Fresh Water

“Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”—C. Fields

Greetings Dear Ones!

Rabbit, Rabbit!  A pinch and a hug for the first of the month! I hope this finds you snug and cozy, wherever you may be.  Here, Dawn is just a thin crack in the grey bowl over the trees but morning logs of preserved sunlight are bursting back into a self-contained inferno in the wood stove, which is cackling merrily, as if it has just heard a good joke or a good fart, not sure which—the dog is doing both.  I’m getting another delivery of hay today, and I have a cup of tea right now—Bliss is running high. I know the first thing on the shop docket is to put not one but two new zippers in a down ski coat but even that cannot diminish the deep serenity of this moment as I pause to be with You.   It’s that time of year when the BTUs of a cup of tea or a small dog on one’s lap can become life sustaining.  

Everything is an hourglass on a farm—the wood going down in the woodpile, the hay mow going down in the barn.  The hot things born on the earth, nourished by the sun, feel prickly, splintery yet slippery, as they pour through our hands into hungry mouths of stoves and cattle.  The cool water under the ground can be summoned with a pull on the pump handle.  It feels like pure magic to pull what is cold and mysterious from the unseen depths beneath our feet.  There is no “gathering” as much as there is flow and containment of that flow.  Both are needed to keep the animals alive.   

Today, I want to share with you the story of the Water:  

Once upon a time, a young, ambitious, silly, middle-aged woman moved to a farm.  There was a dilapidated but cute little barn, which she quickly repaired and filled with cute, thirsty little animals. Unfortunately, the water hydrant was broken so the only way to get water to her animals, was to drag buckets of water from a spigot on the house down to the barn, a distance of about 50 yards.  In the frigid winter temperatures, the water in their buckets froze twice a day and twice a day she had to bash the ice out and replace it with liquid water they lapped or slurped and filled their beaks with gratefully.  (Actually, they filled their beaks with water.)  She read about how women “of a certain age” need to do weight-bearing activity to maintain their bone density so she was never unhappy about all the weight lifting she was doing on a daily basis.  Even when the young steers began sucking up as much as twenty gallons a day, she maintained a rugged optimism about her personal “gym.” This went on for more than a year, in scorching sun, cool moonlight, every day, in every weather.  She always meant to get that pump sorted out but somehow she never did and bolstered her inertia with the idea that the extra work was “good for her.” Something that started out as temporary became Habit. (All habits, whether wretched or wonderful, get their hold when we say to ourselves, “ok, I’m only going to do this ONE more time!”)

It wasn’t until she contemplated leaving the farm for more than a day that she realized she would need to do something about the water situation. A Habit had to change. 

We have no idea how weird we really are until we have to leave instructions for a house-sitter who is going to take the reins of our lives for a mere weekend. That’s when all the unconscious quirks suddenly make themselves visible.  One might find oneself writing to fellow adults statements like “feed the wounded chicken blueberries while you spray her gently with saline from the plastic bottle marked ketchup” or “please inspect all dehydrating scrotums daily for infectious discharge…”  or, in the case of the mother of a toddler, “if [the person you are watching] poops in the potty, she is allowed a yellow treat.”  Such statements give us pause and make us consider that our lives are not as conventional as we think, or perhaps we are going through a little phase that simply should not be explained to outsiders.

She found herself stymied by an inability to convey, in words, her system of watering the animals and decided it was just going to be easier to dig a six- foot hole in the ground and try her hand at replacing the water hydrant in the barn. It’s one thing to ask another person to handle your nuttiness for a weekend; it’s another thing entirely to ask her to give herself a hernia lifting thirty gallons of water downhill on a daily basis.   

Naturally, she did tried to hire a plumber to do the work, but apparently they are all busy for the next three years so Youtube videos, consultations with her beloved housemates and the staff of the local hardware store were the next best bet.  She would have to do this herself (mostly).  Fine.  Bring it.  As Glennon Doyle says, “We can do hard things.” She tried to listen carefully as the sales clerk at Brown and Roberts explained how, underground, she was going to need to patch some pieces of pipe together to create the elbow joint connecting two different sizes of pipe.  The joint needed to be heated, glued, etc… but all she could hear was “the thing with the thing needs to connect to the thing but don’t let stuff get in the thing or you’re, well….”  She must have looked a little panic-stricken over the top of her mask because an interested bystander said, “Don’t look so worried. Soon you’ll be teaching other people how to do this.” 

On a Friday night, after sewing all day, she came home, grabbed a spade and some rage and went to work. (It always makes one stronger, when doing manual labor, to think of vintage silk getting jammed in a sewing machine and chewed into a greasy mess by the underworkings of the bobbin… or irons that spit rust on wedding gowns…. or customers who think they might have paid you when they dropped off their clothing, when they didn’t and you know they didn’t but somehow they make you feel like a robber when they grudgingly pay you again… and there’s always that damn GLITTER for those truly weak moments when you need an extra push!)  

Down she went, grunt by grunt, pants filling with accumulating grit, until she was shoulder deep into the ground, getting in touch with her internal Welsh pit pony, digging until she found the source of the Nile, or the pipe which brought water to the barn, whichever came first.  Inevitably, she got distracted and started kind of hoping to strike gold, but then figured if she didn’t have to haul water all winter, that would be pretty much the same thing.  After two days and one rain storm, in which the hole caved in and had to be entirely re-dug (summoning More Rage), an exhausted, exhultant, now-thoroughly-rageless woman celebrated having running water to the barn.  

She lifted the spigot handle and water flowed as if by magic. There was much rejoicing.  Again and again, checking for leaks, incredulous that IT WORKED, she tried the water.  Then, she attached a hose and tried that. MAGIC.   All the animals were as Astonished as she was. The calves saw the hose come over the top of their wall and spray water into their bucket and panicked. They ran backwards, crapping as they went.  They were utterly traumatized by the idea that it could spontaneously rain directly into their bucket.  They had never seen anything like this. The woman felt like an Empress for a whole day.  It’s quite an intoxicating thing to be able to make it rain on a whim and have everyone around you poop themselves.  

She went away and returned home and the House-sitter survived and so did all the creatures, including “Blueberry Girl” and the dangling dingle brothers.  Things went back to whatever passes for “Normal” (ha!! Yeah…ok…). Yet the magic of the water hasn’t faded for that dear, mad, silly, courageous woman. She goes down on frosty mornings and flips the pump handle up and holds her steamy breath.  There is a moment of silence that always seems to last a fraction too long before there is a hidden burble, a burp, then a gush as the clear stick of water strikes the bottom of the bucket and then morphs into a puddle that rises…  She is amazed and grateful every time.  Things look like dusty chaos up above, but in the dark Silence below, the water is always there, waiting to be summoned.  Her Joy would not be the same at all if she had not carried the water for a year, then dug deep (TWICE!!!), or made a change because she tried to treat someone else better than she treats herself.    

Some of you will think this story is about water.  Of course it isn’t.  (Yes, Dear Katie and Nora, I just deleted “that” paragraph where Prudence is desperate to cram a bunch of morals down your craw.) Draw your own conclusions. And your own water!  The work is worth it.  I know you are doing it. Keep going! 

I love you sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

The best tool ever

Greetings Dear Ones! 

A friend of mine who stops by my shop occasionally for a spot of tea and chit-chat,  discovers me hunched over my machine doing what he describes as “vexated growling” but could also be a form of forlorn moo-ing.  It all depends on whether one sees me as predator or prey. 

I attempt simultaneously to apologize and to blame the ski pants jammed in the machine under yet another broken needle.  As he pulls out the chair from the dressing room and settles himself comfortably, he looks at me curiously and asks, “Nancy, what is it you like to do? I’ve heard you grumble about curtains, zippers, pleats and cuffs, denim overalls and dog clothes. You seem to hate modern synthetics, old-fashioned moth holes, and anything to do with glitter.  I’ve heard you complain about custom work as well as mending.  Do you even like your work? Or are you just doing this for the cash?  Would you still do all this if you won a million dollars in the lottery?”   

Instantly, I think of a contrite four-year-old girl who once said to her exhausted grandmother, “Please don’t tell Mummy I was growling!”  Having been caught “growling” I too think that I am in trouble. 

Defiantly, I fix him with a cheeky grin over my cheap plastic “cheater” glasses and say as “gangsta” as I can manage, “Honey, I be doing this for the pure glamour and sex appeal.  Seamstresses like me, we make it Big! We ride around in limos, in white fur coats, with lots of gold chains and bling and minions quaffing Chivas Regal and we be like… Yo! Wwwwhut Up dude…”  

We both laugh uproariously.  He knows me well enough to know if I ever “make it big” I will travel by ox cart and my wool-and-calico-clad minions will drink Kombucha. (Who am I kidding? I’ll never have minions! Onions and bunions maybe…) He doesn’t stay nearly as long as his questions, which haunt me the rest of the day.   

I LOVE all the things I do.  I also… occasionally… hate them.  I adore my customers and I am filled with joy at being able to help them.  So why am intermittently resentful? Does Workaholic me like only the hard work that makes us look impressive? Does Slacker me like only the easy stuff? Which is it? Do I simply need what people in my youth called “an attitude adjustment?”  

Shortly after, another customer arrives and is breathless to tell me that there is a sewing machine for sale in a second-hand shop nearby.  She wants me to pounce on it—close up shop early if I have to—to be sure to get it.  I look around my shop.  It is filled with sewing machines and various tools. I don’t need another one.  She seems crestfallen.  She doesn’t even know what kind it is.  She just keeps insisting it is “old” as if that should be all I need to know.   “I don’t need more tools,” I joke gently, “I just need at least three more of me to use the ones I have!”   She leaves with an air that tells me she does not like to be disobeyed.

I get back to the ski pants and the questions and now a layer of thoughts about tools and which ones are the most valuable to me.  The truth is that I could do ninety percent of all my work with just a simple needle and thread.  Perhaps a pair of good scissors… or just some sharper teeth.  This is not super high-tech stuff.  It’s old-fashioned hand-eye neurology and years of patient repetition you cannot buy, even from a second-hand store.  (It’s First Hand experience!)

These damn ski pants are NOT behaving.  I am growl-mooing again. 

Suddenly, I remember what my BEST TOOL EVER is….

Ready?   

I’ll let you in on a tiny secret I’ve discovered this year. Of all the tools in my little shop—the sergers, the seam rippers, the thimbles and thread--the tool that makes the work turn out the best is Gratitude.   I’m not kidding.  I know that sounds like a Pollyanna-ish thing to say designed to make Prudence feel a little warmth in her knickers but it’s the absolute truth.  Gratitude for work makes me do a way better job. I don’t know how but it makes the machines run better; it makes the work go faster; it takes this “job” and makes it a Vocation.  It reminds me of how much I love my customers—even those who bring me dirty horse blankets to mend, or leave fresh mystery stains in their pants.

Gratitude is a secret weapon I need when I am up against the putting in of a new zipper in an ankle-length down parka or a well-meaning dance mom who doesn’t want me to permanently alter a vintage costume that needs to fit two vastly different-sized girls for the same performance the same weekend. 

Gratitude puts me in touch with the Privilege it is to serve.  Gratitude isn’t a feeling, like happiness or being thankful, though it certainly contains both.  I see Gratitude as the action that results from those feelings.  It is love made manifest.  

Whoever said “the Ordinary is the hiding place for the Holy” was clearly talking about hemming ten pairs of jeans for a young man who has already been wearing the excess length as footwear. (The Ordinary is also the hiding place of the holey!)  The Holy beckons me from inside a bombed out jacket, from the back side of a pair of jeans, from a gooey garment that I have been ironing for ten minutes without realizing its owner left a chocolate bar in the side pocket. 

When I lose sight of the sacred nature of this work, my inner being receives nothing but static.  It’s like a radio between channels.  I swiftly disregulate.  Nothing goes well. I break needles and promises.  It’s time to retune the dial. Sometimes I have to lie down on the floor of my shop and think of things to be grateful for in order to climb back up to the cutting table and face what it takes to chop five yards of imported silk into pieces for blouse.  Sometimes I have to lie there for quite a while.  

Gratitude is what gets me through the Resisting and over to the Doing.  It makes me happy with the simplest things—like bobbins that make it to the end of the seam, customers who pick up their stuff promptly, those who say “Thank you for your good work,”  and the little shop dog who reminds me to take a walk in the middle of the day, whether I need it or not.  

Gratitude.  That’s my best tool ever.  I sometimes forget to use it.  Some of my dearest friends who visit the shop often don’t even know I have it.   I feel sad about this and vow to be more publicly grateful more often, which is convenient, because tomorrow is a whole day supposedly devoted to the practice. (That and figuring out who has to tell Aunt Martha she’s not allowed to sit at the kid’s table…)  

Living from a grateful heart means I feel compelled to write this blog.  When I do not feel grateful, I find it hard to write.  I find it hard to appreciate the petty joys and simple charms of all the things that, when I am in love with them, I cannot wait to share with you.  Life is a feast of delicious absurdities and I love YOU so much I want you to share them with me.   These things, these precious details of the warp and weft of our days, deserve to be seen, shared, cherished—slubs, sneds, and all. Gratitude is what turns wretchedness into Love.

Gratitude also helps me accept that I cannot hold my little cosmos together with sheer effort.  Believe me, I try.  I have about as much success as when I try to manhandle (er… woman-handle) 700 pounds of runaway beef in a wooden yoke.   I have literally stepped in front of those two, thinking I could grab their yoke and just stop them, the way the one might stop a runaway VW beetle that has slipped gear and started downhill.  It’s a poor use of one’s energy and hip bones.

Some of us are in fragile places now.  I get letters from The Weary. I hear you, like myself, moo-growling over your chores in the looming dark. Winter brings ancient fears of sickness, cold, and isolation with it—especially as pandemic numbers spike and social groups and families fracture along lines of politics and religion.  I invite you to join me on the floor.  For best effect, I recommend wearing wool socks on your feet and small dogs on your chest but these are strictly optional.   I will close my eyes and think of you, out there, likewise hanging by a thread.   Gratitude is the weaving of all those threads together--the path of Grace that says we are not the only Makers, Menders, or Sustainers.   We are not alone. Gratitude is recognition that you are here too, Dear Ones, doing your part.  You are not alone either.  

Tomorrow is the day, here in America, when we pause and express our patriotic gratitude for all we have then realize we will need to set our alarms for 4:am if we are going to beat the rest of our fellow citizens to More. Casual consumption is now too disappointing for me.  I would rather gaze at the wonder of a Maple tree in its Fall Glory than anything that is sold in a mall.  Instead, I shall feed the dear sheep and calves and witness the glory of the dawn and Really See It. Someday, I’ll wrap it in words and give it to us to share.

Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you may be! May our hearts be as full as our tummies.  May we share our blessings, from the trivial to the super-sized, and may we always continue the Mending. I am so grateful to you for reading, for commenting, for sharing—and for all the Good Mending you do for this aching world of mysteries and miracles.  I love you sew much! 

Gratefully,

Nancy

Your inner Voice has Garlic Breath

“Garlick maketh a man wynke, drynke, and stynke.”—Thomas Nashe

Greetings, Dear Ones!

Little by little the darkness deepens and the fall chores hasten to get themselves done in the slim, grey selvedges of Time.  Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” illuminates a variety of tasks, igniting temporary bits of tinder (ok, the infamous Dating App has RUINED that word for Prudence… we mean it in its most old-fashioned sense). Such match-bursts are destined to become cozy candles to light our way forward to Spring or accidental sudden bonfires I must put out.  On the “bonfires” list is whatever is currently causing the cellar to flood each time it rains (I have already cleaned the gutter…), windows that whistle in the wind, and certain doors that are yet to open (or shut).  Under the “cheerful candle” list, I finally got the garlic planted this week!  Woo Hoo! 

It is always nice to feel that the garlic futures are secure. There will be much “wynken, dryken, and stynken” among the resident descendents of Roman Gladiators here: We can either pack our wounds with it, brush our teeth with it, or use it, more mundanely, to flavor our daily bread.  In any case, it’s a boon.   It was delightful to have the help of my dear, current lodger, who had never planted garlic before.   I showed him how to seat the little cloves in the rich black soil so that the points grew up and the roots grew down.  His eyes glowed with the charm of churning the earth and tucking away secrets for our future selves to seek.  I was happy to share the work as well as the joy. Fall planting is a pleasure that never dims for me.  I love feeling my fingers in the dirt, numbly separating the tiny cloves, blessing each one, covering it in dirt and thick blankets of partially composted bedding and dung.   From this frosty filth will one day come a pizza to remember.

So it is with the growth of my soul as it faces The Waiting.

I pause to exult in the number of worms I see wending their way through what once was anemic clay.  Now it pulses with writhing capsules of blood and sinew. “Look!” I shriek excitedly, “Look at the worms!  This soil is so rich!  They are feasting on all that poop we’ve been spreading.  How fabulous!!!”

“How is it they don’t eat what we plant, also?” he asks.  I can’t answer.  I don’t know how they tell the difference between what is living and what is dead, or why any worm in its right mind wouldn’t prefer garlic on the shit it eats.  Given the choice between shit with garlic and shit without, I would definitely choose the shit with garlic.  And yet, I’ve never met a worm with garlic breath.  Garlic makes everything taste better… well, everything except pumpkin pie, I guess, which simply cannot be helped.  There is some Miracle that tells worms what is food for them and what is meant to grow into food for us.

The garlic we plant is so small and dry.  I can’t believe it is just “resting” and not dead.  It has the papery skin of the Very Old.  But like most of us right now, it is only “mostly dead” and, as we have learned from The Princess Bride, “mostly dead is also partly Alive.”  Partly alive is all that matters, whether one is Garlic or a frazzled seamstress heading into Winter.

Of course, this is not exactly the garlic I had wanted to plant so my faith in it wavers a little.  The garlic I wanted to plant is still in the wooden bin at the local Farm & Feed store across the river.  I had just loaded a few plump bulbs into my basket when a Voice of Authority behind me announced, “You don’t want that garlic, Hon, that stuff is the organic stuff that’s $27.99 a pound.  You want the cheap stuff in the little bags in the next bin.  I think there’s some left.” She pointed to some dirty bags containing shriveled blisters lurking in the bottom of a small black bucket.  I’ve seen bunions on the elderly that look more appealing.

I don’t know what made this clerk, clothed head-to-toe in mismatched flannel with tri-color hair and a nose ring, look me up and down and instantly assess without questions that I was not a garlic-at-27-dollars-a-pound kind of gal, but Dutifully, billowing with nameless shame as if I had been caught stealing the garlic, I silently put back the wonderful, fist-sized, purple-striped teardrops of Wealth and Promise that was not for me, and collected a few random small white scabs.  How dare I aspire to the Good Garlic?  What was I thinking? She nodded approvingly and motioned me towards the register where she rang up my bargains.  Prudence almost loved her, except for the nose ring and tartan abuse. 

In the car on the way home, as I cursed myself for being so weak, I could hear my mother’s voice from the back of my head announcing, “That clerk would never have treated you that way if you had been wearing lipstick.  People who wear lipstick get treated like they can afford anything.”  

“Mother!” I answer with teenage exasperation, “it’s not like anyone wears lipstick these days!  Especially with masks!”

“Yes,” says Prudence (who despises vanity in general and lipstick in particular), “but at least go in there in proper street shoes, not mucks. People who shop with poop on their feet are bound to be treated as cheap.”

“Maybe she just saw you as one of her,” said my inner angel,

“What, like someone who’s saving the grocery budget for a new tattoo?” interrupted Prudence.

“No,” said the better angel of my nature, ignoring her. “She was clearly being loving and trying to help you.  You will take such good care of your garlic, it won’t matter one bit what you plant.  Chin up, Dear, All shall be well.  It always is.”

“Does this mean we can get a nose ring?” asked my inner teenager. (We all ignored her.)  

The garlic is now in its bed, covered with a thick counterpane of mulch made mostly of hay the sheep have discarded because one of their colleagues has spit it out, stepped on it, napped on it, pooped in it, or simply sniffed it and looked at it sideways.  Sheep, like all fussy creatures, tend to waste a lot. A thick web of rejection rises from the floor of their pen that I peel off in rolls to tuck over the garden.

The work is done and I am satisfied. Mostly… part of me cannot help thinking about the other garlic. The Good Stuff.  I am filled with guilty regret.  I’ve got to let this go.  But pain is here to teach us where we need to Mend.  I decide to root around in the mind-muck again and figure out Why I am so plagued by this recent exchange. What made me hand my sovereignty away so quickly?  Do I not understand my own needs/wants/desires/budget? What makes a shop girl think she can decide what’s best for me? What makes me think homegrown organic garlic could be seen as the height of extravagance? (Well, it IS, isn’t it?) Am I having “first-world-white-woman” problems or do I need to make my way to some bad coffee and a support group in a dimly-lit church basement somewhere?   With all the pesky voices in my head, why didn’t I listen to the one begging me to “just go ahead and buy the damn garlic!”  Who cares what a feed store cashier thinks?

How many of us do this?  I am not alone, right?  I know I’m not because my own customers act like all shop girls, including me, should be in charge. They do it all the time.  They try to ask me how they should look, how their clothes should look and feel.

“You’re a professional,” insists one, as if I am going to follow him around and take his pulse for the rest of the week.

“No,” I reply firmly, “I am here to make sure YOU get what you want, not I.”  

I am their servant. I am here to give them what they desire. (For the record, Servants do get paid.  Paying, or being “professional” has nothing to do with it.)

Lately, I’ve had a string of younger men coming in to ask me about suits they have been buying from eBay or local thrift stores.  I am excited to help them recycle clothing but some of them have no idea how to go about getting the look they desire.   Mainly because they have no idea what look it is they desire. They buy these big 1980’s jackets and baggy bottoms with pleats and cuffs and think they want to turn them into modern little scraps that could be worn to cycle the Tour de France.  

I think about my garlic as I try to guide them.  “Somewhere between what you want and what you can afford is a delicate balance only you can decide.  You need to take into account the basic integrity of the garment. I’ll tell you what the options are.  The truth is almost anything can be done.  It’s up to you to question what is feasible or reasonable before you send me to hack up this lovely museum piece.  I’m not trying to tell you what to do…”

“I want you to tell me what to do,” says one young man, clearly irritated.

“I can’t.  You need to decide for yourself. On pretty much everything… This is a good way to practice, so that someday, some well-meaning twit won’t scare you away from high-quality garlic.”  He looks alarmed. 

I try another tack.

“When I am out walking my oxen, I need a plan.  Every step of the way, I need to decide where I am going so that I will know whether or not we get there. I’m the leader, so I decide.  I can’t have them deciding these things.  What a mess that would be! It’s the same with suits and garlic. Don’t let anyone, even if you are paying them, push you around.  People can be like oxen, especially when they wear plaid. Love yourself enough to stand firm.”

I can tell he thinks I am going mad.  I don’t mind.  Being the boss of everything is not as great as it’s cracked up to be anyway, so I am happy to withdraw.  It’s time to shrink down into the Silence where we can hear the better angels whisper.  They know our hearts, our gifts, our paths--whom we should love and how we are meant to share the unearned blessings that are our birthrights.  Seasons of light and dark regulate our little worlds, urging us both to “prepare” and create necessary spaces for rest and suspension of the relentless forward momentum of “doing” rather than “being.”  

I have been feeling the darkness deeply this year—trying to embrace it, to see my annual lethargy and melancholy as the part of myself that needs to rest and go to seed.  It is time to go inward, be a small “something-that-is-not-yet”—not a pumpkin or a flower, or a vine, or even a tiny garlic shoot— held by a rich, mysterious darkness.  It’s time to listen better to those grace-filled inner voices—especially the quiet ones with garlic breath.

I love you all sew much! Thanks for your Good Work. May our Mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Mile Eleven

“You will never know your limits unless you push yourself to them.”

Greetings Dear Ones!

I am so sorry there was not a blog published last week.  I got about eleven hundred words into a diatribe on “Following Instructions” and then, as luck would have it, didn’t follow my own instructions, which resulted in some, well… unfortunate results. (“The irony of this amuses No One,” Prudence assures me.)   It was a tough week that included heavy deadlines, two broken sewing machines and the ensuing panic around that, as well as an unfortunate “dietary indiscretion” (when I ate something that really should have been taken out and buried in the garden) that had me unable to trust any sort of bodily rumble, upwards or downwards, for the better part of a day.

On top of it all, there are the inevitable farming dramas that occur when one needs to keep all the animals locked up. It’s hunting season here and the locals can be heard sighting in their guns.  “Every day sounds like Sunday now,” observed a farmer.  Pretty much any of my creatures, especially the fawn-like calves, could look like deer to some enthusiast ready to shoot anything with hair on it, so I can’t let them go roaming the countryside like trick-or-treaters without a chaperone. “You’re a seamstress,” pointed out a friend. “Why don’t you sew them all vests in blaze orange?”  Why not, indeed?  

Add it to the ever-growing to-do list that currently clogs the work table—a list that includes the wishes of an aged female customer who wants me to attach strings to all her waistbands so that she can tighten them herself as necessary.  “Don’t you want me to take in the skirts properly, so they actually fit you?” I asked naively.  “No,” she said sweetly. “I want to have control at all times in case I get a big meal.”  Her word choice arrested me for a moment and made me think she might be out, like the hunters, scouring the hillsides for a big kill.   These aren’t skirts as much as they are expandable bags where she might hide some purloined mutton or a side of brussel sprouts.

With the clocks going back last weekend and the ever-increasing cold and dark, I feel a sense of desperation creeping in.  My brain has divided itself into three parts.  One is continually worrying about “all that is not done,” one is still berating me for eating anything that lurks at the back of the fridge, and the other is playing a non-stop “ear maggot” from a wonderful tune called “The Night We Had The Bears.”  It’s an up-tempo reel, spun from the heavens by a tunesmith named Jenna Moynihan that has become the soundtrack to my hurrying.  Literally, I feel as if I am being chased by bears.  It’s “mile eleven” all over again.

My daughter called me from Boston on Sunday, jubilant because she had just finished her very first half marathon.  I had wanted to run it with her, or at least be there to cheer for her, but too much work (and potential dysentery) threatened, so I stayed home and trained the oxen instead.  (Yes, Prudence… another bullshite excuse…)

“How was mile 11?” I wanted to know.  Mile eleven is always my worst mile.  With ten miles behind me and only 3.1 to go, I can barely suppress the urge to curl myself in the fetal position, tongue on tarmac, and wait for the people in orange vests to scrape me into whatever vessel one uses to transport road kill. No amount of faith or Gatorade can sustain me in that moment.   I have been known to crawl, to retch, to limp, even to sneak into the bushes and relieve myself, on mile eleven.  But then, I am not the best at getting myself well-conditioned for athletic performances.   I might as well stay home and dine on items from the back of the fridge. I am, at heart, a Slacker.  Mile eleven is when the Slackers, like me, who may have started the race hung-over to begin with (as in my younger days), learn what it means to “tough it out.”  Mile eleven is where the real fight happens—the grovel on gravel--all alone.  It’s that thing that, as an old nun from middle school was fond of saying, “separates the men from the boys.” (Even if you are a girl.)

I was curious about how my daughter, with all her training, smart shoes, and research had fared.  She is the Opposite of a slacker.

“It was the hardest mile, for sure,” she admitted, glowingly.  “Mile twelve wasn’t that great either. But you’re right, mile 11 is the worst.  By mile 13, you know you can do it then; it’s almost over.  Mile eleven is a killer. My I-T bands seized up and it was awful. I just hung in there and imagined you and Una running together, all those years ago, and I actually got a little choked up. It was so hard… my I-T bands were killing me and I seriously did not think I would make it. Then I could hear her sweet Irish voice in my head saying ‘You GO Gurlie…  And I did. I made it. ”

My eyes got hot and full, listening to her.  I thought of Una, my running buddy and dear friend now departed, and all the miles we had run together.  She would have been so proud of Kate.  I too was so proud; I could not speak for several moments.  I knew, step for step, the triumph she had claimed for herself.  I knew that fight. I knew that pain.   I also knew that, come what may, she had done a Very Hard Thing and that doing so would change her forever.  Doing one Hard Thing enables us to do many others. 

It would be so easy for me to skip this blog for a second week. But she inspires me and reminds me of what is sometimes easy to forget:  that I can do What Needs to be Done, even if it is difficult.  I can get through a rack of mending on an unfamiliar sewing machine, I can train two small bulls to walk forward together in a straight line, I can remember where my keys and wallet are, and I can (and by golly must) check the “sell by” date on all mystery yoghurt.  And I can write. So I am doing it.  That’s all I can do.  The finish line is nowhere in sight but I can keep going, so I will.

I look around my life at the moment and most of it looks like “mile eleven.”  There is a half-dug trench filled with rainwater encircling the barn that needs to become a drainage system; there are untold numbers of half-started projects in the garage (including a table I need to have operational by Thanksgiving); there is a languishing manuscript that feels like it will never get done on my computer; there are no fences to keep the hunters out nor the sheep in on my land, and I could go on…  Yes, I’m living my dream, but my dream is a lot harder than I thought.  It’s the eleventh month of a tough year.  So many of my Dear Ones too, are embroiled in courageous struggles with their health, their relationships, their faith, their choices, their finances, and their dreams.  Life is harder than we thought.  The roads we travel alone are longer than the ones we go together. 

Of all the “eleventh miles” I have run, one specific one stands out.  It was a race in Portland, Maine the day after I turned 50.  The pack had thinned out and so had the crowds cheering from the sidelines.  Some would clap half-heartedly as I jogged past and say generic words of encouragement like “Good Job!  Keep it up!” but I knew they were “just saying that.” They said that to everyone.  It’s not that I didn’t appreciate their generosity and support.  But it was watered down by the notion that I wasn’t really that person they had come to rally.  My name wasn’t on the sign they were waving.  They were just being “nice.”  I got to mile eleven and a woman started calling my name. “Come on, Nancy!  I know you’ve got it in you!  Don’t quit now!  You GOT this.” I was confused.  She seemed like she was looking at me but just to be sure, I looked over my shoulder to see if another woman named Nancy might be running up behind me.  “She must have a friend called Nancy,” I thought to myself as I ignored her.  But she kept focusing on me and cheering.  How could she know my name?  But there was no one that I could see behind me.  She got more excited and more insistent. “Keep it going, Nancy!  Dig Deep!  You GOT this!  I mean it!  YOU are going to finish this race!”  She cheered louder and louder the closer I got to her.  She looked me right in the eye and kept yelling, just for me.   I was too embarrassed, too self conscious to lie down, or vomit, or crawl into the bushes and have a squat with this women watching me and yelling my name, so I kept going.  By the time I was out of earshot of her, I felt a little better.  I even picked up my pace a bit. 

Later, at the finish line, clutching a banana, a tinfoil blanket, and a medal, I told my running buddies about that woman on mile eleven.  “She cheered for me too,” said one.

“By name?” I asked.  “She seemed to know my name.  How could she have done that?”

My friends could not stop laughing. They pointed to my stomach.

“Look at your number, silly! Your name is printed right on your number!”

“oh…..”

But still, even that could not diminish the magic.  I don’t care how she knew.  That angel was calling for me. I was not just a number to her.  She called my name.  In mile eleven, the darkest mile, she called my name.  It made all the difference.  She was a witness to a struggle I thought I was having alone.  She saw the bleakness of my face.  She didn’t step in and carry me or run it for me.  She just stood and yelled with a happy smile and the Deep Joy of one who knows there is so much more than just bananas at the finish line. She helped me do a really hard thing.  She helped me behave better than I thought I could.  (At the very least, she prevented me from having a small crap on her neighbor’s lawn.)

I’m grateful to her to this very day. 

There is a saying that goes something like “faster alone, farther together…” There are so many of us at some personal version of “mile eleven” in our journeys.  Bleak and dreary, exhausted and weary… we are up against forces we could not have anticipated when the gun went off and we began the race with so much hope.   Some of us are running races not of our choosing, which is even harder.

As I pause today, to examine the rubble around me and reassess my goals, I’m not sure how much I need to be someone who crosses a finish line, as much as I want to be that woman on mile eleven, cheering for each of us.  Every one of us.  Especially YOU.

Yes, YOU.   So I stop sewing for a minute; I stop attaching string to waistbands, so I can do some better Mending.  Can you hear me where you are? I’m yelling for YOU. If you can’t make out the words, just listen to that little voice in your head saying “You GO Gurlie!”

YOU GOT THIS… You’ve come SO Far—way further than you have yet to go.  You’re almost there.  The finish line is waiting, as inevitable as a banana.   I know you are tired and you think you can’t. 

You Can.

You Will.

You ARE.

I love you sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

The Parable of the Potatoes

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” –The Little Prince

Greetings Dear Ones!

Those of you who were there know this is a True Story:

Once upon a recent fiddle camp, a known chaos addict entered a walk-in fridge and could not find the potatoes. She searched high. She searched low.  She couldn’t find them. She left the fridge and went elsewhere to search.  Along the way, she got distracted and made four batches of scones.  Then she remembered she was looking for potatoes.  She searched the walk-in pantry.  She checked the ovens.  She got involved in making coffee, even though that was not her job.  She cut up some fruit and made some porridge oats. Helpers turned up to help and she kept asking them to find the potatoes, hoping fresh eyes could find what hers could not. 

“What are we looking for?” they asked. She showed them what an empty hotel pan looks like. 

“You are looking for this, only full of last night’s dinner’s roasted potatoes,” she said.

“Ok,” they said and began checking all the places she had already checked.  They came back and likewise admitted defeat. 

At this news, she had twin responses: on the one hand, she felt Validated. She was gratified to find that she was not alone in her ability to somehow overlook a full hotel pan of roasted potatoes. On the other hand, she began to panic.  What if someone had thrown them away? What if the late-night jammers had accidentally eaten them as a midnight snack? Who would do that? Who could just mindlessly eat a tray of cold potatoes? (Her inner potato gobbler admitted she could. She scanned a mental dossier of potential criminals and realized that of all the people at that camp, she would be voted most likely to chow down on a pan of cooling potatoes, especially those salty, crispy ones…) But it hadn’t been her.  So whom? Seriously… (angry inner teenager stamps her foot) How could they DO this to her?  Didn’t they know she had deliberately cooked an extra thirty pounds of potatoes so that they could have hash-browns for breakfast?? Those rats!  (She has never truly forgiven them for the time, years ago, when they ate 20 quarts of homemade chili, chili intended to feed 84 people lunch the next day, as a bedtime “snack” …)

She realized she was in the five stages of grief around these potatoes.  She had moved swiftly from denial/disbelief, to hope/bargaining (that others could save her and find them for her), to anger/blame (lashing out at those greedy jammers!), and now, there was nothing left to do but be depressed until Acceptance set in.  

She scrambled eggs, chopped fruit, and listlessly bossed her helpers around as nicely as she could manage in her depressed and distracted state. People she had not seen in years came to help or visit and told her about their lives and pets and Covid sagas and through it all, she nodded, smiled emptily, and wondered where the potatoes had gone. As masked folk chopped and chatted all around her, she went secretly completely mad.  She returned again and again to the walk-in fridge, hoping to find the tray of missing potatoes.  She checked the shelves on the other side of the fridge, shelves that were not allocated to their camp, just in case they had been put there by accident. No. She trotted circles between the pantry and the fridge, repeatedly checking the same places, hoping to have a new result. (Insanity!)  She kept opening and slamming shut the oven doors.  She wondered if there is a 12-step program available for people whose lives become unmanageable because they cannot find potatoes.

Breakfast came and went.  They served the porridge, fruit, sausage and eggs.  There were no home fries or hash-browns. No one cared. But she could not forget.  Something had happened to the potatoes…  As some of the younger late-nighters stumbled through the buffet line, she began interrogating them.

“Did you eat potatoes last night after I left the kitchen?”

“What? No.”

“What happened to the trays of potatoes I left on the counter?”

“Huh? I don’t know…”

They all had the same look of bleary-eyed innocence and confusion but she was determined to get to the bottom of this nightshade crime.

“Did you at any time witness anyone else eating potatoes without authorization last night???”  Her voice became slightly shriller as one by one they backed away from her slowly and reached for the nearest fork or coffee cup.

Thirty pounds of potatoes don’t just vanish into thin air, do they?

 It wasn’t until after lunch, when afternoon classes had started, that she thought to ask one of the extremely capable and sensible young women who had been helping her all the previous day, if she knew where the potatoes had gone.
“Yes, certainly!” she replied. She put down her fiddle and headed straight to the walk-in fridge.

“We put them all in here,” she said.

“That’s what I thought you would do,” admitted the crazy person. “But they are gone! Someone must have taken them… But who???”

“Are they not here?” asked the extremely capable and sensible young woman, opening the door and pointing to the stacks of tiny plastic boxes clearly marked in bold print: ‘POTATOES’. See? Here they are!”

 It’s a damn good thing the crazy lady was wearing a mask, or her jaw might have hit the floor.

“But…. But… I was looking for a hotel pan…” she mumbled, as realization began to dawn on her. “We all were.  I told everyone who looked to search for a hotel pan. I’m such a visually oriented person; I could not imagine looking for anything other than a big, greasy hotel pan.”

“Oh!” she said brightly. “That looked like it needed to be cleaned, so we stored all the potatoes in these containers and cleaned it and put it away.”

The crazy lady with tufts of red hair squirming out from under her black hat stood rooted to the spot.  She had just been struck by a bolt of lightning. Actually, she had just been stunned by an enormous, life-changing epiphany.  You all know the word epiphany—it comes from an ancient Greek word that means ‘here are the potatoes.’ (Actually, it means reveal.) For the student who claims everything and everyone is her teacher, this was a huge lesson.

What else am I also NOT seeing around me? She wondered. She had spent most of the weekend misplacing things, trying to “get organized,” trying to create and maintain a system while running herself ragged.  Was she even listening to the music? Hearing the stories people were trying to tell her? She realized she was looking without seeing, listening without hearing, tasting without savoring, rushing without actually getting anywhere.  She had misplaced so many things, she wasn’t even sure she could find her own bum with both hands.

What is the point of living like this? She raged.  She remembered her own private “agreements” and reminded herself to switch from “why me?” to “what if?” and decided to spend the rest of her weekend trying to see the things that were right in front of her, without expecting them to look like something else. When we cannot see what it is we seek to see, a part of us shuts down.  We become blind. Welcoming Truth to ourselves involves a daring amount of imagination in order to accept what it is we cannot recognize. So it is with love, with partnerships, with miracles and, it seems, Potatoes. 

She remembered the moment her friend Margie, who was dying at the time, woke from a drugged sleep and pointed excitedly towards the Kitchen and announced “The Kingdom of Heaven! Nancy, I’ve seen it. It’s right there!” Yes, yes it is.  The Kingdom of Heaven is surely in a kitchen, could we but see it.  It’s in a fiddle tune, could we but hear it. It’s in a deep vat of “clean-out-the-fridge curry” could we but taste it. Life is so filled with meaning, joy, and purpose beneath our humble toiling.  We are all but pilgrims, distracted by our search for potatoes. Yet, no Peace lies in the future, which is not already here, present yet hidden.

 The crazy lady knew she needed to add more love (and garlic) to the food she was co-cooking with her team.  She went outside, looked up into a cloudless azure sky aflutter with leaves and birdsong, and whispered to any passing angels who might hear, “please…let me see what needs to be seen; let me feel what needs to be felt; let me hear what needs to be heard; let me love who needs to be loved (especially that troll who barked at me because there wasn’t a non-dairy option available at the tea station!)”  A light breeze dried the sweat on her brow.  She looked around her and realized that she wasn’t tired any more. The angst that the mystery had caused was no longer weighing on her like an anchor.  The burden of feeding ninety-five people nine meals in four days suddenly lifted, was gone.

She realized we don’t need to do anything sensational in order to love people.  They can be nourished on more than potatoes.  We can be totally refueled by Sympathy, Understanding, and Compassion (although some, apparently, will cease functioning without non-dairy creamer…)

 She went back inside and observed the bustling kitchen. Suddenly, she saw a young man who was quietly scouring all the pots so that his friends who were on dish duty later wouldn’t get so bombed out with work that they might miss the ceilidh.

Suddenly, she saw a young woman’s joy at learning to crack eggs one-handed.

She saw the glow in the eyes of a newcomer who felt more comfortable making friends and “doing things” in the kitchen than attending a cocktail party full of strangers in her dorm.

She saw an older man being taught a new tune by a very forgiving, patient younger person.

She saw that cooking together forges unique and primal bonds of fellowship—that the risks, trials, and triumphs are the foundations of meals and memories for years to come.

She saw her teammates entering the kitchen as strangers and leaving as buddies.

And then “She” laughed.

She laughed and laughed, melting and gradually turning into the Me I’d rather be. I’ve changed a lot, thanks to those tatties!  I may have lost my mind for a moment, but it helped me find my heart.

Potatoes nourish our bodies, but at the end of the day, what really nourishes our souls is knowing we Belong. We can be trusted.  We are loving, loveable, loved and trying to assist each other in ways that may cause confusion but we try anyway. Many of us have struggled over huge mountains of isolation and fear in the past twenty months.  There was a bleak veneer of mute suffering over many dear faces I just saw for the first time in two years. We’ve been through a lot.  The jam sessions were sobering, intense, and poignant—reminders of how we need to celebrate survival and to heal more.

Healing sometimes means taking an honest look at the role we play in our own suffering.  Healing our blindness to What Is is an important step in finding our joy—it’s might not be the One big hotel pan we think it is, but many tiny boxes piled up right under our very (masked) noses.

I know you know this already, Dear Menders.  I’m just catching up to you now.  Thanks for your Good Work!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Monsters

“Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

 Greeting Dear Ones!

There is a raw and dreary beauty in these mornings wrapped in river fog.  The dullness of the sky actually shows off the foliage to its best advantage.  In that seasonal union of the sublime and the ridiculous, all roads north are clogged with “leaf-peepers” this time of year—people (quite literally) driving very slowly to look at the silent fireworks of sumac and sugar maples in full glory.   The locals shrug and roll their eyes.  Deep down, we are all somehow gratified that so many feel the invitation to wonder, to marvel, to savor life (and death) in this moment.  They came to “be here Now” and bear witness to the grandeur.  A grandeur we who live here might forget to see, so common it becomes so soon.  They are both a humble reminder to look around and a reason to add an extra twenty minutes to each journey, as “Now” starts to soak up a little of “then” too.  I bless them as I drive.

On a recent drive to Massachusetts, I passed through a series of small towns getting all decked out for Halloween.  There is a new kind of oversized skeleton that seems popular with those who like to festoon their lawns and shrubbery with phantoms and fake spider webs—as if enormous vegetarian arachnids feast on pumpkins and chrysanthemums.  What is it about human beings that make us want to garland our dwellings with such grotesquery?  I have enough real monsters at home and in my shop, never mind adding a few more synthetic ones massed produced in factories that are themselves probably one of Dante’s rings of hell.

I’ve been thinking about my own monsters lately and what I am doing about them.  The first little monster is a wee chap named Chip.  He was christened “Charles” but was too tiny to carry the weight of such dignity when he was born.   He was just a few ounces of chocolate wool in a basket by the wood stove the day he decided to live.  The phrase “gentle as a lamb” has not applied to him for some time now.  He has become an obnoxious pest.   When I discovered my terrified neighbor dangling from a peach tree, screaming, because she was afraid he was going to come after her and ram her, I had to have a little chat with him—a chat that involved me sitting on him so that he could “hear” me better, via his entire, non-verbal, wooly carcass.   From then on, it became a daily necessity to “flip Chip” and teach him some manners.  I told him in no uncertain terms that he was turning into a monster that nobody liked and that his little uninvited visit to the party up the street, where he rudely ate all the crudités, tipped over the table, and chased the teenagers, was not to be forgiven soon.   No one likes a party-crasher who brings nothing, eats everything, and annoys or terrifies the other guests. (Such is the enduring problem of confused sociable beings with poor boundaries.)

Chip has a buddy called Wally who, though normally tame and sweet, has been attempting to court all of his aunts, sisters, and cousins in the herd.  Wally also has a horn defect that means his horns, if left unchecked, will grow around his head and right into the back of his skull and pierce his walnut-sized brain, which is composed mostly of an irrepressible ego convincing him he is suave and adorable.  (So it is, so often, with lusty males who assume they are Breeding Stock…) When I saw him trying to get it on with his elderly Grandmother Willow, I called the vet.

So!  Last week, we went through the barn and castrated all the eligible monsters, including the bulls.  As my witty lodger wryly noted, “Since you are still looking for a new name for your farm that is preferable to ‘The Land of Lost Plots,’ perhaps you should consider calling it ‘Wethering Heights’?” Indeed.  I can see the brochures now: “Welcome to Wethering Heights: Feral Females at Play. No Balls Allowed.”

Personally, I think it is a tragic thing that too much testosterone causes an abundance of trouble on a farm.  I have nothing against males in general nor testicles in particular and I understand how traumatic castration can be to an animal.  (Don’t worry; ours were done humanely, with anesthesia!) The surgical recovery is hard for a day or two and the risk of infection genuine.   But it is a truth universally acknowledged that eunuchs are far more manageable and less dangerous, so we do it.  The bulls, approaching five and six months of age respectively, were hardly dangerous yet but very likely to be soon.  They are getting stronger all the time and even their affection can lead to bruises.  (I took a horn bud to the chin last week that left a blue robin’s egg on my jaw.) Uncut, an angered dairy bull can be genuinely murderous.  

I want these boys to remain the sweet, gentle, open-hearted chaps they are.  I love how they put their chins up to be scratched and roll their eyes back in their heads as if they have just eaten a peach when I get exactly the right “spot.”  My biggest fear is that I might become afraid of them.   I know they could become “monsters” if not handled correctly—with consistency, affection, and discipline, so I show up every damn day to redraw our lines and to teach them that their world is safe, that things like bicycles, mailboxes, and yapping dogs are to be ignored.  I tie them up and flap things like tarps, feed sacks, sweatshirts, and newspapers at them from a safe distance until they are bored, relaxed, “Unflappable.”  Dangerous Monsters can only grow in the presence of extreme fear.  

The way to keep them from becoming monsters is to teach them that the world holds no monsters.  Of course, they never imagine that they are acting like a monster—they think the strangers (boys on bikes, people walking dogs, mail trucks with flashing lights), the others are the unsafe creatures who will harm them.  I makes me think of every major world religion that has ever gone to war with another major world religion—they say ‘is not we who are the monsters, but them.’  SO wrong.  They should all be tied up and flapped at.

The very word 'Monster' probably derives from the Latin, monstrare,  the root of 'to demonstrate', or maybe monere, 'to warn'. The first known use of monster was in the 14th century but the idea of dangerous creatures possessed of warped super-human characteristics is as old as storytelling itself. My favorite literary monster is Beowulf’s Grendel, probably because he had a mother, which I somehow find endearing.  Is he descended from Cain through his matrilineal side? We don’t know.  (It might explain so much.)  It’s not clear to me that Grendel is not some form of human, albeit with trollish qualities.  He evokes my pity because I know his mother failed him. She did not teach him that his isolation is an illusion, that flappy things are safe, that to be a welcomed member of community, one must not arrive to the party empty-handed, drink everyone else’s beer, then insist on playing fiddle tunes only he knows…  He feels maligned and misunderstood, fearful, rageful.  His lack of place within a tribe, his lack of identity through knowing himself and others is what makes him not just obnoxious but truly dangerous.

 Monsters aren’t just yard ornaments for no reason. In literary terms, Monsters are demonstrative. They reveal, portend, admonish, advise, warn, instruct and reveal necessary horrors to those who would be heroes.  Such stories help us to do battle with ourselves and our own psychological demons.

 What replaces fear? Love.  How do we begin to love? By being familiar.  By Recognition.  By the steadfast repetition of work, boundaries, expectations, service, and affection.  With glad and joyful hearts, we show up in small ways until nothing is scary any more.   The thing that is making me not fear having two giant animals capable of uprooting trees on my property is the solace that I will know them and know how to handle them because I started when they were tiny and never let them feel too big for me because I kept at it.  Having a working team of oxen seems like a badass thing to do. It’s not.  The badassery occurs in the hellish micro-moments it takes me to convince myself to get the hell out there and do my time with them.  Daily.  So it is with writing, with practicing a musical instrument, growing a garden, or having ten yards of vintage Chinese silk on the cutting table that needs to be two blouses by Friday. (Oh, how I quake in my boots at the thought of taking shears to that!)

There are so many things that feel like “monsters” to us—because the size of the commitment seems too scary.  To love another person, raise an ox, or rear a child—requires facing a lot of monsters.  Over and over, we must ask ourselves, “am I creating a monster?” or worse, “am I the one becoming the monster?” (like when I didn’t immediately bury the surgical remnants on operating day and Iris, the visiting Great Pyrenees who works the night shift guarding the barn, discovered the gory bucket and well… um… ‘had a ball’ as they say.) But the monsters shrink when we look at them straight on and keep looking.  They dwindle to little chores that are do-able.   One day, three thousand pounds of muscles and horns will stop dead in its tracks and meekly back up, just because you ask it to, if you’ve done your homework well.  As a twelve-step buddy tells me “One day at a time… and if you can’t manage a whole day, half a day works too.”

Well, my Darlings, I’m off to chop that silk and shrink the monsters and do what ever small, kind thing I can do to keep Fear from winning today.  I hope you are too! Good Luck! Thank you for your Good Work.  Let the Mending Continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Of Hats and Harvests...

Greetings Dear Ones!

I am getting up at the same time each morning but the night is lasting longer and longer, until it is dark now, when I rise. Things with sharp teeth and claws are still on the prowl then so I don’t let the sheep out until later.  They have taken to sleeping in, glancing at me with perturbed annoyance when I bounce into the barn, shout good morning, and find them all still lying down.  

The sheep and I have not been getting along so well lately. Those wooly little robbers broke into the garage where I had stored the apple and pear harvests in large plastic tubs and took one little munch out of every blessed thing they could reach. “The first bite is the best” is their operating principle and almost every piece of fruit is now missing its first bite, leaving us with, well… NOT the best.  (This is almost as bad as the time they ate my entire crop of garlic and then burped and farted like ancient Roman gladiators for a week.)

“Who cares about your plans for cider, pies, and goodies?” they cried, “fruit is for eating NOW.”   Such is the way with creatures who live Immediately, whose only “plan” at any given moment is to die Spontaneously, Tragically, or of a Large Tummy-ache—all three if they can manage it.  “Live in the moment!  Eat it all fresh!  Eat it all now!  Eat until someone needs to put a halter on you and drag you away and force feed you olive oil and pepto bismol!” are their mottos.   

I was happy to leave my greedy band of criminals on Saturday to attend a pop-up outdoor fibre festival at the Green Mountain Spinnery, where I reveled in every kind of knitwear and inspiration and reminded myself of all the homespun reasons I put up with these darling delinquents.  

There I met a lovely woman who told me a story about the most beautiful hat.  It was a story that filled my heart with peace, as well as tears, and made me love sheep and people so much more than I have been doing recently.  I needed a story like that.  Perhaps you do too, so I’ll share it now.   We need such fodder in times where life seems to pit us against one another, when it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and hard done by.  We feel “robbed” of our abundance, forgetting that the abundance itself was a gift to us in the first place.

The woman, who had the kind of magic, sparkly blue eyes I could fall into like a river, said that she had designed the hat for her best friend, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.  She spun the yarn from her own Shetland sheep and her friend’s angora rabbits. The result was something that, when knitted up, feels softer than cashmere.  She knew her friend would be losing her hair during the chemo treatments and that this hat would feel so comforting on her bare scalp. 

Not long after she finished the hat, she got a call.  It was her friend, crying. “My hair is falling out,” she said. “It’s happening.”

“There, there,” said the knitter with sparkly eyes, “You’re gonna be ok. It’s just hair.”

“I know…” sniffed the cancer patient. “I know… but it’s harder to lose than I thought… I look so different, like I’m losing who I am…”

“I’ll be right over,” said the knitter who had just finished the special hat. “I have a gift I’ve been saving for this very moment.”   She hung up the phone and shouted for her daughter to get the shearing clippers.

“What do you want with these shears?” asked the daughter, puzzled because it was not time to shear the sheep.

“I want you to shave my head,” said her mother.

“What??? NO!” the daughter was appalled. Her mother had shimmering waves of thick, glossy hair that went nearly to her waist.

“It’s just hair,” insisted the mother. “Shave it! Quick!”

So she did. 

Then she put another one of her knitted hats on her own head and went over to the friend’s house.  She arrived and gave the balding cancer patient her gift.  She opened the hat and put it on immediately and agreed she looked a bit more like herself.  They hugged and had a good cry. Then the knitter with the sparkly eyes stood back and said, “I have another gift for you.” And with that, she took off her hat and showed her own bald head.

The cancer patient was stunned.  Her whole family came in and started crying. Then they started laughing.

“You don’t have to go through all this alone,” said the knitter. “We’re right here with you.”

“But your hair….it was so gorgeous…”

“When I told you ‘it’s just hair,’ I really meant it. It’s just hair means it’s just hair.  Now, let’s see who can grow it back faster!”

I stood, hat in hand, tears in eyes as the knitter with sparkly eyes finished her story, not daring to ask... 

“Yes,” she answered my eyes, “we both grew it back together.  She’s been five years and counting cancer-free.” She paused, shrugged and smiled. “These are just the things we do for our peeps, right?”

I’ve been warming my little heart cockles over that story ever since.  The wounded inner children among us may hear it and wonder “who would ever do such a thing for me? Who loves me that much?” and the sparkly-eyed knitters/Menders/healers among us will be thinking “who can I do that for?”  

Before we all go shaving our heads (trust me, some days the impulse overwhelms me, but for other, purely selfish reasons…) I think we need to ask some different questions.  When we truly love another, we ask “How can I help you keep being YOU—you are so dear to me.  What is it you need to sustain yourself? Where is that Well-from-which-you-drink that nourishes your spirit and brings your light of love into our world?  When you are weak, or sick, how can we continue to bring you that water? What do I need to protect or defend or procure for you so that you can continue to evolve and blossom? How can I be a part of co-creating all the blessed potential I see within you without trying to “fix” you or “change” you in any way?  What will help make you strong when you feel small and fearful? How can I help you be brave? Most of all, how can I help you truly Live while you are alive?

One by one, I go through each of my loves, my business relationships, family members and personal friendships—even down to every last miscreant sheep, earthworm and toadstool in the Land of Lost Plots—Pondering… Where are the places I can help with the mending? How many hats do I need to knit? When I am exhausted or defeated, how might I need to care for myself as one of these similarly precious beings?

Answers and mysteries continue to ravel and unravel like a ball of homespun yarn. For now, I go into the empty orchard and stand in the last of the summer gold. I take the peaches I have been hoarding in the cellar and break them each into three segments with my bare hands and let the juice dribble to my elbows. There is a piece for me and a piece for each young steer,  just so I can share and witness and giggle at the look of eye-rolling bliss that passes over his face as he tastes the perfection of a ripe peach for the first time. The sheep are right. Let’s eat the fruit Now. And that look…that look of pure pleasure on a young bull’s face is sweeter and better than any jam I could ever hope to make.  

As for the sheep, who might as well be Jack Russells in sticky, apple-scented wool coats, they know that come June they too will be shorn.  From my lost apple and pear crop will come good wool for hats (and perhaps a little diarrhea). We are each a cog in the Great Cycle as harvest abundance and bad diagnoses take their turns on the Wheel.  Wool or hair, short or long, we are each still ourselves inside—still loving, still greedy, still ready to die at a moment’s notice in order to Live (ok, maybe the sheep are better at that last one).

The peaches, the apples, the wool, the hair…They all grow back. And if they don't, at least we have soft hats made by loving hands. Sometimes it's we who must do the growing.  Ugh… at least we can do it together. Keep Mending, Dear Ones! Thank you for your Good Work!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Love and a Jumpsuit

“Be curious, not judgmental.”― Walt Whitman

 Greetings Dear Ones! 

Happy Autumn! Exciting things are happening on my wee croft.  The barn is (finally) full of hay, which permeates the air all around it with a rich and heady sweetness—the gentle exhale of many ‘Leaves of Grass.’  No perfume could entice me more.  It’s been so hard to get hay this summer.  You’ve all heard the saying “make hay while the sun shines.” Well, June, July, and August were so wet and the fields so boggy that many farmers couldn’t get their machines in to cut, turn, or bale.  Hay needs three dry days in a row to cure between cutting and baling.  Only the luckiest farmers, those without necessary side-hustles like “real jobs,” managed that kind of dance.  Consequently, our local hay prices are through the roof, easily three times what they were only three summers ago.

Summer, like an exhausted babysitter ready to be relieved of her charges, hangs her heavy head over the fence in the garden, which is running amok.  Apple arms reach out with apples, the pear trees with pears. Never do they bear each other’s fruit.  And so it is in dressing rooms too… Those who come in happy remain so, while customers covered in the mold of self-loathing make work hard for me.

A Leaf of Grass stands in the dressing room fussing with a purple one-piece outfit she wants to wear to an upcoming wedding.  She has on three-inch, blingy sandals.  “I want you to hem it so that it just shows a little bit of the bling,” she instructs me.  The trouser portion of the one-piece has billowy legs that behave like a skirt. “I hate dresses,” she confesses.  “I think this looks as good as a dress but it isn’t a dress.”

I pin the hem length so she can see it in the mirror. She takes off the shoes.  Now the hem is way too long.  “These shoes kill my feet. I’m only going to wear them for the ceremony. For the dancing, I’m going to be barefoot.”

So I adjust the hem and pin it up.  She puts the shoes back on. “Well, that looks goofy!” she says critically. “Too much of my foot is showing.  I don’t actually like my feet.

I resist the urge to smack her.  People I feel like smacking are usually the people most in need of a hug.  I take a deep breath and pause, while she continues her dance. Finally, I announce that she needs to make a choice—either her feet are going to show or not.  I ask if maybe she should wear some comfortable flats that won’t hurt her feet too much. (I like feet. I always lobby for kindness to them.)

“I can’t,” she says. “I’m too short. I hate how short I am. I always wear heels to events like this so that I can stand up taller and chat to people during the cocktail hour.”

Prudence is having a field day. “Ah, you always wear heels, but then take them off…how short do you look then, madam?? Do you think people won’t notice you’ve shrunk three inches after a few bites of wedding cake? How heavy is that cake, they’ll be wondering… ”  It’s not like this is a kid heading off to a prom.  This is a grown woman, well into a groove around who she is, what she hates about herself, and how she maneuvers in the world to disguise those things with makeup, jewelry, and draconian undergarments.  

Meanwhile, she has begun clutching at the back of the jumpsuit, trying to excavate it from her buttocks.  “It keeps riding up,” she complains.  “Is there anything you can do about that?” I take a look.  I tell her that there isn’t really a tailoring fix for this now that the garment is already made.  The crotch is pretty much connected to the shoulders.  There’s not much I can do but advise her to keep her shoulders back and to edge herself up against the nearest shrubbery for occasional discreet digs on the day.

“My legs…my legs are too short,” she says. “If I had longer legs, then I could have bought the right size for my body.”

“Nonsense,” I say.  “Size has nothing to do with it.  Not every design fits every body. Jumpsuits are really tricky.  They are very uncomfortable for long-waisted gals and they can look silly on the short-waisted ones too. Have you tried sitting down?”

She blinks at me for several moments, uncomprehending. She has not. Since finding and buying this little number, she has only ever stood up, scowling into mirrors. When she does attempt to bend her bottom towards the seat of the dressing room chair, her eyes widen considerably and she does a surprised little jump that probably gave this item of clothing its name in the first place. She has just realized that she will be standing for the whole event.  Someone will have to drive her, lying flat in the back of a wagon, lest she slice herself in two if she bends in the middle.  For a jumpsuit to accommodate sitting, the crotch needs to hit you almost at mid thigh and hers is already lodged deep in her heinie.

Undaunted, she goes back to looking at herself critically in the mirror.  “I’m not going to wear a bra,” she decides, as if that will change everything.

“Ok,” I say, “take it off.” I have learned not to talk people out of their ideas, only their clothing.  She wiggles out of the straps through the armholes of the jumpsuit and brings the whole thing up through the front of the neck opening like she is a magician disgorging a sweaty bouquet of lace flowers. Now she has a little more room, but something doesn’t look right.

“Do you have cups I can add?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, “but they won’t give you any support.  They will just fill out the front seams while everything underneath just dangles.

“Well, that looks weird,” she says, after trying the small foam inserts I offer her. “I need support. But I don’t want it to show and the back [of the jumpsuit] goes too low for the strap.

“You could try one of those backless bras,” I suggest.

“I hate those,” she says, trying to manually rearrange her breasts, which are behaving like defiant dough.  She looks in the mirror with the same stern look on her face I get when I have told my little calves to “Whoa!” and they are still attempting to sneak around me.

I realize I am starting to feel depressed.  From her toes on up, I have watched yet another beautiful woman go to war with every part of her body so that she can wear something that will make her appear (so she thinks) more “loveable,” translated (in her mind) as “taller,” “thinner,” more “attractive.”  She wants to wear it as revenge against her ex, who is also attending the wedding.  She wants to wear it because she hates something else (dresses) worse.  She likes the feel of the fabric between her legs—she hates the feel of bare skin sticking to itself up near the top of her inner thighs but she cannot abide it riding up her bum.  She wiggles and frowns and picks at every part of the fabric.

She has not told me once that she wants to wear this jumpsuit because she feels great in it—because she loves the color, because she feels Alive in it, because it will comfort her in some way.  Instead, I have been summoned as the hired ally, a version of the Hessian mercenaries in 1776, in her fight to colonize herself.

Again and again, I look at women like her (and myself) and wonder what amazing, thrilling, possible Good could come from us just LOVING every inch of ourselves?

“Tell me what you love about this jumpsuit,” I say.

“Well, they’re coming back in fashion,” is her answer.

“And they’ll be out of fashion again really soon. Do you know why?” I ask. She looks confused. “Because they are a pain in the ass. Literally. They are hard to fit and hard to wear.  They feel comfortable standing up or sitting down, but not both. It’s hard to mass-produce anything that fits a large enough segment of the population because each body is unique and jumpsuits don’t work for most bodies. Shortly after the designers fill the runways with these things, women come to their senses and decide they don’t want to have to strip to their knickers just to go to the bathroom.  They are like a chipped horse on a merry-go-round that no one wants to sit on for long.”

“Want to know what NEVER goes out of fashion?” I ask.

“What?”

“A woman who feels beautiful in her clothes. Seriously.  I see brides wearing hiking boots with their wedding gowns and they look fabulous.”

This woman laughs. She gets it. She rolls her eyes.  She’s genuinely pretty when she smiles.

We all think we can sneak a little self-loathing, like cupcakes, whisky, or cigarettes, behind closed doors when no one is looking and it won’t do us any harm.  But It Does.  People think they can hate all over themselves in front of me and I won’t see it.  I feel it though.  It’s like I am watching someone abuse an innocent animal. I am not the owner of those feet, but I don’t want to see them hurt.  I am not the owner of those breasts, but I do not want to see them mauled. The sadness haunts me.

I am getting braver about defending our rights to be whatever shape, size, color, or hemline we want, but I have a ways to go.  I hate it when I stand by, say nothing, then spend the rest of the day wishing I had.  This leads to long conversations and “dress rehearsals” in my head as I think of what to say next time.

What would Walt Whitman have said, if he were an Un-Silent witness to a dressing room on a Thursday evening before a wedding? Perhaps “…dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem…” [Leaves of Grass]

THIS….

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” (Whitman)

Bound from our collars to our crotches, we are the ill-fitting jumpsuits affecting each other locally and globally. We cannot bend to help one another if we yet contain our own self-hatred.  This Life we live, whether we see it or not, binds raindrops to pennies, threads to bread, heartaches to happiness, and Work to Love.  We need to cheer the hell up and start loving ourselves better. Especially behind closed doors.  It matters.  Every little, blessed thing is woven to another.  Can you see it too?

Dear Ones, let an enormous sense of Peace envelop you.  There is mending yet to do!  May we make of our flesh Great Poetry. Thank you for your loving work!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Good Sport

“In the end, only three things matter:

How much you loved,

How gently you lived,

How gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

--From “Buddha Quotes.”

Greetings Dear Ones,

Apple season has arrived, with its tart days, crisp nights, and round, rosy-glowing afternoons.  We had our very first apple dumplings of this harvest a few nights ago.  They came out of the oven like golden, age-stained vintage pillow cases stuffed with cinnamon and memories.

Beneath the biggest, oldest apple tree on the property, the earth still freshly churned, is a small grave I now visit often as I work in the orchard.  Not very long ago, we stood and cried as one of the Jack Russells, “Sport” took his final resting place beneath this ancient tree on the ridge overlooking the barn.  I sometimes visit this place in the twilight, as I finish the evening chores, and think of him, curled up beneath the dirt, instead of in his basket by the wood stove. I marvel about how the energies of “him” will dissolve, dissipate until all that will remain is Story.   Again and again, I thank him for coming and being a part of our lives.  You could not dig a hole big enough to contain all the stories about this dog. He was both cur and mudgeon (high dudgeon) through and through.  What he lacked in size or brains he more than made up for in Moxy.

I miss him. I appreciate moxy. It seems pretty thin on the ground these days, except in those who choose to wear neon yoga pants as formal wear.  I really wish sensible moderates had more of it.

Why do we love our dogs so much? My friend Nora says they are the psychic love portals through which Unconditional Love leaks in from a much better world.  (She says it way more eloquently than that; I’m paraphrasing.) In a world where politics are ugly, faith is struggling, daily life is stressful, and the economy uncertain, what could be better than having a three-legged imp-with-attitude taking a dump on your carpet, shedding all over your bed, and then grinningly expecting his supper?  I guess we succumb to anything to feel Love. And no matter how you are feeling, these little dogs gonna love you and demand love in return. No matter what.  

Most of the people who privately admit to me that they really don’t know what love is also admit that they have never owned a dog. They have never experienced being the sole focus of someone else’s blind trust and Acceptance.   A veterinarian friend of mine says she always marvels that no matter how smelly, disheveled, disorganized or socially awkward the owners are, their dogs adore them.  “They truly don’t care how nasty your toenails are or whether or not you have bad breath.  They are God’s Angels here on earth.  They are the one chance we have to experience Unconditional Love.”

In 8th grade, I remember a boy with red, puffy eyes asking our teacher if dogs went to Heaven.

“Of course not,” she retorted. “They have no souls; how could they go to Heaven?”

“How about hamsters?” quipped a cheeky gambler from the back of the room.

She scowled at him with more than her customary ferocity.

“NO animals go to Heaven,” she spat, surveying all would-be challengers with baleful contempt.  We were silent as the boy with red eyes bent his head over his desk and leaked fresh tears onto his morning math facts.

Later, in Latin class, my eye was drawn to the irony that the word “animal” derives from the Latin anima or “soul.” But that teacher was not one with whom I felt comfortable sharing delightful ironies and absurdities.  So I kept it to myself.  I also kept it to myself that I believe EVERY living thing has a soul, and even some un-living things too—like tractors and quilts, vintage egg beaters and favorite linens passed down to us from our grandmothers.  (There is no doubt in my mind that certain sewing machines know when it is Friday.) Even the elderly wooden desk, etched with years of boredom and graffiti, at which I sat, had a soul.  I had to still my swinging feet to keep from kicking it while the ancient, pagan, feral, Imposter in me learned to keep her mouth shut.

It took me years to figure out what every dyslexic knows immediately: Dog is God spelled backwards.

Lifetimes later, when my children asked tearfully if our precious family dog, who had just been run over in our own driveway by a friend, was going to heaven, I said “I’m certain of it.”

“How do you know?” they asked.

“Because she herself was a little bit of Heaven that came to visit us.  She has simply gone home.  But don’t worry, the Love that sent her, will send us more love.  It will just be in a different form, that’s all.”

“I don’t want another form,” sobbed my son in exasperation.  “Why couldn’t we keep that form?? Those little paws that smelled like popcorn, those soft little ears, that licky tongue?  I liked her muscles, her fur.  I don’t want anything else.”

"Maybe because we are here on earth to experience so many varieties of love, in so many forms, over and over."
"Well that stinks," he insisted.

“My head hurts,” said my daughter tiredly. “Why does crying make your head hurt? I want to be done with this crying.”

“What hurts is all the love that feels unfinished. We need to love again and then the hurt will go away. Trust me on this.  The more you love something, the more pain you feel when you have to let it go.  But that pain is just a sign that you are seeking more love.  Think about it, which is worse, feeling like this, or never having had her at all?”  They agreed that not having her was worse.  That night, they both fell asleep in my arms, having cried themselves out.  I remember lying there, awake beneath their damp, sticky, over-heated bodies, afraid to move, in case I woke them and had to deal with more theology.

Theology and doctrinal piety debates are not my specialty, especially with a grieving eight and ten-year-old who poke at inconsistencies like law professors.   What I believe with all my heart is that we are called to be Love in this world and we don’t do it nearly as well as our dogs.   They don’t need formal “religiosity” to do Good.  Finding our way in a troubled and hurting world takes unashamed goofiness and unblinking Courage. They have both in spades.  

“How come dogs don’t have to go to church?” my daughter once asked.

“They ARE church,” I said. “They live joyfully with their whole hearts.  They love purely. They serve God by doing their jobs and being themselves. They don’t need to learn how to do that like we humans do.”

Soon after, I saw two dogs offered for adoption on Craigslist. They had to come as a team, the ad said.  We only needed one dog, but I was open to having two, especially since they were already so bonded to each other and could keep each other company when we were not home.   I wrote the owner of the dogs a long letter explaining that we were a home-schooling family—we were home a lot, our kids were eight and ten, we had a wonderful yard, never watched T.V. and were extremely bonded to our animals.  We had just lost our family dog and the kids were grieving hard. 

She brought them over the next day.  “We’ll love them forever,” I promised her. 

“I just wanted to see an honest-to-god real family that had no TV,” she said. “It’s a miracle. To me, it’s a sign that he belongs with you.  TV is a problem for him.”

“I think TV is a problem for everyone,” I laughed, not joking. “What’s his deal? Is he addicted to day-time soap operas? The cooking channel?”

“He just can’t be around TVs at all,” she said emphatically. “I’m serious.  He’s got what they call ‘a high prey drive’ and every time he sees a flippin’ bird in a commercial, he goes nuts.  You have no idea how many birds show up unexpectedly on TV programs these days.  We have to get rid of him because we just bought ourselves one of them fancy new flat-screen TVs—paid beaucoup bucks for it—and this little bastard saw a bird on it and attacked it.  It shattered everywhere, basically exploded… It was a mess. My partner said we can’t live like this. He has to go.  We’re truck drivers, we wanted company in the trucks, but he’s just worn us out. He needs a different home. And little Stinky, she goes with him because she’s his best friend. They are partners in crime. He lets her eat all the mice they kill.”

A few months later, to our horror, the male dog, whom we called “Sport,” chased a car down our busy road and got hit.  He survived, but lost the use of his left front leg.  As far as we know, he never once grieved the loss of that leg. We tied it up in decorative bandanas and he hopped about in sepia tones like a grateful civil war veteran.  The first few times he tried to use the bad leg, he fell over, then readjusted himself and got on with his Purpose and never looked back.  Eventually, we had to have the dead limb amputated. He didn’t care. On three legs, he dedicated himself to the pursuit of tennis balls, sometimes tossing them downstairs so that he could then chase them himself.  As the only member of the household who did NOT have Attention Deficit Disorder, he could drive us absolutely bonkers with his stubborn dedication to a self-imposed task, such as digging a hole in a plaster wall to get to a mouse.  He was very much concerned with his own rights, privileges, and comforts and not so much those of other dogs, chickens or automobiles.  He never forgave the Buick that hit him and took his leg, and ever after pursued all motor vehicles with the single-minded vengeance of Captain Ahab.  

Sadly, Stinky was not with us very long.  She was extremely food-focused and, for one of God’s Angel’s here on earth, surprisingly dedicated to petty crime and thievery.  One day, we came home to find she had stolen a bag of shredded cheese off the kitchen table and eaten until she reached the other side of the rainbow with her mouth full of cheddar.  The bag was big enough for her to get her head into and out of easily—she could have quit at any time—but she kept nibbling, licking, trying to reach the last little crumbs as gradual oxygen deprivation put her into a cheese coma.  We found her dead, head in the bag, a greasy smile on her sweet wee face. Such are the perils of good Vermont cheddar.

Again, the kids were devastated.  They tried to talk their father into a replacement dog. “You don’t need another dog,” he said, “One dog per family is enough.”

“But Sport is lonely now,” said my daughter plaintively. “And we will give some dog out there a really great home. We are so good with dogs!”

He looked at her quizzically. “Really?  In the space of a year, one’s crippled and one’s dead! I don’t think this family is very good for dogs at all.”

But dogs were good for our family.  We all knew it.  We adopted not one, but two more.  Given our track record, and the suicidal nature of Jack Russells, it seemed like we might need a few extra.

Through it all, Sport remained happy, hopeful, grateful, and only occasionally, murderous.  One summer, he slaughtered every last Guinea hen I had.  (I think I started with twenty-seven.)  My daughter tried to host a small dinner party while I was out of town and the festivities were continuously interrupted by the need to stop and bury poultry.

More than once, he turned on his own colleagues and we would have to rush a snarling mass to the nearest sink to dunk them under running water until someone released that steel mouse trap of a jaw. Once, he had his throat ripped open by another dog and went into shock as we examined him on the kitchen table.  Naturally, it was late in the evening and the nearest emergency clinic was over an hour away.  He was not going to make it.  My daughter, a certified EMT at the time, performed the necessary triage and stitched him back together with my best sewing silk and instructions supplied over cell-phone by my dear sister (and favorite veterinarian) in Pennsylvania.  We got him the necessary antibiotics the next day and he healed beautifully.

He was nothing if not a survivor.  As Mark Twain said “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” He survived that operation, as well as losing a leg, a fractured skull, and two bouts of colon cancer.  (Sport, that is, not Mark Twain.) He even survived that time three of them shared a meal of six pounds of purloined butter, including plastic and packaging, and they all wound up with acute pancreatitis (which was not cute at all).   

As W. Bruce Cameron put it, “When you adopt a dog, you have a lot of very good days and one very bad day.” The worst day ever.   And that day finally came. There is hard honesty in knowing we have to love them up as best we can, storing their joys for colder winters to come, when we must sit by the fireside with only weightless stories on our laps.  

The difference between dogs and us lesser mortals is that they live right up until the moment they die.  Sport went to meet his Maker with a belly full of sausage and treats and passed peacefully in the arms of his beloved boy (now a grown man). He never complained; he never explained. Just one soulful look and he was gone. He lived his whole brave little life, never wasting one moment in being worried about what the next moment might bring or who was paying his bills.    

When I consider the above poem about living gently and releasing gracefully, I realize what a terrible Buddhist he was.  He lived with great passion, generating mayhem and violence, soiled carpets and lacerated squeaky toys wherever he roamed. He never released his grip on anything, whether it was meant for him or not.  To my utter mortification, I once had to put him on the conveyor belt at the till at Tractor Supply so that the checkout clerk could scan him along with the plush toy he had shoplifted because he refused unclamp it from his mouth.  (If you look up “tenacious” in certain dictionaries, you will find his portrait.)  But, gosh…. He LOVED.  And he was Loved.  So maybe it all evens out in the end.

Seasons change, Life passes through us and around us and Love takes on new forms.  Apples fall and so do us men, bitten or baked. New seeds are planted and we Forgive. We Learn. We grow. The Loving never goes away—It simply seeks us in new shapes and guises.  Each precious time it finds us, the Truth of Love changes us indelibly.  It transforms us animale from Fearful into Trusting beings and all species into kin. Thanks to Sport, we know that we will always love again, no matter what the cost.   And the more we love, the more we become the beings we are meant to be: Authentic, as Love Itself imagined us at our start.

He may have been a terrible Buddhist, but he was a damn good Sport.

I’m trying to learn from him.

With sew much love,

Nancy

For my Daughter

“For all the things my hands have held, the best by far is you…” (unknown)

Greetings Dear Ones!

Secretly, today is always an intense day for me. It’s a day of poignant memories, secret celebration, and massive Gratitude.  Now, on the twentieth anniversary of 9-11, a pulling in my heart prompts me to write honestly about a few hard things that have been weighing my spirit. After yet another sleepless night, it might help to share them with you…

Today, this day of National Mourning, is also my beloved daughter’s birthday. 

Twenty years ago, she turned four.  Her father and I had her birthday party first thing in the morning, as soon as she woke up, because what four-year-old wouldn’t LOVE that anyway, and he had to make it to Logan airport early. He was due to go to work in New York City that day, to make a presentation to the staff of the restaurant at the Windows of the World restaurant on the top of the World Trade center. His boss was furious because he hadn’t agreed to go down the night before, to stay in the Twin Towers Marriott and be there early.  He had wanted the meeting to start at 9:am. 

“What do you mean you have to put your daughter first?” he fumed, “She’s FOUR.  She’ll never know!”

But her daddy got his way and the meeting was postponed to the afternoon so that he could be there when his little girl woke up. And she did know.  Ever after, she has known.  Putting his daughter first saved his life that day.  We have no concept of how hers might have been changed, had she had to grow up without a daddy.  Thankfully, we will never know.  Today, she is 24 and, unlike so many of the victims of that tragic, hateful day, she still has her daddy.

She opened her presents, got butter and frosting on her nose, and he kissed her goodbye only to be back again later the same day, looking stunned beyond words.  The people who were to attend his meeting, some of whom he knew personally, were Gone… along with an innocence America did not know she had.

________

Fast forward twenty years. Last night, around 5:pm, I left a small, successful business, which I own and have legally registered in my name with the State of Vermont.  I work alone to my own standards and report to no one.   I drove home in a vehicle, which I also own and know how to drive and maintain and clean (occasionally) (ok, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement).  I arrived home at a piece of land I “own,” as much as any of us can ever be said to “own” anything wild like land.  Perhaps “steward” is better word.  Still, no one else pays the taxes and no other name is on the deed.  I changed into work clothes—a mix of witch and muggle fashion that pairs gloves and wellie boots with a vintage calico dress, denim leggings, and a floppy hat (I’m not required by law to cover this bird’s nest of hair but I choose to anyway)—and climbed onto a tractor I know how to drive and transported three loads of manure to the site of a future garden I intend to plant next Spring.  I can plan to plant a garden because sunshine, soil, and water are assured and my home, my village, the surrounding countryside, all my neighbors are at Peace.  I worked a tiny team of oxen I am also allowed to own and drive.  When I went into the house later, three chivalrous house guests—delightful, gracious young men, two of whom are immigrants—had prepared dinner and set the table.  We dined together happily without losing our virtue or our honor.  We discussed history and politics without losing our tempers.  They listened respectfully to everything I had to say.  

I tried not to say too much—I do think of conversation like a “pie”—each person should be offered the same size piece.  But when a topic excites me, like 1850’s history or the Civil War, I can get greedy and help myself to too many pieces at once.  I have to remind myself not to eat the whole thing, without sharing “bites” (sound bites) now and then.  They did not mind. Here, women can talk as much as they want. We all did the dishes, then the old crone (me) went off to say goodnight to everyone at the barn and they practiced music for a concert they are giving in a nearby town tonight.  

 Twenty years ago, I tucked my darling in with a princess-themed sippy-cup of water by her bed, in case she got thirsty in the night. Nowadays, my “babies” require five-gallon buckets hauled from the well by the house. (There are no princesses involved!) As I labor up hill and downhill in the dusk, the weight cutting into my palms is nothing to the weight cutting into my heart as I recall the evening news from other parts of the world.   I am deeply conscious of my incredible amount of Privilege and haunted by the knowledge that very, very few of this planet’s women get to have even ONE of these exquisite opportunities I enjoy daily.  Extreme empathy and a lively imagination can cause me physical pain if I am not careful to coral my thoughts and turn them to prayers.  I look up at the stars and think of the women, the mothers, the precious daughters—at the mercy of regimes that seek to “protect” them by making them invisible, unheard when they cry. I lie awake in gut-twisting discomfort and “survivor guilt” because I feel so lucky to be who I am, where I am.  I consider the history of women’s rights here in America, all the way from the current “Me Too” movement to my great aunts who were prohibitionist keg-bashers and suffragettes.  How have our mothers bled to give us daughters these freedoms!  What will we pass along to ours in our time? Our daughters will be princesses not because they have the right Disney cups, or believe they need to grow up to marry princes, but because their mothers have become Queens.

I know that my wealth and privilege are the result of education, race, and the choices of ancestors who risked everything to immigrate here in dire poverty, that each generation could do better than the previous one, so that one day, their frazzle-haired descendent could live safely alone where she wanted, eat what she grew, and wear whatever she damn well pleased, poopy shoes and all.  I know that my chances would have been different if my ancestors had been enslaved, rather than simply impoverished, or if any of them had been denied the right to education and the belief that ALL people are created Equal.   I feel both sad and immensely grateful.

One of the things I truly believed, twenty years ago, in the wake of 9/11, was that “we” were going to change a lot of things, especially the lives of women in places like Afganistan, for the better.  Personally, I did very little, beyond teaching my own little girl to read. I now wonder, What the hell did “we” do? What can I do now? What can any of us do?  What should we do? One has to pay attention closely to the news reports to infer the rest of the story, “there are no women on the streets of Kabul…”

Here on my farm, I keep realizing I need a Good Fence. I tried saying prayers and affirmations, hoping to manifest a fence and it actually worked! A neighbor GAVE me the makings of an electric fence. But…it is still rolled around a post and leaning against a wall in the barn. So I keep looking out the windows and seeing no fence. The sheep are still lounging on my back deck, cudding nonchalantly, as if they are New Yorkers on a cruise ship bound for the Bahamas.  It’s starting to dawn on me that if I want to look out the window and see a fence, I’m going to have to get off my ass and build the damn fence.

It’s the same for changing anything about our world.

Twenty years on, everyone is asking what the enduring legacy of 9/11 is. What are we creating for ourselves, for our daughters? Do we have a plan?   I want to think more about the legacy of what happened on 9/12 when, we were united by loss, fury at being threatened, and dawning awareness that we had a lot of work to do to change hearts and minds about how America is viewed in the rest of the world—that we couldn’t hang out in the shelter of our own vast continent of isolation and be “safe” from the effects of how we behave in the world.  Senator John Kerry said, “[September 11th] was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us.”  Where is that “best” now?

Today, I don’t think 9/11 is the worst day we have ever seen.  In my humble opinion, that day is now January 6th, 2021, when we attacked ourselves from within.  The global threat of terrorism that surprised us all twenty years ago is nothing to the current threats of Covid-19, racial violence, and climate disasters.   But where the attack in 2001 brought us a temporarily heightened sense of unity and patriotism, these new threats divide us and corrode our basic fabric of civility and decency.  Where we once shared facts but not necessarily opinions, now we have no idea what Facts even are and our “opinions” are deeply personal and vicious.  Twenty years on, it seems like nothing unites us now.  What’s up with that? Even “Patriotism” seems explosively divisive and “political.”  Is this what we want for our children?

On September 11, 1997, when I stared for the first time into the eyes of the being who had been trampolining off my bladder for the past 42 ½  weeks, I couldn’t believe the rush of love I felt. I loved Her and I also loved the magic of the biology of me.  One of the biggest surprises of motherhood is the way it changed how I began to look at myself, who I was, and what I believed I deserved, especially in contrast with what I wanted for my little girl.  What are daughters for but to make us see the innocence, the beauty, and goodness that can come into this world and inspire us to be the best versions of ourselves? Would we inflict our own bargains on our daughters? 

Even in a land as rich and vast and magical as America, our women know what it is to tread carefully, silently, fearfully.  Every day in the privacy of my little dressing room, I glimpse the scars.  I see the wounds of flesh and psyche.  Some of us have been hurt by fists as well as words.  Worst of all is being hurt by the lack of words, the lack of story, the lack of being heard, seen, valued, cherished, or allowed to blossom.   My own life is haunted by painful choices that led to painful learning.   At the tender age of 46, I decided I was going to live Authentically, or not at all.  I decided to get off the floor and LIVE because I had a precious daughter and a precious son who needed their mama not just to survive, but to teach them how Strong a woman really can be.

 Many women never get that choice. 

My dear friend, who just turned eighty and has lived a long life in service to others, says “Whatever this lifetime has left for me, it’s got to be the lifetime in which I get to be who I want to be. So it should be for all women.” This is all I have ever wanted for my daughter too. Too many people believe that if the cage is pretty enough, no one will care if the bird sings or not.  I care.  Smash the cages.  I want ALL birds to sing.

To get where I am today, I’ve had a tremendous amount of love, help, and support.  I didn’t do anything alone.  I am thankful to live, love, and work in this country, flawed and misguided and selfish as it is.  I gratefully pay my taxes. I really do kiss each check as I put it in with my returns and send it with a blessing that it be spent well to help many.  I am thankful to all those working to keep us “safe.” I question whether safety comes at the end of a rifle but I do know from training cattle that words don’t teach unless you are prepared to back them with the force of an understandable consequence.   As a woman who owns nine sheep and no fences, I know that strong boundaries are a MUST.  But so too are gates.  Being open to ideas, to healing, to those who know and can do better is a MUST as well.

I am thankful to have this incredible daughter and to share the experiences of womanhood with her. I celebrate the miracle that enabled me to create a life within my bones, ribs beneath my ribs, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and to feel with awe the crush of a skull forcing its way through the portal of pelvis to air and light and the waiting embrace of Love.  Today, as always, I cherish my gift to do that for someone I have grown to love so dearly.  I may have given her the gift of life, but Life gave me the gift of Her.  I wouldn’t change my gender for all the tea in China, and miss out on an experience like that. I genuinely mourn for those who would chose to bear or keep their children and can’t.

I count my blessings every year on this day, that there are brave souls who wisely put our daughters first.  It’s good for them. It’s good for all of us.  Saving our daughters saves us all in the end. I know that we need more Menders in this world. More strong daughters. We haven’t done our best by them, from the looks of things, and I am deeply sorry about that.  But perhaps… We can take up the work that has been left for us to do…and KEEP MENDING!

What shall we give Life/birth to Today?

Thank you.

I love you.

Nancy

P.S. I know this has been a long, tough read. Thank you for enduring. This essay contains 2,526 words.That’s not even one for every name of a person who perished in the initial attack on September 11th 2001.

Getting Hitched

“Not the ones speaking the same language, but the ones sharing the same feeling understand each other.” --Rumi

Greetings Dear ones!

September is here. The nights are getting cooler and the butter in the glass dish on the counter is gathering more Resolve each day—it has stopped its languid, sloppy slouching and now stands up straight, its shoulders high, defiant even, ready to give a knife some trouble.  It looks like butter that can look itself in the eye and keep its promises.

It’s wedding season.  The high rack is clogged with suits and long bridesmaids’ dresses in Autumnal colors. I’m altering my fourth wedding gown in ten days.  Two gorgeous gowns take up nearly the whole of the fitting room.  “We’re getting hitched!” say two women, smiling fondly at each other.  They call each other “Babe” and each doesn’t want the other to see her dress until the big day so I have to keep them all bagged up and secret.  The thing that amuses me so much is how truly similar both gowns are.  Both have similar-length trains with dozens of buttons marching in single file all the way to the hems.  These are two people who think very much alike.  Hitched. I can’t help thinking about how one tries to pair a team of oxen.  These two seem like a solid match.

I cringe to admit that six weeks of training oxen has taught me more about “getting’ hitched” than twenty-five years of matrimony ever did. 

I have a wonderful new friend and mentor I’ll call “H” helping me train the wee bulls.  He’s “Vermont” through and through, from his baseball cap to his boots. He’s been driving teams since the age of 6. (He’s 78.) He said that every summer when school got out, his uncle would put him in charge of two new calves. If, by September, he could make them back up 100 feet in a straight line without touching them, he was allowed to take them to the county fair and compete.  Being able to back up in a straight line on voice commands only is a sign that one has done one’s homework in the Ox world.  (It works pretty well in the shop with balky customers too.)

We learned a lot about each other the first day. He brought a tiny yoke out of his truck and showed me how to fit the bows around their necks and pin them in place with cotter pins.  I was very excited, prone to exuberance.  By contrast, his movements were methodical and silent, almost stern. The boys stood quietly, curious, watching us both. 

“Do this the exact same way, every time,” he said firmly. “They need to be able to predict the routine.” I nodded vigorously. All animals prefer routine.  Routine helps us feel safe. Consistency is how we know what happens before the thing that is about to happen happens.   Accurate predicting is not just the basis of all learning, it is the foundation of Sanity.

We unhooked them from the hitching area and brought them out of the barn, bound for the first time in their little lives by a bar of wood across their necks, resting just behind their heads.  Otus seemed just as happy as ever but Gus, the smaller ox on the left, wasn’t having it.  He dug in his heels, lowered his head and quit right then and there.  I got behind him and pushed him halfway up the hill as H led the team from the front.  Gus took a few steps on his own then quit again.  This time, his eyes rolled back in his head and he threw himself on the ground.  This is known far and wide as “The Jersey Flop.” Jerseys are renowned for these dramatic bovine temper tantrums.  Gus is a flopper.  As a calf, he flopped seven times the first time I tried to lead him by a halter.  He sticks his neck way out, stiffens all over, and down he goes, looking like he has just had a cardiac arrest.  He lies quite still, with no thrashing or kicking, while I wait for him to get up.  It’s like he just refuses to live any more in that moment.  He can be pushed NO Further.  He’s DONE.

Ever since I learned about the Jersey Flop, I’ve realized how much my own inner seam-stressing cow wants to flop like that—especially at the sight of not one but TWO five-layer wedding gowns complete with closed linings and horsehair braiding in the hems—that have to be done in less than two weeks.  I want to flop at instant deadlines, zippers, down coats, anything eaten by moths, and vintage silk dresses where the original stitching is still strong but the fabric is rotting… I especially want to stiffen up, roll my eyes back, and throw myself on the ground when oddly-scented men bring in their ex-brother-in-law’s hand-me-down boxers to be refitted to them.   

Normally, Gus’s little flops don’t mean much.  But now that he was yoked to Otie, he was taking Otie down too.  I watched in horror as Otie spooked and darted to the right, swinging his butt around so that he was facing the wrong way.  He was yanked backwards by the yoke, which twisted around his neck as he fought. That put pressure on Gus, who was trying to stand up but wound up falling again, into Otie, who now went down too. Slowly, they rolled over one another in a wood-and-bull somersault and then scrambled to their feet, shaking.  The yoke that was supposed to be across their necks now hung under both their chins and they stood there, trembling, heads down, confused.  I wanted to scream but something about H being there kept me very quiet instead.  I thought my eyes were going to roll out of their sockets, down my cheeks, and into my open mouth.  I couldn’t believe nothing was broken.

H said nothing.  His face never changed expression. He had watched as calmly as if someone were pouring tea.  He simply handed me the rope connected to Gus’s halter and said “Hold this.”   Then he stumped off to the barn.  The three of us stood there in wordless, moo-less shock.  When he came back with two more lead lines, I peppered him with questions.  “That was bad, right?  Wasn’t that a bad thing? Does that happen often? What should I have done? Are they going to do that a lot? How can we stop that? That didn’t look quite right to me, but then what do I know?”

H worked silently to unyoke the boys, reposition the bows, and yoke them again.  They stood quiet.  I shut up.  Finally, when everything was set to rights, I was brave enough to ask again. “That was bad, right?”

“Yup.” 

He stood there stoking their little backs.  After a long pause, he said, “Pretty much the worst thing that could ever happen to a team…We’re lucky they weren’t hurt. Let’s just hope they forget about it by the end of the lesson. Let’s go.”

Unbelievably, this baby duo still trusted us.  After recovering as best we could from the initial disaster, we set off, lurching, attempting to keep ourselves all pointed in the same direction.  It’s incredibly important to have a team pulling together in the same direction at the same pace.  You can’t have one attempting to GO and DO and BE while the other one wants to flop… You really can’t have one thinking that maybe it’s time to buy a house and a dog and a picket fence while the other one wants to sell all her possessions and run off to India. Walking Together is very hard to do at first—the strong one pulls the smaller one off course any time he wants.  Yokes are exhausting to those accustomed to self-oriented individualism.

We stopped after about twenty minutes, before they got too tired.  I agreed to work them fifteen minutes a day for the next few weeks.

“Words are important,” H said. “Don’t use too many of them and always use the exact same ones to mean the exact same things.  Don’t say ‘whoa’ if you intend to let them keep walking.  ‘Whoa’ is only for a dead stop.  If you want them to slow down, pick another word, like ‘Easy.’”

“Work on just one word at a time.  Just do one thing at a time and don’t chat too much. They need to hear the word clearly and it has to be connected to a request they understand.” 

How many tearstained brides and grooms could benefit from understanding that expectations must be made Very Clear—they can only be answered effectively by the animal you are attempting to control if (he/she) understands what you want done.

Two weeks later, H came back to see how we were getting on.  The boys are much better, mostly because I am getting better.  I spend a minimum of fifteen minutes a day doing creative problem solving by trying to think like a cow—in pictures, in fears, in wonderment at strange things that are new.  I’m not actually a cow (most of the time) but learning to think like one is helping me learn Empathy, Courage, Obedience.    

“You’re going to be a very different sort of lady when you get done with these two,” H says appreciatively. “Nevermind them, this is going to be the making of You!” 

Later, over a cup of coffee in the kitchen, he opens up a little.

“You surprised me,” he admits. “After that first mess, when I saw them bulls rolling down the hill in that yoke, I thought ‘here we go…I’ll come back and find this gal all tangled up half dead in the ropes.” His shoulders shook in silent laughter.  Then he looked me right in the eye and said words I cling to daily now, “Girl, You’ve got grit.  These guys look alright. You’ve got a long way to go but you’re going. They’re keepers. Keep at it. I’ve seen worse and you’re gonna’ be OK.”

For those of us craving the dream relationship partnership, love, trust, harmony and teamwork, we can learn a lot from these tiny bulls:

Go the Same Direction. Momentum in opposite directions is extremely dangerous.

Fears must be addressed one by one.

Words mean what they mean.

Empathy is the key to problem solving.

Be Flexible, Patient, Consistent and Kind, EVERY DAY for as long as your endurance can manage at first.

In everything little thing we do, we are training others how to treat us.  We teach them whether our words matter or not by our actions.  We create trust by our requests and responses. In minutes every day, with consistency, discipline, and repetition, we can come to see amazing results.  So it is with bulls, partners, marriage, and Life.  Getting Hitched is a damn big deal.  Happily ever after doesn't come with the dress. It can't be made in a day, or even by next Friday. Only after you’ve spent the agonizing daily minutes can you realize you’ve actually won the years.

And so I say to you now, Dear  Menders, just in case you need to hear it as badly as I sometimes do— It’s not great to fall, but it’s survivable.  Get Up. Keep Going. You CAN do this. You’re alright.  You’ve got what it takes.  Do your minutes! They count.

With sew much love,

Nancy