but to do or die.” Not Diet.

Physics tells us that

P=mv

           p= momentum, m=mass, v=velocity

…Which basically means that a certain amount of Friction is necessary for progress.  And that a Moment is the center of Momentum. 

“It’s going fast but not falling on your tum in the moment,” says a young sheep, helpfully. “Sliding head first through life really only works if you are Pete Rose…”

“And MASS means you need to go to Mass!” bellows Prudence.  None of us know exactly what velocity means but the sheep are learning.

“Most of life is dull and grubby,” they say, “but the thought of cookies is the kind of excitement that leads to action.”   And Action, as we have seen, can lead to a mess if we don’t stay over our own hooves.  To make progress, we need to understand the substrate beneath us.  We can only go as fast as safety permits.

But neither may we stop.

From the wreckage around us, may we rebuild greater beauty.  Into the anger and the hate, may we pour our love.  I’m absolutely not being a sweet person when I say such things.  I mean it savagely, with wild passion and raw strength.   I’m asking you to help me Love (not necessarily forgive, condone, or not hold accountable) the eejits who bring us the messes we don’t want to have to fix.  Let’s grab our needles, our fiddles, our pens, our hearts and Let The Mending Begin. (again.) (and again.) What TINY little thing could you help us fix, TODAY? 

Handle your rage responsibly and then get on with it.  We have a LOT to do…

Well, my Dear Ones, I was SO almost ready for the New Year to begin… I was just going to get a few things organized… Wait, WHAT?? It left without me??  I’m going to tip-toe carefully over the ruts of ice and hope I can catch up.

May you be safe and healthy.  I love you SEW much!!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Closure...

“First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.” –George Burns

Happy New Year’s Day, Dear Ones!

I am sipping a cup of Peach Detox tea with the last of the Christmas cookies this morning.  I have been told recently that I need to eat more “intuitively.”  I heartily agree.  (Especially when my inner voice says that I should eat up all the cookies NOW, rather than have them around later, when they might tempt me.)   The first sunrise of the baby year has managed to throw a tiny leg over the New Hampshire mountains in the distance and make its way steadily to Vermont.  Through the window, I can see the barn gradually turning from shadow into color.

More by the light of the moon than the sun, I go to visit the sheep and see that their new manger, built for them on Christmas day, is full.  It is.  They are lying down, uninterested in last summer’s salad. They want this winter’s cookies.  Thanks to Christmas cookies, the new sheep—who were a tad shy at first—have learned to rush the unsuspecting and bite at their gloves in search of sugar.  It’s impossible to go in and visit with them without being bullied and pushed and shaken down for treats. 

I plop down on my little milk crate seat in the corner and start to talk with them about closures—about how lovely things like Christmas cookies have to come to an end.  “We all need to go back to eating green stuff that needs a lot of chewing” I tell them.  “Cookies are over.”  They refuse to believe me—nudging and snuffling and nipping at my pockets and gloves.  They want to eat Intuitively too.

A new dawn, a new day, a new year comes quietly, gently, tenderly to the sheep fold.  I bury my face in the rich aroma of warm raw wool and sigh out steam that hangs in the air, then curls away.  There is so much I need to leave behind with 2020.  The past few months have been filled with intense physical activity and deeply sorrowful personal struggle.  I feel depleted, exhausted.  I know this is true for so many of us.  I have longed to write more, to process, to share, to commiserate but in the end I just had to endure it wordlessly.  And yet, I am deeply grateful for the many blessings that 2020 brought too—my new home, a wonderful new shop and work space, new music buddies, and above all, Clarity about what is truly important to me.  But it’s been Hard…

I know You understand.

The sheep don’t.

Placidly, they burp and munch.  They have nothing to leave behind except small handfuls of what a six-year-old friend calls “doots.”   They have no idea what day it is. “Your problem is that you think you have a Future and a Past,” one tells me, looking deep into my eyes. “This is nonsense.  You have neither.  There is either Cookies, or Not Cookies, that is All.”  The others nod sagely, chewing. 

“So you ascribe to philosophical presentism?” I ask.  “Are you Zen Buddhists?  Forgive me for assuming otherwise--The way you hang out around angels and mangers, and that big part you played in the original Christmas Story, you know…  I kind of thought…”

“That we are Semitic???” asks one.

“We are more like Taoists who eat shrubbery and have a tendency to panic,” interrupted another, setting me straight.  We leave it at that.  I have to get going.  Even though it is a “holiday” in my world, I have to get to my shop to work.   My opening day of 2021 is going to be all about closures.  Literally.

A woman called the other day and asked if I did zippers.   “I have six jackets I’ve been carrying around with me looking for someone who will fix them.  I dragged them all the way to [town about thirty miles from here] to a place that used to do them but they said that they don’t do them anymore…”

“Yes,” I said soberly, biting my lips and trying not to cross my eyes… “bring them in.  I’ll do my best.” Then I hung up the phone and wept.

You might think that it’s because I hate doing zippers. (I do.)  You might think that it’s because she was dragging six (ugh! SIX) of them towards me at the speed of a Subaru Forrester (it’s Vermont. Everyone drives Subarus—unless, of course, they are lucky enough to have a vintage VW bus.)  But honestly, it’s more than that.  It’s because suddenly I ached all over for my friend, whom I once nicknamed “Zippy,” who has been diagnosed with an awful kind of cancer that is known for being particularly swift and savage.  I texted her and told her I was thinking of her and she wrote back saying she really wished she could do those zippers for me, if she could.   We then called and had a good chat and told each other how much we loved each other (again).  And then, us being US, we couldn’t help laughing and being very silly.

We laughed about all the times we would arrive at the old shop at the same time and race each other to the back door, keys outstretched, trying to be the first one in so that we could claim “employee of the month.”  We laughed about how we wanted to make a reality T.V. show out of all the hilarious things that happened—men who asked us to repair their boxer shorts in odd ways, female cops who needed their uniforms to look more “sexy,” ghastly bridezillas, customers who roamed the shop in their underwear, and people who wanted custom outfits for their pets…  We laughed about which “Golden Girl” actress would play each of us in the movie version and which customer we wanted to be when we grew up.  I had wanted to be the stale-smelling librarian with the fascinatingly smooth coif of hair and vintage tweed clothing that fit her so perfectly despite a significant dowagers hump.   Zippy wanted to be the one who slapped around bare-legged in furry galoshes with her slip hanging out.  “It’s not that I want to look terrible,” she had clarified at the time, “it’s that I want to live long enough not to care if I do or not.”

Those words haunt me now.  Young people, PAY ATTENTION.  It’s never too soon to stop caring about how you look! People who run about in plastic boots with Eisenhower-era slips hanging out under their clothes are probably having a way better life than you are.  Get to it!

So today is going to be a Zipper day in my little shop.  I have been doing quite a lot of them lately.  I remember Zippy saying that “there’s not that much to it, really—if you had to, you could do it and get good at it.” She made it look so easy.  When I let go of my tendency to Avoid hard things, I learn quite a bit from them.  “If you can’t get out of it, get Into it,” barks Prudence.

Prudence feels the need to teach you all a little about Zippers:

For one thing, the adage “little things mean a lot” definitely applies.  The teeth must be intact and perfectly aligned.  For want of a tooth, the pulley was lost; for want of a pulley, the zipper was lost; for want of a zipper, the jacket was lost; for want of a jacket, the teenager was lost; for want of a teenager, the mother had to nag herself voiceless and then shovel all the snow herself…and so it goes… Check first to see if you have all your teeth. (Try not to bite anyone, even those holding cookies.)

If there is not a tooth missing or broken, Alignment is key. How spiritual is that?  Get all the Little Things in order and BIG CONNECTIONS can occur.  I love it.

The Left and the Right must come together and agree to alternate appropriately.  (Now that’s a message for a country that doesn’t want to run around getting snow down its pants!)

99 % of all damage is operator inflicted. Good people of Earth, PLEASE HEAR THIS: Begin mindfully and carefully. You cannot just start yanking on a Pulley and expect it to do your bidding like an obedient Labrador retriever.  So many people are in a hurry and don’t bother to line things up right at the start.  Zippers are moody little things.  They need to be appeased. That little metal doo-dad MUST be properly seated first, like your honored granny at Thanksgiving, or a toddler just learning to poo in the potty, or things won’t go well after that.  Get them all firmly seated in their proper places (possibly in an outhouse located three counties away) before you begin.

Here’s another tip: Know when to stop.  If you yank past the stopper, you pull the whole pulley off and there is NO getting it back on without tiny pliers stolen from your son’s guitar case, specialized machinery, AND a magic wand. The next thing you know, you’ll be watching a loved one, arms trapped overhead, head entirely missing, doing a disturbingly violent (yet oddly erotic) dance as he/she/they tries to escape before you have to cut them free with rusty kitchen shears. 

I hate zippers.   But damn, they ARE Good Teachers.   Like Covid-19, Life without them is all Buttons and Bows.  Ever since 1851, when Elias Howe introduced the “Automatic Continuous Clothing Closure,” (which was not a marketing success),   zippers have been transforming lives and fashions.  Grudgingly, I admit that they are jolly useful. Many’s the time I have stood in a dressing room, watching a woman (it’s always a woman) in a stretchy knit pull-over dress, scrunching up fistfuls of fabric in her hands, saying “why can’t you take it in?  It’s still so loose…”   And the answer is always, “because, Madam, we would never again get you OUT of that garment.  You need the ease to accommodate entry and exit.  If you want it that tight, I shall have to install a zipper under your arm.”  

For, what are Closures anyway, but Openings in disguise?

That’s all for now, my dearies!  May 2021 bring you every blessing.  May we continue to learn from and with each other.  May we view this world with tenderness and lavish the love it needs. May we work swiftly, with all the skill we have to Mend what needs mending.  May we have the Grace to listen to the problem fully before we start pulling towards the answer.  May we bless the past, embrace the future and eat our greens (or cookies) in between.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S.   I invite you to comment, share, or subscribe.  I am looking for ways to focus more on improving my writing this year and the generosity of your insights is invaluable. Thank you.

The Shopping Season

Greetings Dear Ones!

To Prudence’s horror, we heard an advertisement recently that called this season “The Shopping Season.”  What??? No it’s NOT!!!  How dare they claim for Capitalism this deeply Spiritual Season of Preparation—when we reverently garnish our homes with garish gee-gaws, gawdy ornaments, and crinkled tinsel (“almost as vile as glitter…” huffs Prudence). Then we have a tree slain in our honor that we may bring it indoors and spend the next six weeks (or, if you are like me, the next six months) watching it die and vacuuming evergreen needles out of the rug  (Just kidding! Who vacuums??)—All so we can welcome the relatives we already had enough of at Thanksgiving.  (As if people returning within a month won’t recognize the place with all the elf statuary, mistletoe, and Jingle Bells.)  It’s the season of eye-itching sweaters, odd food pairings (like smoked fish and candy canes), and occasionally gruesome music whose themes seem to center on the fauna of Lapland who, having been mercilessly teased for their sinus issues, then run over and murder the elderly.  And all in the name of helping us forget this is essentially a Pagan festival born of Fear of the Dark. 

The Truth is, it is more than likely only a HALF-birthday for the Christ Child (for those, like my nephews, who celebrate half-birthdays) since he was almost certainly born during lambing season—which is approximately five months away.  Still, who doesn’t want to party in the Dark and celebrate the Return of the Light, especially if it involves beverages made of eggs and indoor shrubbery? (Indoor shrubbery is not actually an intended ingredient…though, after a while, it does turn up in everything from pockets to pancakes, kind of like glitter.)   The whole thing, like the year of 2020 itself, seems to be the invention of an imaginative fifth-grader trying to make a story as weird as possible… “Yeah, um… there are going to be some flying deer, and a barn full of  animals who talk at midnight, and a pesky elf who causes worn out parents to lose their minds because they were so darn busy putting cloves (Cloves?? When do we ever use cloves any other time of the year?) in their baking that they forgot to move him and now the children are in danger of suspecting there isn’t really a jolly man with carbohydrate issues who is going to stealthily break and enter their home while they are asleep and eat all their cookies…

Yeah…. “I guess we might as well call it the Shopping Season,” says the part of me that isn’t cynical at all.

A young shopper came to see me about a week ago.  She had (I’m not kidding) nearly twenty things to try on.  “I just brought a few things to start off.  I love to shop,” she giggled as she held up her forty-gallon kitchen trash bag full of clothes.  “It helps me stay sane.  I guess I feel powerless with the Covid thing, you know, so I get to decide what I want,” she said miming the act of clicking a mouse.  Apparently, she wanted a whole lot of stuff that wasn’t her size, along with the exact same skirt in every single color available, as well as a lot of past-season bargains that she won’t be wearing until next summer, or maybe January, if Greta Thunberg is correct.   She kept asking me if things looked like “her.”  I had no idea how to answer.  I had only just met her!  She was looking directly into two large mirrors but she couldn’t “see” herself. So often, we use other people “seeing us” as a way to see ourselves.

Maybe she was just asking if they looked good on her, which is hard to tell when things don’t fit.  I am always loath to answer questions on fashion.  (Please, don’t ask the middle-aged woman with animal dung on her shoes what “looks good!”) After all, having gotten off the fashion train in the 1830’s, my own personal “look” is some version of Amish-track-star-in-cowboy-boots.  I keep imploring such customers, “Tell me what you want.  I want you to be comfortable.” Prudence is more harsh:  “We are here to make this fit YOUR whims, not ours.  We are not available to follow you everywhere in your life, capering in constant rapture because you chose this cardigan, which really would have looked much nicer in navy blue, buttoned to your throat…” (If you think Prudence is mean, you should have seen her prototype—the nun who taught me in eighth grade.)

Gradually, as she tried on various styles from her bag (we’re back to the young customer now, not the nun from eighth grade), I began think I could see who “she” was—a dear, sweet, very Young soul, in a masquerade ball of “choices.”  She was Me, ten, twenty, and thirty years ago. She didn’t have clothing; she had costumes. Like most of us, she was a great variety of people who might be glimpsed differently through the eyes of a date, a boss, a teacher, a lover, or a friend.  In our private confessional, behind the dressing room curtain, she was asking me to see her, at least partially, as all these things. Some things made her look pretty; some made her look smart; some made her look sweet; some made her look smoking hot; and some made her look like she was entering renal failure—or at best, like she had dined on raw salad onions at lunch and was going pale and waxy from being forced to breathe her own fumes beneath her mask.  None of them looked to me like HER. Watching her shape-shift from powerful to meek and back was like observing a kaleidoscope of femininity.     I began to think about women and clothing and Power, wondering, are we Choosing, or hoping to be Chosen? In short, “Which are we, the Shoppers or the Merch?”   

How many young women (I know I should say “people,” but in this case I actually mean women) are given the impression that they are supposed to make a nice little package of themselves and hope the Right Buyer “values” them enough to trade whatever blood or treasure is necessary for the pleasure of “keeping her” happily, ever after?  And what is it the mystery “buyer” seeks—Autonomy or Loyalty? Self-reliance or Interdependence? Are we supposed to be Strong? Or make them the heroes? Are we supposed to see ourselves as Alone? Or anchored in ourselves by being the center of a web of important connections with others?

These questions and insecurities radiate outwards in all areas of our lives--especially in this, the “Shopping Season.”  Who, exactly, are we shopping for?  What do we hope will happen as a result of all our Spending? 

This time of year, I like to sit in a corner of the barn and try to explain basic economics to the sheep.  I tell them that the Christmas tree they ate last year got turned into wool that is going to be made into a Christmas shawl for someone special (if I can get it done on time!)  They just nuzzle me, enquiring what happened to all the corn chips.  “Are you Shoppers? Or are you Merch?” I ask them.  One looks at me and blinks.  “We only talk on Christmas Eve,” another whispers out of the side of her cudding mouth.

“Nonsense,” I reply.  “I know you talk all year round, to those who are listening.”

They roll their eyes and shrug.

“Ok. We’re Merch,” they burp.  “Definitely. All prey animals are.”

“What about Pray Animals?” I ask.

“They have Free Will,” they say with unconcerned nonchalance.  “They get to decide.” 

The sheep, who know considerably more about Fashion than I do, insisting “there’s no such thing as bad weather; only bad clothing,” hunker down in the straw and help me devise the following Guide to help us during the “Shopping Season.”  As you go forth to make your buying decisions, here’s how to recognize whether you are becoming The Shopper or  The Merch:

1.       Shoppers see themselves Directly, without the help of Middlemen (people)

2.      Merch needs other people to see, to praise, to validate, or encourage their image of themselves.

3.      Shoppers choose based on how things make them feel, rather than how others think.  They buy to share Joy, not to “make someone happy.”

4.      Merch hopes, passively, that it will get “chosen,” by choosing “the right thing,” though they haven’t a clue what that is.

5.      Shoppers don’t need other people’s opinions because they don’t want to get stuck having to manage energy coming towards them they cannot control or be responsible for.

6.      Merch gives to Others management of issues they should handle themselves.

7.      Shoppers don’t actually have to buy a damn thing.

8.      Merch will purchase anything in order to gain approval

9.      Shoppers are not for Sale.

10.   Merch will continually bargain itself down in humiliating spirals in the hopes of going home with someone…Anyone…

Merch, according to the sheep, (bless them), will also eat up all your old Christmas trees if you let them, not to mention any stale bread or corn chips you might have lying about.  They will wear lumps of wool and sit in draughts and placidly listen to you go on and on about how much you hate shopping, even on-line shopping.

I would definitely write more—as this feels Unfinished—but there is a fragrant Jack Russell at my feet, whom I suspect of being a Shopper. He says there is no Free Will where incontinence is concerned and if I don’t want to have to add “shop for a new carpet” to my list, I shall have to sign off Now.  If I have to buy a new carpet immanently, I’m not sure who I will turn into… perhaps someone who never finished her blogs…

Take care my Dear Ones! This is a time of Patience with the Dark.  May we give each other the respect, the tolerance, the forgiveness, and the Service that one can never find in a shop.  Charity is Price-less.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Still Thankful...

“We Thank Thee, Lord, for food and friends, And all the Good thy mercy sends”

Greetings Dear Ones,

When a gorgeous pumpkin pie the size of a hubcap shot from its store-bought container and blasted out the open back of the SUV like it had been fired from an extra-terrestrial pie gun* and landed naked, face-down in the driveway mud, my first words were definitely NOT “Oh! Goody! Disasters are wonderful opportunities.”   No…  I said Other Words.  Very naughty words.  I stared in disbelief at the upside-down pie on the ground.  It’s packaging was still exactly where I had balanced it, along with all the other feast-fixings.  They were intact.  That pie, and just that pie, had its own private agreement with gravity.

Slacker me was very disappointed.  Not because I like pumpkin pie all that much; I don’t.  I prefer any kind of pies to pumpkin pies but I definitely prefer pumpkin pies to no pies at all.  I hadn’t had the time to make a pie in the first place, and now I didn’t have time for a return trip to the store, certainly not the store where I had bought that pie.  And that pie had been the crowning glory on what was to be the “Perfect” first Thanksgiving with my family in the new house. The artist in me mourned its perfection.   It wasn’t just a vast wheel of pumpkin Goodness; it was a work of Art with perfectly carved finials of crust around the edges.  It was, in fact, the Platonic Ideal of a pumpkin pie.  My inner Victim instantly recognized the sabotage and suspected this pie of knowing it was way out of our league.  Even shattered in the mud, it shimmered with cinnamon and nutmeg charm.  Of course we could never have a pie like that… It had to jump ship and commit pie-icide.  For folks like us to dare to aspire to a pie like that…what was I thinking?

From the bushes, the chickens emerged as scavengers.  They were absolutely delighted to discover the mess.  By the time I had the groceries in on the kitchen counter they had pecked off the entire crust and exposed the orange sunset beneath.   They were making the kind of noises that satisfied guests make when they discover you used real butter in the crust.  Their compliments to the chef were almost more than I could bear.  It was worse than watching the Great British Bake Off and not getting to nibble the burnt bits.  (Those are always the best bits, eh?)

Where was I to get a replacement pie?  If only there were such things as the “pie guns” mentioned above.  When my son was young, he used to spend hours building complicated ships out of Leggos, with impressive canonry which he insisted was used solely for inter-galactic pie dispersal.  “These are not scary guns, Mummy,” he insisted. “They are not for killing. They are for getting the pies way far away quickly to people who need them.  They make people smile.”  How does one call out for an intergalactic pie delivery?  I wondered.  How could I be entering into a holiday celebrating all we HAVE with the idea that there was something missing? There was something bordering on obscene in the irony.

To distract Grundalina Thunderpants from the impulse to lie down in the mud next to the lost pie and snork what she could through a straw, I thought about my work day and an interesting conversation I had had that very morning.  A man had entered the workshop asking “Do you know the difference between pants and trousers?” before he even said hello.  The eyes above his mask were bright and curious.  “Why is that plural even though a shirt is not and they are each just one item of clothing?And what about slacks?  Where do they fit in?”

I love questions like that.  I love learning about the origins and uses of words.  My inner professor lunged for her podium, brandishing the lecture on garments designed to cover our lower halves. “Pants,” she announced, are the shortened form of “pantaloons” and are pluralized because anything that can be bifurcated (i.e. cut in two) is considered plural in our language—same with scissors, trousers, glasses, sleeves etc…  There are “two” pants—one for each leg.  In America, we use the word pants for anything that covers the legs from the waist to the ankles.  In the U.K., they reserve the use of the word to mean only underwear or underpants.  They use the word “trousers” for outerwear for the legs.  Breathless, fearful that her audience was losing interest, she continued: In America, we also use the word trousers interchangeably for pants—but we tend to imply that the garment has more tailoring—with topstitching, pockets, belt loops etc… and is worn more formally.  “Slacks” comes from an old Saxon word for “loose” and they tend to be a fuller cut… Normally, customers glaze over with this much detail but his eyes brightened further.  I liked him immediately.

“I’m a problem analyst,” he said. “I’m intrigued with language.  Language often can reveal where the problem is.  I go into big companies all the time and have them tell me where things are going wrong.  I listen to how they explain the story.  Then I show them how their “problems” are just fantastic opportunities.  There is no such thing as a mistake.  Every single disaster brings a gift.”  He beamed, then handed me the trousers he was holding. Clearly, a “gift.”

I nodded. I knew what he meant—at least on a certain level.  If people don’t rip their pants or need me to hem their dresses or tailor their clothing due to some specialized requirement which, sometimes, is the result of a disaster, then I have no work to do.  In a way, I “profit” from their problems.  But he was taking it much further than that.  He meant that the people themselves were blest in some way from having to address their own needs.  The needs themselves, not the absence of them,  ARE the blessing. 

I stared back at the pie at my feet and thought about his sentiment, the energy in his words.  Was there a thought with which to try to leverage great value from a smashed pie in the mud? How could I be Delighted with this experience?  Clearly, the chickens were profiting.  Perhaps they were saving me fifty-seven cents’ worth of chicken feed that I could invest in the stock market and turn into a lucrative IRA fund in three-hundred years… I rolled my eyes.

Then I struggled.  I struggled physically with the groceries, with setting things to rights in the kitchen, and getting food prepped for the dinner the next day.  But most of all, I struggled mentally with that gorgeous pie in the mud.  The best I could do was promise myself a jolly blog about it later.

Against Covid regulations, at least 32 people showed up to dinner this Thanksgiving.  There were only five human bodies seated around the table—and three furry canine bodies waiting patiently for “drop-age” underneath the table—but the cast of internal characters each one brought along—the victims, the heroes, the pleasers, the achievers, the slackers, Prudence, Grundalina, Festus T. Bumfluff, Madam Scumblebum… not to mention the inner pussycats, lions and tigers and bears (Oh My!) made for a crowded family weekend.  Some of them mourned the loss of the pie; some were relieved that there would be nothing to sneak down and eat the rest of after midnight while others were sleeping.   We all talked candidly about our individual journeys between the distances of Expectation and Reality and where true Gratitude could be found.  My children are of that wonderful age (in their early twenties) when it is customary to have one’s parents stand trial (without a jury of their peers) for the crimes of their childhood—especially when we look through photo albums and they realize the full horrors of my early fashion choices on their behalf.  Over and over, I found myself humbled by the generosity of their answers, questions, and willingness to seek Forgiveness over Righteousness (though I was never fully absolved of putting them in Colonial outfits for the 2008 Christmas cards).  I explain that most parents do their best to provide The Best for their children but some “pies” just have their own agreement with gravity.  Sometimes, despite our best efforts, things just Flop.  It’s up to each of us to then make it for our own damn good.

In this moment, I realize with great sorrow that we teach our children so many things; we give them so many things (“only some of which are actually necessary,” shrills Prudence from her corner) that they may experience Gratitude.  Do we give them the ability to see a Lost Pie as an “advantage”?  An “Opportunity”? A way to, with laughter born of Resilience, find brussell sprouts as an acceptable alternative for dessert? (Ok, maybe I would be the only one happy about that…)  How do we teach them to get out of the mud when they too get stuck, when they can’t get “what they want”?  Apart from standing there and singing that Music Together hit single “Oh, My! No More Pie!” what can we do?

The zeitgeist of 2020 has been catching me a lot these days.  The mud is deep and slick around my home.  I have been laboring more than usual to do good work while taking on exhausting extra projects in the margins—some related to the coming holidays, some related to my new farm, some just the desperate efforts of keeping the chickens out of the kitchen when the door’s left open.   It’s hard to look at Hard Things—losses, illness, rejection, and grief and try to find the Good in them—the “Opportunity” for learning or greatness, or even just sullen acceptance that one must now change course.   It’s hard to lose not just pies, but the Idea of Pie—the cherished Hope that we can provide/procure/produce some sort of Perfection for those we love so dearly—and still feel Grateful.  Sometimes, we just can’t.  And that’s OK.   Perhaps the shared Hunger, not the food, is the gift.  

May you be nourished in Spirit, if not in Pie.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S.After all that, guess who turned up with not one but two small pumpkin pies? The Inter-galactic Pie Gun Hero of the day!

Patching things up

Greetings Dear Ones!

I may not look it to the casual observer, but I am a deeply empathic person.  When you watch those Psych 2 Go videos on Youtube and they talk about people who have a paranormal ability to apprehend the emotional state of another individual, that’s me—particularly if the “individual” is an animal, a tool, or an article of clothing.  I am a native speaker of goat, sheep, spinning wheel, chipmunk, and dog—including a highly localized dialect of surly Jack Russell whose vocabulary consists mainly of things that could never be said on prime time T.V. (No wonder he still doesn’t have his own Taco Bell commercial.)  Pretty much anyone can tell what kittens are thinking—but I know why the tractor trembles...  I can hear pants weep… 

So when a man brings in his favorite shirt and asks me to mend it, I take one look at it and can tell it is not just exhausted, it is severely clinically depressed.  Another victim of Covid.

“I loaned it to my girlfriend—well, actually she just kinda borrowed it because she liked the way it smelled—and I think she ate some kind of food in it and slopped it all down the front and then tried to scrub the stains out and these holes appeared,” he says pointing to the damage.  While Prudence rolls her eyes and tut-tuts behind the scenes, I peer at the holes in the shirt with interest.  I have seen such holes before.   A woman used to bring tank tops to us at the old shop with holes that were very similar.  She always giggled and told us mice had eaten her clothes.  “Those silly mice,” she would say chirpily, slapping the table and laughing as if she lived in a Disney movie where they were supposed to be sewing her ball gowns instead of gnawing through her grundy under layers.  She thought it was simply adorable to be the butt of one of their little jokes in the way that nervous nerds often find themselves sucking up to rats in middle school.

The holes in the threadbare fabric of this shirt are neatly snipped, as if by tiny scissors.  No sponge, no matter how vigorous, did this damage. “What happened to you, poor baby?” I croon mentally to the shirt.  I surpress the urge to cuddle it and hold it up to my ear to hear the answer as Prudence wrinkles her nose disapprovingly.  Even through my mask I can smell the thing. The girlfriend might like the way this shirt smells but we sure don’t!  This shirt needs a hot sudsy bath and a week in the sun. (Hell, who doesn’t?)

I study the shirt carefully.  It’s a nice shirt, all in all, though ancient and threadbare in spots. It was made from Indian cotton, softened with age to the texture of micro flannel, in a striped pattern that hasn’t been popular for many decades, if ever.   The original reds and blues have faded to macho pinks and purples.  Thread in the seams looks overweight, too robust for the fineness of the fabric.  This shirt was originally something hippie and organic looking, with the sturdiness of denim but in its old age it has the texture of gauze.  You can read newsprint through parts of it.

“Can it be fixed?” he wants to know.

I hesitate, then answer slowly, “Well, I can mend it.  That’s a little different.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I explain. “I’m pretty sure that by “fix” you mean ‘return to its original condition.’  That I most definitely cannot do.  I can’t close these up with seams or darts.  They are in weird places.  It would not look right.  And I cannot darn them with invisible weaving because the fabric is just far too fragile.  However, I could make a neat little job of patching them.  But patches are patches and are not going to be subtle.”

“You can’t just sew it?” he asks.  But what he really wants to know is if I have a magic wand that can miraculously make all this go away so it will look like it used to look.

“No.” I say, “I cannot just sew it.  I can create patches but we are going to have a really hard time matching this fabric—new fabric won’t look right—and the shirt is going to have a kind of thick spot where the patches go that will seem stiff or lumpish.  In fact, it might look terrible.  The good news is that patching clothes is super trendy—nothing looks more Woke than fixing clothes instead of throwing them away. I’ll do it by hand with stitches that look like the mice did them after they snacked on it first. ” 

He bites his lip, considering.  I can see how emotionally attached he is to this shirt and how increasingly vexed he is with his woman.  He does not want patches.  Meanwhile, I discover, much to my delight, that the shirt has pockets and they are lined with the same fabric. 

“Hey!” I cry, “We can use the pockets for the patch fabric.  I can harvest a little from one pocket—you don’t need both of them, do you? I can replace it with a different fabric and you’ll never know.

The man shrugs.  The Shirt sags and looks even more defeated.  They don’t want this change to happen, even if it is a change for the better.  They want everything to go back to the way it was before Grundalina’s cousin got around to straining her vittles through it and leaving it for mice to eat.  

“We can’t turn back time.  We need to make a plan,” I say briskly, effectively announcing that his mourning period must come to an end.  “Maybe you want me to make something else out of it—a pillow, perhaps, to salvage the fabric and the memories? You can take it away and think it over if you like.”   My shop is small and we are reaching the ten minute mark. I don’t like my appointments to drag on too long during a pandemic.  He looks so appalled at the notion of turning the shirt into a pillow that I try not to giggle.  

He decides to have the patches done and leaves. 

Now I have this ragged old shirt to fix.  It’s like a velveteen Rabbit it’s been loved so much.  Loved and… quite frankly, abused.  Nothing I do will make it look like it used to.  But NOT fixing it is not an option either.  It reminds me partly of every broken heart I’ve ever had and partly of my country.   What do they have in common? Serious mending must be done.   And it might not look pretty for a while.   Our stitches will be visible, so we need to make them say what needs to be said about our art.  We can turn the patches into decorations, even badges that say: “We’ve been through something and we’re better now.  We were too valuable to throw away.  Someone cared enough to stabilize the trauma so that no more damage could occur.” 

I feel for this shirt.  I feel for that man.  Hopefully, by the time he comes back to pick up the shirt, he will have come to terms with his delusions about how long things can last.  Time and Pizza sauce take heavy tolls.  Every shirt is just as mortal as its wearer.    

What I love best is when someone comes along and takes a stack of ragged shirts like this and turns them into a soft blanket of caring for a new generation.  It takes guts to release what Was and create a new vision for the future and what is possible.   I look down at my own shirt and realize Grundalina has been at it again.  There is a trail of salad dressing that indicates my messy habit of taking giant bites of things while not paying attention.   The stains are not going to come out of this shirt either.  I suppose I could leave it for mice to eat, or I could imagine something Better.   So it is with the fabric of our shirts, our flags, our souls. 

Remember to hug a veteran today!  I thank each of them, and each of you, for your Service and good work, from the bottom of my patched up heart.  Let the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

For the Greater Good

Greetings my Weary Dearies,

I did a bold, noble, perhaps heroic, perhaps even patriotic thing this week.  It wasn’t easy but I gritted my teeth and did it anyway.  I did it for the good of the future, the good of the world, and my country and a very special little girl.  I won’t receive a medal or any kind of reward for my Noblesse.  It’s quite likely I squandered time that my alter-ego “Grundalina” could have spent lounging on a couch binge-watching “The Queen’s Gambit” and snacking directly out of cardboard boxes and “family size” bags of dehydrated potato parts.  It’s a risk I simply had to take.  Maybe Santa and St. Peter weren’t even watching and doling out the points… Perhaps it was all for naught…. Still, I willingly exchanged a bit of my earthly existence to do it and I don’t regret it:

I taught a six-year-old girl to knit.

Teaching six-year-olds to knit is like the pain one inflicts on oneself while jogging.  You tell yourself that Actual Good is coming from this dreaded activity that feels so immensely good to Stop doing.  You feel exhausted and relieved when the session is concluded and you tell yourself that embracing pain on your own terms gives one a greater capacity for dealing with pain that occurs not on one’s terms.  Acts of perseverance increase our resilience.  Choosing to endure “what must be done” builds Character.

The little girl, with eyes as dangerous as the knitting needles she brandishes, is a total Character.  I adore her.  She is Little Miss Ravenlocks,  the next door neighbor of an elderly friend of mine whom I visit regularly.    The little girl and I are the only ones allowed into this friend’s house, wearing masks of course, during the pandemic.   Little Miss Ravenlocks visits my friend every day and they color and draw and take nature walks and tend my friend’s sheep. A few months ago, when my friend’s sheep dog died, this little girl, who had learned all the commands from watching the dog, took to running the sheep in for her.  “She is as good as any Border Collie,” says my friend proudly, “and she responds just about the same to the whistles.”   Her school is closed and her mother, currently working from home due to Covid-19, has to fit in home-schooling around a demanding job.  Both are grateful that she can escape to the farm next door to play and run.  She has been begging to knit for a while now.

I don’t have the foggiest idea how to teach someone to knit in a socially distanced way, especially a six-year-old who is part Border Collie.  So It’s not long before we are tangled together, hands, fingers, yarn, needles.  I decide to teach her the European way of knitting, so we can keep the yarn behind the left needle, where it will cause less trouble.  My hands hold hers as I teach her the nursery rhyme that goes with each step:

“In through the front door” (poke the needle in the next loop),

”Round to the back,” (pick up a new loop of yarn in the back),

“Peek through the window,” (bring new loop through the old loop)

“And Off Jumps Jack!” (slide old loop off the needle.) 

Again and again we poke and peek and jump together. “In through the front door, round to the back, peek through the window, off jumps Jack!”  We have put six stitches on the needle, because she is six.  Each time we finish the row, we count and pull.  Our piece gets longer each time and she vibrates all over with glee, like a puppy asking to have a ball thrown again.

“This is way more fun even than I thought it would be!” she says, visibly bouncing on the seat next to me. “

“I’m so glad,” I mutter, as we struggle to get another batch of Jacks jumping.  The thick, fuzzy yarn splices easily and her loose stitches are hard to keep on the bamboo needles.  Unless they are suddenly way too tight and then that little bastard Jack refuses to jump at all.   We have been chanting and chasing Jack for another ten rows when I decide she can go it alone now.  She is pulling on the needles and becoming restless and Prudence has had about enough of Jack and his capricious ways.  Prudence just wants to grab the needles and do it all herself.  I tell Prudence to go sit on the couch and commiserate with Grundalina.  It’s Little Miss Ravenlock’s turn. Children don’t learn from telling; they learn from Doing.  We need to get out of her way.

The bright eyes gaze at the yarn in her hands.  It looks different, alien, without my hands there, over hers.  Instantly, she forgets everything.  “How does it go?” she wants to know.  “I think I forget.”

“Nonsense,” I reassure her. “You did not forget.  Your brain just got a little tired and the screen went blank while it thinks this out.  Say the rhyme and let your hands stay still.”  She does.  She knows the rhyme perfectly. 

“So, what comes first? How do you get in the front door?”  She is frozen, staring.  She shrugs her shoulders.   “Why don’t we take a small rest?” I suggest.  “I promise, you’ll remember after a wee break.”

But she does not want to rest.  “I want to knit a scarf for my daddy,” she insists, panting. “And then I’m going to make some mittens for Mommy.”  Clearly, she has a lot to do before she has to go home today.  The Border Collie in her has no time for rest.

“You are going to be a wonderful knitter,” I tell her confidently.

“I’m very good at this already,” she says with aplomb, momentarily oblivious to the fact that she is stuck and awaiting instructions. “AND did you know I have FIVE best friends?”

“That’s wonderful,” I say.  “I can see that you have very skillful little fingers and a lot of dexterity—that means your fingers like to play with tiny things—but what is going to make you such a great knitter is that you don’t want to quit.  That is an amazing thing in any learner.  The Best Knitters are very patient and persistent.  Knitting a scarf or some mittens takes an awfully long time.”

She shrugs and wiggles happily at the news.  “I’m going to knit for everybody!”  She looks at the ball of yarn I have given her.  “How did you know that Red is my favorite color?”

“I guessed.  And it’s one of my favorites too, so I had some lying around that I could share.”

She hugs it.  “I’m going to make so many things out of this!”

I do not have the heart to tell her that she’ll be lucky to get a ratty little pot-holder or two out of it.  There is not much yarn.  She has no clue that one needs multiple skeins for projects—two for socks, nine for sweaters, and four for a shawl.  She is too busily full of generosity and idealism and enthusiasm.  She is going to get this Jack character to behave on the needle and then she is going to slip-cover everyone she knows in wool and Love.

I look at her and smile.  I have been her.  I have had those same thoughts.  Every creative person does.   I know that, even if her tiny hands falter and forget the stitches, she is already a Knitter.

She slips all the loops off the needle by accident.  “Ooops!”  she shouts, “Aaaagh! Now what?”

“You tell me!”

“Put them back on?”

“Clever girl!”  Little Miss Ravenlocks re-inserts the needle deftly through the loops and begins the rhyming again.  She manages to knit a whole row by herself. 

“See?” I say, “You did not forget.  Your brain was just chewing.”

She arches an eyebrow and gives me that look that well-brought-up children give grown-ups who are weird but they are too polite to say so.  

“But I am afraid I will forget,” she says.  “What if I forget?”

“Then I shall simply teach you again!” I say. “Only next time you will learn faster.  Most people have to learn to knit several times before they get the hang of it.  You can have as many lessons as you want, as long as you think it is fun.”

“That reminds me,” says my friend, who has been listening from a nearby chair. “Her mother wants to pay you for doing this.  We’ll send her home tonight with a note saying how much you charge and she’ll send over a cheque for next time.”

I look at the girl, whose dark head is bent over her knitting, which is now a tangled mess, and I announce in bold, theatrical tones “But I am SO expensive!  I charge a LOT.”  The little girl looks unconcerned.  Her parents can afford it.  I continue “But I cannot take money from grown-ups.  I only charge my students.  Little Miss Ravenlocks is going to have to pay for this all by herself.”  Now, I have her attention!

“But I don’t have any money,” she says blithely.

“I don’t charge money,” I say ominously.

“Then how can I pay?”

I explain.

“I just paid you. I paid you in good time, yarn, and needles.  Now—someday when you are a fabulous knitter—you must teach at least one other person to knit too.  And then we will be even.  You have fifty years to do it. Make it fifty-three.  Do we have a deal?”

“I’m going to teach FIVE-- my five best friends!” she says excitedly. 

“I’m only charging you to teach ONE,” I say.  “And it doesn’t have to be soon. Just Someday…when you are a little old lady like me, take a little person and teach him or her to knit.  It’s something we have to pass on.”

“Like the virus, but in a good way,” she says.

Yes. Precisely.

“But what if I teach five.  Because they are all my best friends and I don’t think Ashley even knows that knitting exists.  She’s going to be so surprised,” she says with emphasis.

“Well,” I say, “The more you teach, the richer we all will be!”

Gradually, the light fades and it is time to walk her home and tell her that she must NEVER run with knitting needles and that they need to be kept in a safe space at all times.  She nods and scurries away on blurry feet that barely qualify as “walking.”  “I need to get home and practice,” she calls from the darkness.

Later, I get a text from her mother, which reads “Thank you so much!  I heard you are getting all the money she makes teaching others to knit!”   I guess this savvy little six-year-old sees me as the originator of some pyramid marketing scheme—or the Fagan of knitwear! Ha!

Giving someone who has the energy of a Border Collie two sharpened sticks and asking her to keep them pointed in the right direction is as big an act of Faith as anything I have ever done.  But, bless her, she listened.  She was ready to learn.  Prudence and Grundalina survived.  No one gave up—And we all shared in triumph.

Today, as our country (and the world) waits with bated breath for our election results, it does my heart some good to think that Little Miss Ravenlocks is at home, cajoling that rascal Jack to make his jumps, oblivious to the world we are creating for her.  (I hope we can clean it up before she finds out.)  As soon as I finish this blog, I’ll pick up my own wool and needles and make something lovely out of all this stress that needs to go somewhere. Binge-knitting is one of the more socially acceptable numbing behaviours I can turn to at a time like this.  I am tired of “doom-scrolling” through messages that physically hurt my stomach to read.  I am tired of the rhetoric that is so filled with hate and I’m so bewildered by people, some of whom I love dearly, whose logic does not match my own.  In a land where so much is deeply broken, we need Menders, Healers, Cooks, and Fixers.  The politicians aren’t going to fix it, no matter who wins; WE are.  It’s up to us, Dear Ones! It’s time to create the kind of world we want to live in. (Mine is where every six-year-old learns to knit!) 

Our country is a mess and we have serious work to do. Yet, admitting that we have problems is a fantastic act of optimism because it allows for the consideration that “Things could be better.” Yes! Now how? What would that take? Are you willing to pitch in?

I know, deep in my heart, that if we put our left hands and right hands gently together in the middle and handle our sharp sticks carefully, we can create Something…um probably something pretty dreadful, much like a six-year-old’s first scrap of knitting, but it would give us all the hope of Something Better—that’s how it is when we are just learning.  Let’s not quit.  Maybe our first project could be a crummy little pot-holder for this Melting Pot that is boiling over…

I love you SEW much, no matter who you voted for. I honor your right to choose.  Now let’s reclaim our Dignity and get to work.  Let the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Get thee behind me, Milk Dud!

“I can resist anything except temptation.” —Oscar Wilde

Greetings Dear Ones,

Halloween looms, yet I have not a single costume to sew.  After nearly eight months of universal mask wearing and depressed candy bingeing, does such a “holiday” even have any relevance in 2020?  Who knows?  I plan to dress up like a witch anyway and dance widdershins around a campfire of weeds and brush made from clearing the Land of Lost Plots.  I’m not sure there will be treats—or even what a “treat” means these days.

Three hundred and sixty-three days a year I am very anti-candy and will tell anyone within earshot that it is poison. Years ago, we were known as “that house” that gave away storytelling cassette tapes or cds to trick-or-treaters. (Yes, I said cassette tapes! That’s how long ago it was…) My inner child, however, is pestering me. “What,” she wants to know, “about the Milk Duds?” She has become obsessed with these nasty little sugar scabs after years of raiding my children’s cauldrons and confiscating them because they were “bad for their teeth.” Snickers, Reeses, Dove chocolates—all notoriously bad for children’s teeth and must be donated to the nearest self-sacrificing mother stepping up to do her bit for the sake of her children!

Now, when I buy candy… um… “for the neighbors,”  (yeah, that’s it), I pick out all mini milk dud boxes and stash them safely in my laundry cupboard.  After all, I really wouldn’t like to endanger anyone’s denture work during a pandemic when it’s so hard to see a dentist! I would never suffer anyone to undergo pain I would not endure myself. I’m noble like that.

Recently, a fellow traveler, weary of isolation in the time of Covid, asks me an intriguing question: “Where do your emotional calories come from?”  What “feeds” you, nourishes you, and keeps you strong in times of trouble?”  I pause and consider those Milk Duds.  What does she mean?  Does she mean “treat” calories or what might be considered emotional Kale? Given the choice between kale and a Milk Dud, kale is not really the thing I would consider a treat. Yet, I feel very good when I eat it and I eat it all year round, growing as much of it as I can in the garden and then purchasing the rest.   I feel disgusting when I eat Milk Duds and allow myself to have them once a year at Halloween only.  This year, I cannot decide when, or even if, I will eat them.   They are still in the laundry room, hidden away in their little basket.   Do I eat them as a reward?  A reward for what?  If I am feeling well and doing well, why would I want to give myself a stomach ache and then feel awful? Or do I eat them when my resistance is low, when I feel like I’m failing everything anyway, and I feel terrible already?  How will doing this help lift me out of the rut? And yet, I LOVE Milk Duds so much!  What then, exactly, is a treat for me? I hoard my little stock of toffee sugar clots in rebellion against the idea of permanent deprivation, while my inner child threatens to fling herself off the nearest bridge if she doesn’t get her way. “I am a Grown-Up, damn it,” I insist petulantly.  I get to decide stuff like this. I am “allowed” these Milk Duds, if I truly want them, no matter what Prudence has to say about it. I don’t even have to wait until October 31st.  But when? And Why?

It brings me back to the over-arching notion of what good self-care means for me.  In some ways, I believe that self care involves doing all the things I am supposed to do for myself –things like eat kale; be on time for appointments; pay bills and keep to the budget; keep the kitchen tidy and stocked with more than just popcorn and Tabasco sauce; make sure dog poop gets picked up before someone tromps it all over the house like a shoe-shaped shit-stamp… These make life more manageable on some level but I don’t necessarily consider them as “filling some need”—more like their absence creates more need, or an unhealthy environment.  I hate to exercise but I feel better if I do. Caring for my children, for others, for the house, for the garden and the sheep and chickens—yes, these all “feed” me in some way.  But they are also chores that drain me too.  

Some things—like playing music, dancing, knitting, sewing, spinning wool—these are things that feed my spirit—but doing them takes time away from other things.  Singing, praying, being outside—these are things I can do without much fatigue but other things fall into a swinging sort of space where they drain or nourish me depending on me, on them, on the day, and the overall load.  If things can be done with leisure, at a pace that suits me, such as weeding, ironing, cooking, or cleaning, they can be extremely nourishing and fulfilling tasks.  There is nothing I like quite as much as settling into a Saturday afternoon’s ironing or mending with Brian O’Donovan’s “A Celtic Soujourn” or a good podcast like Trad Café on in the background while I take my time.  Keeping domestic things in a reasonable balance is the wholesome “Kale” of my emotional life.  There are a few elements of my life, while quite good for me, that are so depleting they cannot be sustained for very long: Each day, I find I can run for no more than 30-40 minutes, and I can only write for about 2 hours. Then I must wait until the next day for the tank to refill.

I think about the question, “what feeds me?” and it is so depressing to look at my life, as it is now, and realize that very little emotional food does not come with some sort of fatigue or “cost.”  The chaos embedded in this lifestyle means that if I do this: _______________ (insert deeply fulfilling activity that causes my soul to blossom) then I am not doing that:_____________(insert obligation which ensures the survival of civilization on some level, or at least the prevention of tooth decay…) and then some little neglected thing flares into a bonfire I have to stop everything to put out.  While I tend to one “bonfire,” of course, by default, I am neglecting a host of other little things which are themselves turning into bonfires as we speak.  Eventually, I find myself lurching from crisis to crisis, burned and dazed, with my eyebrows singed off,  because I let the general management of things go in favor of  some little “Emotional Milk Dud” I needed that wasn’t part of a healthy plan.  These “EMDs” come at a heavy cost.  They, like real Milk Duds, cannot be daily fare.  Or so I tell myself, with a familiar, sinking, deprived feeling.

I think about how much I love Milk Duds, the real ones and the emotional ones.  I think about how being so fiercely wedded to my own schedule  ensures that I cannot contribute to others out of sequence, nor ever, do I have the time available to let them contribute to me in ways I am not the boss of.   This feels like too much Kale, too much perfection with nothing “perfect” about it at all.

I think about my dear friend, who died of cancer the year before my own life, as I knew it then, came tumbling down in the rubble of divorce.  We used to talk about when she would give up fighting.  She was consuming nothing but raw juices and herbal supplements at that point, in a last ditch bargain to be able to see her kids graduate high school, to attend their someday weddings, to hold her grandchildren, or sip red wine in jazz cafes.  She said “Any day now, when the doctors give the signal that nothing more can be done, you and I are going to go to New York city to be like two big hungry caterpillars who eat their way around all my favorite menus and memories.  I want to taste everything bad for me just one more time.  I can’t wait until all I eat is ice-cream.  Not just any ice cream, either—the slow-churned homemade stuff at Rota Spring Farm, where the cows hang over the fence and watch you...”  And we would both sigh and continue our sugar-free bargaining for “something better” than having what we truly wanted, as life ebbed from us both.

We never made it to New York.

Even scarier than the ancient Celtic idea that the dead get to roam the earth for a night, or fears surrounding the upcoming election, is the idea that we spend a lot of time Alive yet not daring to Live.  In our loneliness and lock-downs, we remember those Milk Dud dance partners, those Milk Dud late nights until dawn, those Milk Dud impulses and the cavities they inevitably brought our teeth, morals, or hearts.  Despite our abstinence, Rot sets in around the longing to taste them one more time. We feel deprived.  In a world more-than-usually obsessed with avoiding Death, how much poison are we allowed in order to “Live a little”?

At its core, Maturity seems to be about Trust. Trust is the foundation of our ability to transform ourselves.  If we trust ourselves, we treat ourselves better.  If we trust each other, we treat each other better. Can we trust ourselves to do the best things? Make the best choices? We have some big choices coming up. Do we know what to cut out and what to allow without creating tyranny? Do we live for Today or put it off until Tomorrow? And HOW are we to deny, reward, or comfort ourselves when that sweet, golden Darkness calls from the Laundry room cupboard?

I’m Curious.  How are you treating yourself, Dear One? Where is your daily nourishment? What is your “kale”? And again, the question that plagues me still: “When can we eat the Milk Duds?”

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Twisted

“Don’t be looking up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers.” D.B.C. Pierre

Greetings My Dear Ones!

It’s been a delicious fall—with golden, crunchy cornflake days and milky swaths of stars at night, seasoned with sweet apples and the scent of falling leaves.  Yum! The Maple trees are in full glory and my commute to work makes me feel like I live in a brochure for some elite university. But the nighttime temperatures are dropping now so we in New England are moving into the next steps of our annual dance: trying to avoid putting on the central heating until November 1st.   We wear more layers than a Kardashian wedding cake and tell whiners to “put on a sweater; rake some leaves; have some hot apple cider; move the wood pile from one side of the yard to the other…” all of which are traditional ways of getting warm here.

The cold makes us sleep better (as does the stacking of wood and cleaning of gutters) but when we start waking up with red noses in the morning, we know a few other things are happening as surely as we know the Kardashians are going to need more wedding cake. And despite all our thinking, planning, hoping, and doing, the gates are not yet shut on 2020—there is still plenty of time for things to go awry…get twisted…and Life may take us on turns we do not expect.

The rams are feeling amorous.  It’s Tupping Season. The cold weather charges sheep libido and makes normally tractable, pleasant fellows beat their horns against walls and behave with all the rationality of linebackers trying to smash a line of scrimmage.  The ewes, like a bunch of weary, middle-aged housewives, roll their eyes and brace themselves for The Inevitable with the stoicism of Queen Victoria who advised her married daughter in Russia to “just lie back and think of England.”  While a fellow shepherdess friend and I were going over bloodlines and arranging marriages, her ram bashed his way out of his pen and helped himself to a few ewes who were not on his list of eligible girlfriends—so Spring is going to bring a few surprises!

The first whiff of cold also makes Otherwise Rational people begin to fantasize about disposing of all of their disposable income on highly specialized gear so they can spend endless trips sliding down mountains encrusted in precipitation. That is, the mountains will be encrusted in precipitation—the people will be encrusted in things like down, quivit, alpaca, gortex, and smart wool. (Is there such a thing as dumb wool? I think not!)  They need garments created in labs or packed with rare animal fibers, and very expensively glazed boards on their feet so they can ride in thrilling vertical circles all day until it’s time to guzzle hot toddies by the fire and boast about how many circles they managed and how smart their wool was.

In my little shop, a horror has arrived—the first down jacket that needs a new zipper.  Of course I will do it. I can. I MUST.  But…. If just a teaspoon of that down escapes, it will make the entire shop like a snow globe for a week.  Down has the magical property of expanding in every possible direction with the speed of a curse.  It’s as unmanageable as a ram below 40 degrees. Any seamster reading this is nodding her/his head.  They can already taste the down I will be eating until Prom season arrives and replaces it with glitter.  If there is a prom season this spring… (Who would ever have thought I would miss glitter!) (On second thought, I still don’t!)

Another young man arrives with a fun puzzle.  “I bought this [name brand] jacket at a ski swap last year and I’ve been meaning to get it fixed.  It’s an awesome jacket!  I mean it’s [name brand] for [naughty word]’s sake!  You can’t beat it.  I can’t figure out why it was so cheap.  It looks perfect on the outside but I can’t get my arm in one of the sleeves.  It’s so weird…Look…” he says getting the jacket out of his bag and trying it on. “One arm goes in great, see?” he pops his hand through to the bottom of the sleeve and waves at himself. “The other one doesn’t.” He struggles and struggles to jam his right arm into the sleeve.  “I can’t figure it out…it just won’t go in!” He takes the jacket off again and starts to explore the sleeve from the cuff end.  “I can get my hand most of the way up from this end…” he flips the jacket over and inserts his hand at the shoulder end “and most of the way down from this end….but I cannot get my hands to meet.  Something’s in the way but there’s nothing there. I can’t figure it out! Weird, eh?”

The young man is so taken with this mystery that I say nothing for several moments, enjoying his amazement and his continued explorations with the fond tenderness of a mother watching a baby try to get a clothespin out of a milk bottle. I wonder how many hours this enchanting activity has already occupied him at home.  I have seen this exact problem once before in a manufactured jacket and accidentally created it myself many times.  It will be stunningly easy to fix. I can’t wait. 

“The lining is twisted,” I say.

“What do you mean?” he wants to know.

“The inner lining got twisted when they put the jacket together.  It’s easy to do—I have to be careful every time I shorten the sleeves on any jacket with a lining that I don’t do it by accident.  Don’t worry—it’s an easy fix.  All I have to do is cut the cuff off, untwist the lining, then sew the cuff back on. Simple.”

“But the cuff isn’t twisted,” he insists. “It looks perfect. It’s a [name brand]!”

“Yes, I know,” I say, “because it is not twisted on the outside! It’s twisted in the inside.”

His eyes widen.  He is wearing a mask but beneath it I know his nostrils are flaring and he is pulling back like a stock animal I am trying to load on a trailer he refuses to board.

“Never mind,” I say, “It’s alright.  I know what to do.  Come back in a couple hours. Both sleeves will work and you’ll have gotten yourself a real bargain of a skiing jacket.  It’s going to look perfect, just like it does now, only you’ll be able to get your arms in it.”

Reluctantly, he stops trying to poke his hands through the sleeve and hands me the jacket and departs. 

It always amazes me that people who come to me for help often get stuck in the act of asking for help because they want me to admit they cannot be helped, that this mysterious affliction is one inflicted upon them by the gods.  I have been summoned to marvel and condole, not actually assist.   Many people are caught in the indecision caused by not fully understanding what their problem is to start with, or thinking it is something else instead.   I think of the gurus who tell us “Your life is the physical manifestation of the conversation you are having in your head.”

Some of us are twisted. 

We are unable to recognize solutions to our problems because, fundamentally, we don’t even understand what our problems are!   We just know that something is Unmanageable.  Inside, beneath a [name brand] exterior of “perfection,” we can’t get from top to bottom without a glitch.  We’re Stuck.

Lots of things are getting twisted these days—not just sleeves but Words, meanings, intentions.  There is a sly seduction to noisy storms and flashes, tempers spinning “truths” such as some people choose to shape them.  It can feel counterintuitive during a time of what feels like crisis, panic, and genuine emergency for so many others for us to pull back, hunker down, and find a way to let ourselves untwist yet it is absolutely necessary to cut ourselves off, momentarily—from whatever holds us twisted—so that we can let gravity gently untangle us, so that we can find our right shape and place, so that we can be more effective when we re-enter the fray.   If we are unclear of our purpose, our passions may be used against us and we will fight only ourselves.

No matter how perfect we may appear on the outside, we are no actual Good to anyone if we are twisted on the inside.  We are utterly unable to fulfill our purpose and intentions.  When only our mouths function and our minds, hands, or hearts don’t or can’t—there’s some deep work we need to do.  

Ultimately, what keeps us warm and decent is what is Inside, closest to us. Once we fix that, we can weather any storm that comes our way.  We might even get to have the fun we set out to have.  One thing’s for sure, Spring of 2021 is going to deliver some loveable surprises! (at least in one barn I know…)

May you be warm and cozy and treat yourselves and others Gently in the next weeks! May we all have Love and patience for those who are Stuck.  As an exhausted mother of toddlers confided recently, “Screaming at them just doesn’t work.” Keep up your Good Work my Dearies and may the Mending Continue!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy