Let 'em Run!

“We must pay with some toughness for a gentle world” –May Sarton

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s a gorgeous May morning!  Spring has arrived with all its scents and zephyrs, tugged Northward in gritted teeth beneath a thousand tiny wings of the dreaded May flies questing blood.  I am re-amazed by how hungry my hollowed winter eyes have gotten for Green.   I am like the crazed barn animals out on fresh pasture.  The sheep refuse to eat their hay now, turning their noses with haughty disdain when it is served.  Flies or no flies, they just want to be Out.  All around the Land of Lost Plots the forest and meadows are greening and my ravenous eyes slurp and gobble every blade, branch, and blossom.  I cannot look at it enough.  Frost was right.  “Nature’s first green is Gold.” The golden evenings stretch and blur in ever-widening margins to a heavenly twilight that is warm, welcoming, inviting me to linger outside.  After a full day’s work, there is still time (and energy!) to potter in the garden, to mulch the orchard, or simply to stand beneath the marvel of a giant pear tree in full bloom, watching the honeybees work.  

At the shop, I am still hacking my way through that Formalwear Forest in the dressing room.  The teenagers know exactly how they want their dresses to look. (“They want them to look Impossible,” harrumphs Prudence.)  The older women, those chosen as bridesmaids or mothers of brides or grooms, have significantly more trouble deciding on hem lengths, sleeve lengths, and cleavage depths.  They have been trained to Please.  “What do you think looks best?” they say but what they mean is “I need to make someone happy and you’re the only other one here.”  I have to hold a very firm boundary on my opinions as I am begged, even pleaded with, to give my thoughts.  Nothing incites panic in them like when I say: “This is your dress, your day; how do you want to feel?”  One dear soul, who was contemplating what length she should make her dress, decided to take it away, pins and all, so that her cousin could see it first.   Then I received word that my steers escaped at home and I had to leave the shop before she could return.

The barn is the opposite of the fitting room. Unlike people, cattle should not be encouraged to think for themselves.  (The problem is that too few people try it and too many cattle do.) The dear young cattle I know personally don’t have the best ideas.  They will eat a lot of things that aren’t food—like hats, nails, and my hair (which, to be fair, really does resemble hay). They have invented all sorts of rough games with their water tub—everything from turd basketball, to wrestling, dumping, and making a water park of their stall on a regular basis.  They are losing respect for fencing, since it’s abundantly clear to them that the better grass is on the other side.   They poke their horns into it, lift it up, and shimmy underneath like sleek Caribbeans doing  the Limbo.

They love the fresh taste of green grass (the steer, that is, not the Limbo dancers) and lap it up with wide tongues and contented grunts like the folks with fully loaded waffle cones at the local ice cream stand, which, these days is doing a brisk trade on any day over forty degrees.  Their necks are getting thicker (again, cattle that is, not the folks at the ice cream stand) so I was unable to work them for a few weeks after an Alarming Incident in which I stuffed Otie (the chubby one) into a bow that didn’t fit any more. Before I could get Gus hitched up on his side, Otie had collapsed on the ground at my feet.  I must have cut off his air supply by accident. There was no struggle involved.  It wasn’t a “Jersey flop,” as there was no temper, no spirit of rebellion. This was a more of a Jersey crumple. His knees buckled and the next thing I knew, a five-hundred pound animal was having an unexpected nap on my foot.  Luckily my dashing young lodger was helping me and he was strong enough to hold up the yoke and the other steer (who was getting pulled down) while I worked the pins out of the bow trapping the first guy.  He came to as soon as we got the bow off him and was totally fine afterwards.  But naturally, I was reluctant to try such a stunt again.   Without schooling, they have been acting like little bullies, pushing and shoving and thinking they are Big Stuff.

Last Sunday, my friend and mentor H.  brought a new  yoke for them, made from a tree he had cut himself, and bows he had shaped by hand in his cellar.  We hitched them up in all their gorgeous new finery then gazed in dismay as they took off lurching towards the blueberry patch without either of us driving them.  Like the strong, ambitious adolescents they are, they thought they could just go it alone, without guidance.  We watched as they smashed into the blueberry fence and Otis got his horns stuck in the wire. Helpful Gus pulled his buddy free and they swung around and went thirty miles an hour into the nearest peach tree behind them.  As they strove to keep going, like linebackers pushing a sled (in this case, a peach tree) their hind ends passed their front ends on either side; they dropped their heads and “flipped” the yoke.  Wild-eyed, they tried to run but didn’t know where to go or how to go there together.

H. stood stock still. His face never once changed expression.   I was doing my best to breathe but I’m pretty sure I was sounding like someone playing double time on an out of tune accordion.  After a moment, the boys came to a stop and just stood there with their heads down, looking tense and confused, out of ideas, the yoke dangling under their jaws.  Almost casually, H. walked up and silently laid a hand on the nearest one.  I could see their taut bodies relax at his touch.  They didn’t move.  If anything, they looked relieved.

“Fetch the halters,” he said in a tone one might use to indicate yes, you would like another biscuit with your tea.  In utter silence, we put their halters back on, then led them back to the hitching post and started all over again. We unhitched them, repositioned everything, and started again as if nothing had happened. When they were all put back together, he looked at me seriously over their backs and said, “Never Chase. Never. They start to run, you let ‘em go. When they stop, then you go up to them and act like nothing happened.  Never punish. Never hit. Never yell. That’s the trick.  You must become their safe place.  Build their trust.  They’ll know they made a mess and they’ll look to you to fix it, to help them.  If you yell and scream or get hysterical, they will just get scared and think they’ll have to solve their own problems, which will be more of a mess. You don’t want to reward them either—so don’t fuss over them.  Just act like it didn’t happen and in another minute they’ll forget all about it. But you’ll have gained their trust.” 

He talks quietly, encouragingly, as if I am one of the animals he is trying to soothe.  He wins my trust.  As with most of his advice, it strikes me as something Bigger, Universal—like he’s just revealed the secret for dealing with relationships of all kinds from cattle to teenagers, or any fool, customer, or lover.  In his words I find that divine paradox of being tender yet fierce, gentle and strong, letting Go in order to win back.  So many relationships depend on that paradox—from raising our children, to advocating for Justice, or simply handling insecure women who have no idea how much of their legs or ankles should show at a wedding.

My heart aches with shame at all the times I have run, flapping and screaming and chasing towards Love  and other would-be disasters in progress, trying to avert them before anyone could learn for themselves that I cannot actually Control Everything.  (Shhh!!! Don’t tell Prudence!) Our modern landscape is beset with disasters in progress.  No one from our Congress-critters to our own partners, spouses, children, and pets wants to do what we think is Best.  It’s tantalizing to think we can charge right in there and smack and yell until they get it right but H. shows me how counter-productive, and possibly terrifying that is.  True Teamwork requires something different.  

Working cattle with H. has mended me more than any best self-help book I have ever read.  He said in the beginning, “this is going to be the training of you. And maybe in the end you’ll have a driveable team as a bonus.”  He’s right.  I wish I had learned these lessons years ago—when my angry teenagers went through micro-phases of hating me, when my marriage dissolved in bewildered despair, when supposed “friends” neglected, gossiped or betrayed.  Each time my heart was broken—when a dream person, a dream plan, a dream house, the dream job I desperately wanted did not “choose” me but ran sideways instead.  I wish I had known to “let ‘em run.” 

All Teamwork, transactions, and collaborations are about Energy.  Don’t send yours off to pursue Chaos. Pause. Hold Steady. Hold onto your power. When the chaos subsides, be there to help. Don’t be part of the problem.  Never amp up the drama.  Give a project the time and space it takes to do it right. Don’t rush. Don’t quit. 

Become the one they Trust.  

To achieve Peace, one must be able to win a fight. To be Gentle, one must be very strong.  When all seems lost, just wait.  Then begin again.  It’s ok Relax while you steadily keep working. The best dreams you have ever dreamed—the ones that will All come true—are the ones you don’t even know you are dreaming yet.  I know this.

With Sew Much Love, whether you choose it or not, (I can wait)

Nancy

Harmony & Balance

“Give yourself to Love, if Love is what you’re after” –Kate Wolf

Greetings Dear Ones!

Buckle up!  Here we go: the start of the FIFTH year of this blog.   The Love Safari continues. I wasn’t even sure I would manage one this week—as there are 18+ (and counting) prom dresses clogging up the shop with glitter, glamour, and tulle. AND (this being Vermont) there are Morris Dancers too!  In the nick of time, I completed the overhaul of seven matching vests for our local team, who danced at dawn on May Day.  With all the deadlines, and to ward off the temptation to guzzle distilled beverages straight from the bottle, I have taken Mary Poppin’s advice and made the job a game.  It’s called Spring Bingo. In the various boxes are all the things Prudence loves best (um…not really) about customers during prom season: mother and daughter bickering, having enough tulle to slip-cover a pony on the cutting table all at the same time, closed hems that include 4-inch horsehair braid, and the dad being rushed to the ER when he sees his baby girl in something that makes him assume the high school dance floor will include a pole.  One dear young lady came in recently and ticked most of her favorites: forgot shoes for hemming, dress needed in less than three days, made entirely of glitter, left wallet at boyfriend’s house and can’t pay for it, it’s too tight but she wants it tighter because “the zipper is too big.”  Should the day come where every single box is ticked at once, I give myself permission to drop a gravity-fed steam iron on my foot and go home.

The State Troopers are all switching to summer uniforms and need new arm patches sewn on.  Cruisers in the parking lot and troopers in uniform going in and out of the building might make people wonder what I am up to.  I say nothing. I cultivate an air of mystery.  Knowing so much of the force will make it unlikely that I will ever qualify for jury duty again so I’m glad I got my chance while I could. Last week I was assigned to my third and final trial—unsavory charges of alleged violence.  I had already made up my mind that if the defendant had been up half the night trying to make a vintage 1980’s Gunne Sax dress three sizes bigger using faded velvet that could not be matched, he probably was innocent and could plead insanity.  But when I showed up at the courthouse with my fellow jurors, we were excused.  The trial was either postponed or cancelled.  In one swift gulp, the morning was bitten and chewed but the rest of the day spit out. What a gift!  I love the idea that I was willing to give my time and that Time, in turn, was willing to give itself back.

Time mystifies me. I am one of those mothers who thought she would never get her children potty-trained and the next minute they left for college.  These days are a swift kaleidoscope of every changing colors (and glitter! Ugh… why did I assume Vermont promsters would prefer sensible things like flannel or burlap?) Morning skies on the farm, which seem to arrive every twenty minutes or so, are a rumple of pink and blue tie dye with a row of slim, inverted lungs in stark outline at the edges.  Their blackened tracheas reach upwards, bifurcate, and branch, becoming the smaller and smaller paths towards the air they transpire.  The central heating is off but on colder mornings I load my arms with the last sticks of firewood for the kitchen stove. I can hear the local band of bachelor turkeys roaming in the dusk, making their characteristic wobble-gobble.  They swagger into view at the edge of the woods, boasting and showing off.  I must remember to scan the trail for their discarded feathers.  Turkey feathers make the perfect tools for gently brushing bees off a frame of honey or brood.  A sweet and gentle customer, who is moving to Colorado and cannot take them with her, has given me a precious hive of bees to steward.  I am experimenting with keeping them in the upper loft of the barn, by a large open window, where they will be safe from bears.  They are a small but friendly clump of BUZZ and seem to like their new location.  Until now, they have been city bees, working off a balcony.  Soon, they will discover the orchard!  I can’t wait.

Bit by bit, all the pieces of the Spring delirium are coming together. The bees are here; the trees are here; all the furry and feathered family are “home.” I’ve mulched the blueberries. In the forest, a green mist rises between the tree as the brush closes in, sealing off the view. Tree frogs and early birds have begun their morning choir rehearsals.  The calves and sheep vie for cuddles and scratches at each margin of the day (and also behind their ears).  Their hides are weary of last winter’s clothing. Each dawn brings both the reassurance of small, familiar circles—daily chores, patterns, procedures—as well as those elipses that are annual, novel, and exciting.  

When I saw my niece Rabbit at Easter time, we decided to go for a walk.  “Which way do you want to go?” she asked, adding “If we go that way, it’s all up hill.”  I laughed.

“ALL uphill? Have you not heard of Kepler’s Laws?” I asked. “If we return to where we start, then we must walk uphill as much as down.  The needle returns to the start of the song.”

“Makes sense,” she said, shrugging accommodatingly. I learn so much from dear Rabbit.  She always gets me thinking.

In the 1690’s, German astronomer/mathematician/musician/natural philosopher/astrologer/writer Johannes Kepler came up with laws of Harmony. He recognized three “laws” concerning planetary motion around a fixed sun as the center, laws which mark an interesting turning point in the transition from thinking everything in orbit revolved around the earth to realizing everything actually revolves around the sun.  (He also realized we have two eyes in order to create depth perception but I am getting off track now…)  He realized that when a planet is closer to the sun, it travels faster, much the way a seamstress’s fingers have a way of scooting past a hot iron on a hemline.  The farther it is from the sun, the slower its orbital speed.  He recognized that we travel space in a series of ellipses, not circles, and that all planets are in a consistent and relational harmony of time and distance with each other.

Harmony is the supreme potential of balance—things seeking equilibrium—going too far and then having to come back. What goes out will come back in again in time the way Disharmonious actions flow out from us like ripples disturbing a pond. They go out and back, like Prom gowns, gradually lessening in frequency until harmony is restored.  Harmony, in this case, is defined as a shop without prom gowns.

I look around the transitional chaos at both shop and farm and wonder what Kepler might think of it. Do things return to Harmony? Really? If given enough time?  And what about the law of Entropy? And the Laws of Glitter? I’m pretty sure they all cancel each other out. All these prom gowns have come in… soon they must go back out.  Afterall, it’s the law. RIGHT???

It’s certainly true that what goes out from us comes back to us. During April vacation week, I took to thanking the teachers for their service, the way I normally thank veterans. Many of them came in during their week off to have their spring wardrobes spruced up (the teachers, that is, not the veterans). They were surprised to be thanked.  And meltingly Grateful.  The more I thanked them, the more they thanked me for thanking them.  The more we received each other’s gratitude, the happier we all were.  I started thanking everyone.  I even thanked a woman who forgot her shoes and balanced her heels on a two-inch stack of books so we could get the hem marked on her bridesmaids’ dress.  “Thanks for making my day,” I said. “You realize, of course, that if this hem is off, you will just have to wear books on your feet to the wedding!” (I seriously hope she does! How fabulous would that be?)

So!  Harmony, Chaos, Transition, Glitter…. Yep. We got it all. Spring is Springing and the planets are swinging.  The sun feels closer and Time is flying. Balance is doing its level best.  Gratitude sweetens the deal.  It’s almost as much fun as Bingo.

Thanks for being here for the ride.  Thanks for the kind words and good work you put out into this world in need of Mending!

With Sew much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Say...nothing?

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, it’s finally happened. I always suspected it might.  It was bound to happen; the risk is ever present in my line of work.  Who’s to say it hasn’t already happened subtly, serruptitiously, multiple times in the past?  Perhaps… but never in such a convincing, undeniable, way.   This time was so bad; we actually had to pretend it never happened at all. Perhaps it didn’t…. We’ll never know.

A dear little lady came into the shop to have her dress hemmed for her grandson’s wedding.  It was a beautiful light woolen thing smelling vaguely of lavender and mothballs, like herself.  “I’ve shrunk a bit since I last wore this,” she said, gazing at it in the fitting room mirror. “I’d like you to take it up a notch. I don’t like where it is landing on my leg.”  Her voice sounded faintly British, as though she spoke with a mouthful of pearls.  Her clear eyes were the color of the sea and her long, aqualine nose had the pinkish hues of a renaissance portrait. Her hair was coiled in a smooth bun held together with old fashioned hair pins.  The dress was fairly non-descript but was well-made and fit her superbly. It was just a little too long. It was a very proper dress on a very proper lady.  Prudence was charmed.

“I think it should come up about three or four inches,” she said. “It’s always been a bit longer than I wanted.”  I nodded.  A dress of that length was probably really fashionable in the late 1980’s.  I got out my skirt marker and started to leave a line of pins around the skirt at the length she indicated.  I reminded her to keep her chin up, so that the length would remain consistent, and asked her to rotate slowly in front of me as I worked.  We had already marked half of the skirt and I was kneeling directly behind her, my face level with her buttocks, when she took her next dainty step. That step was simultaneously accompanied by the muffled yet unmistakable quack of a small, happy mallard and the sudden aroma of composting prunes.

She flinched visibly then froze, afraid to move again, staring aghast into the mirror. Time stopped.  An eternity went by.  (An eternity that my inner fifth-grader spent rolling on the floor of my skull, laughing uncontrollably.) We did not make eye contact.  With the height of professional aplomb, we both chose to utterly ignore the situation and get on with our previously scheduled lives as soon as possible without saying a word.  We finished the pinning without further incident.

“She could have said ‘sorry’ or ‘pardon me’ after shooting at you from point blank range,” said Prudence, reliving the insult later. 

“She didn’t do anything Wrong,” said the better Angel of my nature.  “Why should she apologize? I’m not sure the poor thing had a choice in the matter. Flatulence is a very healthy and natural thing.”

“Well, at least you behaved like a lady,” sniffed Prudence, “which is not something you often do.  A lady would never call attention to another lady’s accidental indiscrections. So at least one of you got it right.  I practically had to sit on that silly fifth-grader and dig my fingernails into her elbows to get her to simmer down.”

The fifth-grader still thinks the whole event is Marvelous.  Every time she thinks about it, she beams with light, causing Prudence to shoot dark shadows at her.

I spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about human communication.  What are the things that need to be said? What makes me the person who should say them? What are the reasons NOT to say something? How can we use both talk and Silence to build bridges and bring light?  Not everything that happens deserves a comment.  Did I just participate in something cowardly or graceful? Or both?

“Whatever you do, DON’T make this the feature of one of your blogs,” insists Prudence, “no one needs to know about this.”

“But we NEED to tell the truth about everything,” says the chatty inner fifth-grader who tends to break out in pimples if she can’t blurt out every single thought she has at all times.  

The angel smiles fondly at them both. “I’m not sure this truth needs to be told. When you come across a situation that requires a truth to be told, you need to ask yourself a few questions.  Firstly, who will be helped by learning this truth? Does hearing this story actually HELP anyone?”

“It might make them very happy,” pleads the fifth-grader who equates passing gas with passing joy.

“Certainly NOT!” insists Prudence. “Though, it might be helpful for those contemplating a visit to your fitting room to continue wearing masks for the foreseeable future, lifted Covid restrictions or no.”  

The angel continued.

“Secondly, when you are telling the truth, are you taking responsibility for your own feelings? Or are you trying to manipulate others into feeling a certain way? There is a big difference between gossiping about another person’s actions and talking about how those actions may have affected you personally.  Saying things like ‘I felt…’ ‘I’m concerned about…’ ‘I need help understanding…’ are helpful ways to frame your discussion and make it about you, not them.”

“Well, I am concerned about Nothing. I feel Fantastic! This is the FUNNIEST thing to happen around here for a long time,” pipes the fifth-grader.  “We definitely need to share this.”

“Right. But you definitely do not need to go about hurting or shaming people.  So take the nugget of the story that delights you and change all the unnecessary details so that no one recognizes that person. N-Bell-ish it until everyone can see themselves and not a single individual. When another person is in your presence, whether in print or in person, they are welcome to a version of your own personal ‘hospitality,” says the angel. “You should make people welcome, not afraid.”

And so it is.  Funny things happen in a tailoring shop.  Sweet things, sad things, things that make my heart burst with deep love and joy for the privilege of being a human in this time and space.  These are all things I love to share with you, Dear Ones. 

There’s something to be said for commonly admitting that a thing has occurred.  It feels strangely disorienting to witness something in the presence of another and not acknowledge it.  It severs one from a sense of reality.  Did that just happen?  Did I make it up?  Am I going mad?  Am I an actual seamstress or am I just pretending the emperor has clothes? “Behaving Normally” in the face of cognitive dissonance (or the back of someone breaking wind) can make life take on the quality of the surreal.

The world is a magical place full of all we need to see, if we just practice looking, loving, sharing.  Sharing makes everything more worthwhile. I think it makes me a better human being to keep writing—though the writing itself is a struggle.  Sometimes the inner fifth-grader gets her way too much.  Sometimes poor time management and chaos win the day.  If it were up to Prudence, I should never write at all.

Today, on the fourth anniversary of starting my writing journey, I look back on cringe-worthy paragraphs that I regret but must have needed to write as part of my learning process. If this blog were a restaurant, critics might say we serve too many baloney sandwiches when the fire is out in the cooker.  But I also celebrate the triumph of “Doing Something” that I set out to do and that in searching for something to feed others, I feed my own soul too.  

Today, I rededicate myself to celebrating little things that happen in an otherwise ordinary and anonymous life—a life I cherish with all my breath and being.  And I rededicate myself to YOU, dear readers.  I am so grateful for your interest, your letters of support or laughter, your comments, your time.  My goal is to keep this blog for about seven years—we are over the half way mark!  Seven years is a decent apprenticeship in which to “learn by doing” (the BEST way to learn!).  Let’s keep sharing the light, love, and laughs as we find them.   

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the quiet little work, muffled quacks and all, YOU are doing in your corner of the world to bring grace and peace to this world and to help us all MEND.

I love you sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Thinner & Dimmer

Greetings Dear Ones!

For those of you rushing to embrace my new personal fashion line of Hermit Granny Woolens—“Handmade in Vermont for grizzled women of indeterminate age who wish to look simultaneously feral and frumpy in irresistibly alluring ways…” I have some terrible news. Summer is coming. You can tell by the way the local Agway is hauling out the weed whackers and seed potatoes.  We are simply going to have to face facts that, perhaps a few months from now, bikini season will be upon us.  It might only last half an hour up here in the North East of the northeast, but we are going to have to take off those anoraks and possibly the long undies.  There might even be something called “Sun.” It’s worth rummaging through the closet for something linen, batik, or calico and a big ass hat. (Just to be clear, the hat is for your head.) Alas, perhaps, you will find that gremlins have gotten into your closet and shrunk all the summer wear.  You are not alone. The bastards got mine too.

So!  It’s time to buff up.  On the way to work, I hear adverts for the local gym, trying to drum up business.  A muscle-bound voice urges us to come in and “get the body you deserve.”  “Tut! No thank you,” says Prudence primly adjusting her petticoats. “I fully deserve the body I am in right now. People who make their bodies look too good tend to think they have a right to other people's bodies too.”

This spring, I have embarked on a brisk and energetic fitness regime that is helping me to lose quite a bit, mostly in the form of money and sanity.   Those of you wishing to join me in toning up a little might consider trying some of my new daily workout routines.  (Seriously, I mean actually come join me! I could use the help!) The first is called bulking up with “Steer-oids.”  This is when you attempt to put two yearling steers out in the same pasture together so that they can caper about, nibble grass, and most importantly, find the ONE LONE SHRED of tarp (where the hell did that come from?) and try to eat it before you can sprint up to them and grab it before it disappears into one of their gullets (along with, potentially, a vet bill amounting to all of the money you were saving to get a brake job done on your car.) (You know you have been hanging out with cattle too often when you tell the mechanic that “the left hind wheel is ‘off’—er, going badly.”)

Now then, this is like one of those logic problems involving foxes and boats that freshmen (fresh-people?) are given in their first year of college.  In this case, there is only one of you and two lively young animals, each weighing about 450 pounds with horns, and a five gallon bucket of water to transfer across a small field of grass and subsequently through a latched gate.  The task is to get them all to the other side of the gate and close it securely. All goes well for the first little guy. But once you return with his friend, and now have a steer on each side of the gate and you have to get one in while not letting the other one out, that’s when the workout begins. You can only lead one at a time, so the one you have in hand goes through the gate while the one inside the gate, who is now loose, runs back out the gate and waits for you to catch him again. Do as many reps as it takes.  Style your hair like Richard Simmons and use positive self-talk.  Do NOT scream at the cattle.  It just makes them giggle and gallop faster. Remember to take breaks for water.  When they step in (and spill) the five gallons of water you just dragged out for them, pause for deep cleansing breaths of country air and cow manure.  Feel the release.  You’ve earned this.

For upper body strengthening, nothing beats mucking.

This is why farms are so much better than gyms.  At a gym, you might do a few reps on a sleek machine that monitors your heart rate and calorie burn, toning yourself equally, precisely, bilaterally, while sipping occasionally on a trendy little protein drink of “muscle slush.”  You simultaneously check your emails and dab away the perspiration from your brow by adjusting your cute, terry-cloth headband, while you listen to a podcast and serenely walk up stairs.  You wipe down the fastidiously clean machine and move on politely when someone named Brittany in a cuter leotard than yours signals that she needs your machine.  The whole ordeal lasts about forty-five minutes and though you don’t yet see results, you feel amazing.  A fabulous mixture of smug satisfaction says you are now entitled to a latte on your way home.

Things are different in a chicken coop.  All winter, the birds have been piling layers of excrement on fresh shavings that have frozen in sedimentary layers until they are now walking approximately a foot off the cement floor on their own violently composting dung.  As soon as it thaws out, it must go. Shoveling it takes several hours, firm footing, and a strong stomach.  One cannot pause halfway through.  The whole job must be done at once because the smell is so vile it is inhumane to the birds to leave it half way.  To start this project is to learn the value of Committing.  Twenty nine wheelbarrows later, even your eyelids seem coated with bird dander and ammonia. You taste nothing but feathers and despair.  There is no one in a cute leotard impatiently awaiting her turn at this task.   There are no lattes on the way as you stumble blindly, fully monochromatic from head to toe, towards the nearest tub.

Side note: The day after I cleaned out the chicken coop, I woke up and could not move. All my muscles were sore.  I had a dry throat and a cough. My head ached.  I had recently been exposed to someone testing positive for Covid so naturally, I assumed the worst.  I took a rapid test and it was negative.  I was puzzled. How could I be so sick and not have Covid? Then it dawned on me! I realized I had a different sort of “bird flu.” Ha!  No one in her right might would go to a “real” gym and work out like that for four hours straight their very first day back!  However, the results were immediate, obvious, and in direct proportion to how wrecked I felt.  I have heaps of grateful satisfaction that the birds have a delightful place to live again.   As Charlotte Lucas, from Pride & Prejudice, might attest, the joys of poultry are endless.  With a very real and tragic bird flu raging in many parts of this country, it is especially comforting to know these girls are kept in a well-aired space with plenty of free ranging outside.  They are healthy and happy.  And so am I now—especially after at least three shampoos!

Back to Fitness. On the weekends, you might consider a more challenging workout.  Take any small, home-owner type project (in this case, rewiring a light switch to make it a dimmer switch because your dining room chandelier currently provides all the romantic ambience of an interrogation chamber) and make sure that all of the required tools for the job are located as far apart as possible.  Whatever you do, do NOT assemble them all at the job site before you begin. (That’s cheating.) Make sure that some are in the cellar, some in the garage, and some in the barn; perhaps even someone else’s barn.  (Some of the items you will need most might actually be located in a hardware store two towns away.) The most crucial items should be up or down a flight of stairs that you will be forced to run ten times.  No two screwdrivers should ever be in any box together. God Forbid.

The workout goes something like this: Turn off the electricity to a section of the house. Find that breaker also works the lights in the cellar right where you just flipped the breaker.  Stumble upstairs in the dark.  Realize that you cannot work in the dining room because it too is now too dark.  Nor can you simultaneously hold your phone, used as a flashlight, and unscrew the switch plate—a procedure which seems to need two hands.  Run! Quickly! Knees up! Knees up! Rig a lighting system using a series of extension cords, a floor lamp, duct tape, an actual flash light (actual batteries stored separately) —all of which are located about the property via an exhausting game of hide and seek.  Take pulse. Start again.  Discover that the switch plate (which has been thoroughly lacquered over with paint) comes off with a flat-head screwdriver, while the actual metal box beneath it (also lacquered over with heavy paint) is anchored with a Phillips head.  (See starting rules above.) Give up search for flat-head and use butter knife instead.

Now, discard the instructions that came with the new dimmer switch you are trying to install.  The print is too tiny to read.  Instead, short cut to a YouTube video to see what needs to be done.  Scan hundreds of YouTube videos searching for one that is less than nineteen minutes in length because you “haven’t got all day” for this nonsense.  (You forgot this was Endurance Training!) Watch about 6 minutes of three different videos of well-meaning males in baseball caps reporting the dangers of not calling a qualified professional, such as themselves.   Get bored with that an open up the nearest light switch.  Get confused because there are FIVE wires in that one and only four on the gizmo you are trying to connect.  Call your dear friend Bob, who is a superbly over-qualified electrical engineer and ask him to solve the problem over the phone without you knowing any of the wiring terminology. (It’s like asking a friend to play chess blindfolded, with a novice who has no idea what any of the pieces are called.) The first thing he asks is “how many switches are connected to the fixture?” Without waiting for an answer, he insists there are three but you can only find two.  Run laps until he has to hang up and attend a luncheon with his girlfriend’s family.

Give yourself a pep talk. Call on your inner Vision to succor yourself through the hardest miles.  Do you want your beloved guests to continue wearing sunglasses and parasols at dinner? No? Well get your bum moving again. Come on, Lassie! You got this.  You are a Creatrix.  You know that any problem is just an opportunity to Get Curious.  For example, what do you suppose the instructions that came with the thing might suggest a novice such as yourself might try? Are you the least bit curious about that?  Take a photo of them with your phone and use the scroll out feature until the print can be read from space.  Follow the diagram. Find the ground; figure out which one is the hot, which one is the return, which one is the spare return from the other thing with the thing that does the thing… (“STOP muttering Thing!” says Prudence.) When you follow the (very Simple) directions and then turn the power back on and the lights GO DIMMER, as suggested by the packaging, you can end today’s workout with a Victory Dance to ABBA’s greatest hits while you clean up the mess you made. (Vacuuming is optional but encouraged.)

Any system of self-improvement is like this: Get Dissatisfied.  Get Grounded.  Source the Power. Make the connections. Stick with it. Make it happen.  And Bonus, just think about the blessings of all that time you just spent NOT thinking of food, or adult beverages, or all the tragedy in the world while you were running after butter knives and duct tape, chasing cattle, shoveling guano, and striving to make your home a little dimmer. 

You’ve tested all your muscles and just made the Whole World a little bit Dimmer. That is your gift.  Now, go have a latte!

Keep up the Mending me Dearies!  I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Unexpectedly...

“We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.” C.S. Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones!

A few days ago, I reread my private journal all the way back to October.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I have stopped gritching about certain things and begun gritching about new things that once seemed too distant to be gritched about then.  I’m taking this as a sign that I am making some sort of “Progress.”  Progress or no, things are definitely NOT turning out as expected.  (“Why should you expect otherwise?” says Prudence.)  As a seamstress who is often just as much about “stress” as “seam” I would have to say the Stress occurs because things come apart at the “Seems.”  Things are rarely what they seem—on  the farm, in the shop, especially in the bowels of a small dog insisting he does not need to venture out into a cold, dark morning to relieve himself.  One must be vigilantly discerning. “Spring time will be soon enough for that,” says he, scuttling back under the bed covers in a cloud of something regrettable.  “Talk to me again in April.”  I know better than to take things for granted but I can’t help it.

Take Winter.  It’s not done here.  Spring lasted three days and then we got a surprise half inch of what a local farmer calls “poor man’s fertilizer.”  It looks as if the angels have been baking and got sloppy with the powdered sugar.  “Why is it called ‘poor man’s’ fertilizer?” I want to know.  “What kind of farmer are you?” she wants to know, astonished at my ignorance. I shrug sheepishly but persist with the curiosity. 

“It makes the grass green,” she gruffs.

“By making it white? Is this like when I wear shades of mulberry and can pass for dead?”

“No, Silly,” she says fondly, “because it brings extra nitrogen down through the sky and puts it on the grass.  You’ll see; the grass will be extra green soon.”

“Umm… doesn’t the grass always look extra green in spring?” I decide NOT to ask aloud.  I just scrape the poor man’s fertilizer off my car and the brown, lucky woman’s fertilizer off my boots and go to work.

At the shop, it’s mentoring day. My student is frowning. She doesn’t want to admit that she hates the dress we are working on but I can tell the way I can tell a Jack Russell needs to go outside.  Her back is stiff and shoulders tight.  She is clenching something. She chose this wool—a luscious plum gabardine gifted to the project by a local benefactress.  She chose this pattern—a loose-fitting flared dress, semi-fitted through the waist with princess seams.  And she has worked hard on tracing, cutting, pinning, fitting, basting, stitching… But with each step she grows more exhausted, more deflated.  I can tell things are not going well.  When we make something we love, we gain energy. The scissors, the thread, even the needle, now appear impossibly heavy for her hand to lift.  “I thought it would be… different…,” she admits finally, sagging over the cutting table.  Her beautiful sea-green eyes well up with waves of guilty emotions, threatening to capsize the entire project.

“Chin up!” I insist. “You didn’t come here to make the perfect dress; you came here to learn to sew!  This is all part of the creative process, which goes something like this: First, you have a vision. Then you work like hell to make it come true. And then it DOESN’T.  So you want to quit.  What happens next is when the true Creative in you is born.  You must ask yourself, “what next?” and then try that.

She sniffs and smiles.  Cautiously, she pets the fabric like it’s an animal she is afraid of.  What’s next? She shrugs.  I can tell she wants to quit.  We are definitely at stage 4.

“Is.. too grandma…” she says, not knowing the word for “frumpy.”

“You get to decide,” I say, holding firm.  “But we must make Something.  We owe it to this fabric and ourselves. If you still hate it at the end, we can donate it to a charity.  Maybe someone needs to attend a train-wreck and this will be just the perfect item they are searching for.   But we cannot donate it like this.  No one wants to go to a train-wreck dressed in scraps.  It must be completed.”   She giggles tearfully. I pause, seriously tempted to launch into a bunch of well-intentioned but overly-wordy cheer-leading but miraculously, I bite my tongue.   She needs Silence. And I need to let her suffer, as a butterfly, to claim her own wings.   

I hem three pairs of pants while I wait.

“Let’s cut it around the middle and make a skirt,” she says.  There is the pleasant ring of something metallic in her voice—a bit of spring, a thin coil of steel maybe?  It sounds like a Decision.  We both smile with relief.

I load my lips with pins and then try to speak through them as I work.

“Mumphines a fing mmmm ah eee mphs uumm ing,” I say.

“Eh?” A non-native speaker of English, unable to read lips with pins in them, she does her best to understand.  I put the last of the pins in the garment and say it again.

“Sometimes a thing just needs to be its own thing.  If we listen to it, it will tell us.  This dress is saying to you ‘I would rather be a skirt right now!’”  She laughed and agreed.

“I hear it!” she says with eyes that have returned to sunshine at low tide.

When we have the freedom to create anything we want—in other words, not for the pleasure of a client who is paying us to make his/her/their vision-version—there is an active participation the artist must do with her substrate.  Most things don’t actually wind up being quite how they start out.   Somewhere there is a Greek word that means “the thing becomes its destiny” but neither she nor I speak Greek.  I am left thinking Creativity is the embrace of the Unexpected and the willingness to make a dance partner of something we dislike.

We make the dress into a skirt. Her face softens with pleasure as she watches herself twirl in the mirror.  The people attending a train-wreck will need to search elsewhere for their treasure.  This skirt now wants to go home with her and be part of her life from Sunday mornings at church to village dances, perhaps even just cozy nights by the stove. She and the skirt have found each other, become family, and will see each other through.

Transformation is such a beautiful thing to witness.  So beautiful, I wanted to write and share it with you.  I know you have struggles like this too.  I know that with Unexpected results—regrets, delays, mis-cuts, twisted stitches and micro-griefs that simmer in our bones until they boil over, saturating our hearts—our Creativity is just asking for us to dance with it in new ways.  We, dear Menders, are those who wrestle daily with the sweet and bitter alchemy of turning thoughts into things.  Once we learn how to perform our magic, using the dense matter of physical things combined with skilled physical actions, we begin to understand that we can do it any time, anywhere, and in any way we choose.   We learn that anxiety, in and of itself, is not dangerous.  It is merely a signal of something yearning to transform.  Bravely, we free ourselves to seek New visions, to change course, to redirect—not for the purposes of avoiding suffering, but in the pursuit of True Fulfillment.

For me, it is the miracle that never grows stale. I get so excited, by my Mentee’s success, I do something Unexpected.  Something Wild. Something I haven’t done in years.  Something I cannot believe I am admitting to you now.  A bit of green wool calls out to me from my stash.  It whispers hoarsely “Nancy… your inner Matriarchal Woodsprite would look so great swaddled in Moss, with brown and tweed accents, vintage buttons, a slender waist and a flared skirt… Create! Defy all reminds you to be Unmagical or Practical.  Make something no one else has made before! Grab your magic wand and thimble! DO IT!”   Two hours later, I am staring moodily into the mirror at all the sex appeal of what can only be described as pure “Hermit Granny.”  The waist is not as slender as I had hoped, nor is the skirt nearly as flared as Prudence’s nostrils.  I have created a swamp-colored dress that looks you right in the eye and says “This woman can cook you a pot-roast you’ll never forget.”  Sigh…  Just point me towards the nearest train wreck!

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!  With all the love in your hearts and no fear of the Unexpected, keep dreaming, daring, dancing, and Doing.

With Sew Much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. I think, if I ever design a fashion label, it will be called “Hermit Granny Woolens.”

Measuring Up

Greetings Dear Ones!

I got a very odd phone call yesterday.  To tell you the truth, if I was the sort of person to suspect people of doing bad things, I might have had the sense to be alarmed, instead of naively mystified. “Always suspect the worst,” says Prudence, “then you can't be disappointed.” But I wasn't disappointed. Far from it.

A male voice said “Are you a seamstress?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I thought so,” he said, sounding pleased.  “I looked you up on Google. I need your help. I need to come show you something.”

“Sure,” I said, “what is it?” assuming he had ripped his pants.

“I’m not sure.  I need to show it to you in person.”

“Is it clothing?” I asked.

“No.”

“Hmmm… I really only work on clothing, Sir. Can you describe it? If it’s curtains or cushions, I’m not your gal.”

“No, it’s not anything made of cloth.  I don’t know what it is.  It’s some sort of tool.  I don’t want to try to describe it.  I’ll just confuse you.  I need to see you in person. Is your address [the right address]? Are you there now? I’ll just come show you in person.”

I didn’t know what to say. Prudence was comforted by the thought that a student was in the shop with me—one who, if needed, could be counted on to brandish a thread ripper and go for the jugular. After a pause that seemed too long, I said in weak, interrogative tones “um…yes….?”

“I’ll be over at 11,” he said and hung up.

Precisely at 11 o’clock there was a rap at the door and I opened it to see the delighted, congenial eyes of a middle-aged man, peering over a mask, cheerfully waving a wooden stick with metal feet and a long metal clamp at one end. 

“Can you help me?” he asked. “Can you tell me what the hell this thing is and how it is used?”

I recognized it instantly, laughed, and pointed him to the dressing room, where two of the same such sticks leaned against the mirror.

“Ah! You have the same thing!” he said, growing more curious.  “I thought it was for sewing. But the guy at the antique shop said it was an antique! He didn't know what it was either. ”  

“Perhaps it is, but I doubt it,” I said. “It’s just an old skirt marker!”

He laughed.

“Well, I’ll be…” he mused. “How does it work?  What does it do? Is it for men’s clothes, like cuffs and stuff?”

“Well, if the men are wearing skirts it could come in handy, I suppose.  Traditionally, it was to help mark ladies’ skirts.  When you hem a skirt, you want that hemline to be parallel to the floor.  You can’t just make a skirt the same length all the way around from the waist down. You need to measure from the floor up. Given the different configurations of human anatomies, some people need more fabric in the back, some in the front.” His eyes glittered with delight as I pantomimed first a larger bum, then a protruding stomach.

“Whatever else you make here, you’ve certainly Made My Day,” he said punningly. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have this mystery solved.  I love learning about old tools.  My son and I share this game. He's very ill.  We take turns finding old tools and figuring out how they were used to take our minds off things and keep us challenged to learning something fun.  We knew this was a tool but had no idea how it worked.”

I grabbed some spare cloth and showed him.  “This folding piece of metal holds the fabric in place; these holes here are where we can set the pins, here—look at the bottom, the stick has numbers on it like a ruler, so we can keep the distance consistent. And this little screw allows you to clamp it all at the right height.”

His excitement at each revelation was contagious. “I can’t wait to tell my son!” he said, beaming. “He was the one who first thought it was something to do with sewing. But neither of us knew what to call it. That’s why when you asked over the phone I had no idea.  What is it called, anyway?”

“I just call it a skirt marker,” said me, the girl who calls rulers “sticks with numbers.”

“So simple,” he said. “Hey!  Would ya look at that! It’s written right on the bottom of it ‘Skirt Marker.’ How did I miss that?”

“Thanks to skirt markers, people in skirts can look like they are walking on level ground, and not constantly uphill or downhill.”  We both laughed with relief, as if this fact changed everything for the better. He tipped his cap, thanked me profusely, and left.  

I turned to my mentee at the cutting table. Being able to take accurate measurements and use appropriate vocabulary for tools is useful in any trade, a fact that seems to be emphasized relentlessly by recent events. A few weeks ago, I got a call from a nearby non-profit group in possession of a magical soul who wants to learn to sew.  Would I consider mentoring her for the next six weeks and teaching her some hand-work skills? Indeed I would!  She is from another country but language is not our barrier.  No. It's worse than that. It’s the metric system.  She does not think in inches, nor I in centimeters.  The numbers on the vintage skirt marker make perfect sense only to me. On everything else, from tea to tweed, we agree completely.  Who knew that measuring things would prove such a divisive challenge?

The first thing we made together was a copy of a skirt she liked. It is a beloved skirt she brought from her own country. We put it on my cutting table and traced it. I showed her how to draft a pattern from it.  Then we cut it out of fabric that had been donated to my stash by a generous local benefactress whose deceased mother had been a seamstress.  Over the next two weeks, my student patiently sewed it all together by hand and did a marvelous job.

Yesterday, we started to make her a new dress, using a vintage pattern that she found in one of my dusty boxes on the top shelf. That’s when the trouble started. We left our “gounding” in what is “real” (ie her old skirt we had used as a model) and ventured into the theoretical, in the form of a “pattern” or plan. She kept insisting that our numbers were “wrong” that we were making it too small.  The pattern was at least thirty years old and had been cut out at its smallest size.  I tried to convince her that we only needed to increase some of the margins a half an inch (a total of four sizes if you factor in included seam allowances) and that we couldn’t just increase everything or it would be a weird shape. The math and its conversions were making us dizzy.

“Fine,” I said, eventually. “Let’s just make it as big as you want; we can take it in later,” knowing full well that Experience is the best teacher. (This is why I make it a point never to rescue young men from the side of the road who have run out of gas, after being warned repeatedly to check the fuel guage as soon as they start the car!) After all, how do you think I came by this information?  Did I listen to those who knew better? Certainly not. I had to make a jumpsuit that could only fit Bumpo the clown (for a friend who was seriously insulted) in order to learn that lesson. When we basted it all together and held it up to her body in the mirror, she was horrified to discover that she could also smuggle in a small Baltic state if she had to. Then we could not stop laughing at our own foolishness.  “Look on the bright side,” I said, wiping my eyes, “with our handy skirt marker, at least you’ll appear to be smuggling level!”

This week, as during the previous weeks, I’ve had to work all weekend to catch up on time lost serving at the pleasure of the District Court of the State of Vermont.  Like an oversized jump suit, nothing about jury duty went the way I expected it to go, which is all I can say about it, but I learned a lot.  Much to Prudence’s astonishment, NOT everyone thinks the way she does about things.  (“But, they SHOULD!” she huffs.) Words get confusing.  Meanings get distorted by our goggles of personal experience and bias.  Trying to decipher meaning from testimony, including audio recordings taken on site during the incident, is even worse than converting inches to metric. It's like being back in Professor Stitt’s American Poetry class and holding each squirming word up to a looking glass, microscope, or telescope.  Twelve people can listen to exactly the same testimony and come to just as many different conclusions.  (One vociferous rooster on our team came to at least thirty-two possible conclusions alone.)  More than once, I had to reckon with the fact that I don’t always see things quite the way others do.   “What is the Truth?” I want to know. “It doesn’t matter,” insists a fellow juror whose horns are beginning to show. “We cannot know the truth.  We just apply the law.”  To me, they ought to be one and the same, like a ruler with inches on one side and centimeters on the other. To know one is to figure both. Apparently not. Unbeknownst to me, Innocence has its own metrics. Somehow, we got our job done with remarkable civility, decency, persistence and patience. A good lunch helped. It was not easy.

Over and over I appreciate the same things: Firstly, no wonder the founding fathers set up our government to minimize citizen involvement and restrict it to voting and jury duty! We “masses” comprised of seamstresses, bank tellers, electricians, and ex dolphin trainers turn to rabble pretty easily, especially when you collect all our cell phones in a bucket and tell us we can’t have them back until we agree unanimously. Secondly, other perspectives are incredibly valuable. We all have different ways of measuring.

Taking the measure of other human beings for any purpose—be it clothing or crime—requires specialized tools but there is a vast difference between measuring and judging. Unexpected things result when those you work with don’t understand the yardstick you are using. Sometimes they are hilarious, sometimes not. Virtue cannot be quantified by an overarching set of units. Like the skirt marker, it's only by measuring up that we can be on level.  As we debate hemlines and democracy in general, we find that some of our tools are very old, but they still work beautifully, if we just learn to recognize and use them well.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones! Thank you for your good work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

The Long Haul

“Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.” —James Madison 

Greetings Dear Ones!

Tuesday, as I drive to the courthouse for my second jury pool, I see above me several V’s of geese rowing northward just below the clouds.  I attempt to drive with one eye on the road and one eye on the sky, marveling, as always, at their synchrony, strength, and beauty.  Any crew team would have much to envy.  Something about seeing them in their flock-pods, knowing that they help each other—taking turns to draft off each other’s wake as the lead goose breaks the stiffest currents of air with her wings—never fails to move me to tears, then curiosity.  What if they are not so noble and community spirited but instead, as the relevant cliché might suggest, Silly? What if they have been bickering all the way since North Carolina about how gassy golf-course grass makes them and how Betty-Sue should not have eaten a belly full of blue fescue from the ninth tee before taking the lead? And what is the point of mating journeys that average 2500 miles on a semi-annual basis? (Perhaps the fact that geese mate for life tells us all we need to know?)  And what on earth will they eat when they land here?  All we have is snow-encrusted mud and buckets of tree sap instead of putting greens. This strikes me as poor planning on the part of the geese.  

I get to the courthouse, get through security (sans knitting) and realize too late that I have left my book in the car.  Rats…  I briefly consider “air knitting” to see if it is possibly as soothing as real knitting.  It is not.  If I were stuck on a desert island (pesky auto-correct has briefly considered how much more fun it would be to be stuck on a dessert island—and Autocorrect, it must be said, I most heartily agree! But then I already live in a land where trees drip sugar.)  On my deserted island (sans whipped cream and cherries) I know I would knit the same sweater over and over again, ripping it out as often as necessary, in order to revel in the “progress” I was making.  Kind of like a goose rotating through mating latitudes on an annual basis.

I am left with nothing more constructive to do than think of all the work waiting for me in my shop while I take time off to judge my fellow citizens (which I might have done anyway, without the formal, patriotic invitation or pay cut).  First, I think of all the “little” projects that sweep in on a daily basis—the things to mend; the “emergencies” that someone needs for the weekend; all the little hemmings (and hawings) that invade the shop on a weekly basis.  These are like small incendiary bombs I need to diffuse immediately. Specifically, I need to get a certain pile of filthy clothes out of there as soon as possible.  I felt too sorry for their bedraggled owner to insist she take them right home again and wash them before I attempt to fix them.  I didn’t want to appear “judgy” (who am I kidding here?) so I just gagged as politely as I could and put them all in a plastic bag the moment she left.  They will get done first. (God help me if I have to iron any of them in order to fix them. It will smell like I am making soup—some kind of seafood bisque, where the “seafood” is dead horseshoe crabs…) 

Next to go is that wretched laundry basket liner that some soul has persuaded me to make out of burlap. The burlap, which probably dates from the Carter administration, is so musty and dusty, I had an allergy attack the moment I cut into it.  I had to vacuum all the machines, cutting table, and the floor before I could go any further with construction, as spores of burlap were swirling everywhere.  Who needs proper snuff when all that is required to have an eye-watering/sniff-snorting/rip-sneezing/bosom-heaving fifteen-minute frolic is a little powdered burlap?   I sneezed enough to awaken the aches in my cracked rib and forgo ab workouts for a week. (And by AB workouts, you know what I really mean is sitting up straight in bed without rolling over first…)Who in their right mind wants to store laundry in this thing??? (Hmmm… maybe this explains the state of the first gal’s laundry?)

Rather than continue to judge the poor choices of my dear customers, Prudence decides it’s time to switch to judging ME instead, which she far prefers to “air-knitting” or goose-musing.  “How come you never get the BIG stuff done?” she wants to know.  Where is that book you wanted to write? Where are the long-term commissions—the shawls, the shirts, the silk blouses, the custom guitar straps?  Why are your cows still able to run up the driveway and snack on our neighbor’s cedar trees without the impediment of fencing? When are THESE going to get done, or in some cases, even started? Why does the Temporary become eternal through the relentless build up of ephemera?

As much as I hate to admit it, especially to a bitch like Prudence, I have become a victim of constant short-termism and no amount of tiny, daily “wins” can forestall the overriding sense of “failure.” I put excessive focus on the short-term results at the expense of my long-term interests, and yet the long-term vision is where my sense of Self resides, so the result of never achieving anything “Big” is an ever-present low-grade sense of distress and low satisfaction, with occasional bursts of anxiety.  Future Nancy, in all her patient Grace and Glory, beckons lovingly to the little frazzled rat racing ever faster on her tiny wheel but no matter how I up the pace, I never seem to reach her.

Long-term projects require infrastructure—sometimes tools as simple as a pair of knitting needles and a skein of yarn—and Tenacity. (Optional infrastructure requirements for shawl production might include a snowy day, a wood stove, a good pod-cast, a small Jack Russell who is conveniently between feedings and potty outings and other things that he will remind you are Imperative...)

Hope and optimism are simply not enough to make a project successful.  Affirmations don’t actually do a damn thing—they are like air knitting until you get the actual yarn in your hands.

“Commitments should be viewed as Sacred Ground,” mutters Prudence moodily.  “If you have promised to do it, then you must. Feeling like Shite is the proper consequence of not doing what you said you would.”  

“Most of us DO believe that we must finish what we start! At the beginning of a project, we make internal commitments that carry us through to completion,” I insist vehemently. “But what if we never even start because we are getting pecked to death by ducks decoyed as daily dramas?  How do we, who accidentally sat on some of the necessary infrastructure, pull the sharp points out of our tender behinds and begin to align our resources to meet organizational objectives in the most efficient way possible?”

It occurs to me that the Geese to not make the 2,500 mile flight all in one go.  They stop a couple times. To create an effective strategy to achieve long-term goals, they set several short term goals.  Short term goals, within the context of a larger objective, improve our focus, provide clarity about our path and purpose, combat procrastination, and help us gather valuable feedback—such as how unhappy most people get when you poop in their swimming pools.

I wonder about other Creative types, like you, Dear Menders, and if our occasional inability to achieve larger, long-term project goals is a sneaky form of procrastination? But how could anyone who runs and works as hard as we do possibly be, simultaneously, procrastinating? Because procrastination has nothing to do with laziness.   For me, perhaps it’s because I fervently believe in “Someday.”  (cue the angelic organ chords here) The “Someday” syndrome is insidious. Bit by bit, I get snagged on little details and “Someday” slips like a log over the waterfall of regrets.  How many times do I charge into my workspace announcing to no one in particular that “Today!! Today, I am here to get those custom shirts made!” only to catch a sniff of burlap or crotch-rot and realize that before I can row on, I must first patch the bottom of the boat.

There is a delightful proverb that says “Tomorrow is the busiest day of the week.” Yes.  That is where most short term objectives derived from long-term projects go to die.  Today is never Someday, and Someday is the day that it will all get done.  This very week, rather than actually get any work done, at the suggestion of one of my most dynamic clients, I decide to join a fellowship of amazing female entrepreneurs and order a book on Time Management.  Someday it will arrive and Someday I will read it and Someday I will get Organized. The irony of this wrinkle delights me no end. At least it’s all off my plate for now…

Deep down, I think I am guilty of “procrastinating” because I truly do not understand how Time works. I think somewhere there is a magic cache of it and I can have all I want of it, the way one can summon endless amounts of happiness without warning simply from inhaling a rose or the warm neck of a small farm animal. (Both smell as sweet!)  There are no limits on things like creativity, love, beauty, and all the finest things that flow from our connection to All That Is.  But such is not the case for Time.  If we lost anything in the Garden, it was Time.

Seneca said “We are always complaining that our days are few and acting as though there is no end to them.”  Yep.  I’m shocked to find that Everything takes longer than I think, including jury duty.  Someday aside, the truth is that my mental calendar only has two types of time—Now and Not Now.  It’s either going to get done Now, or…. Well… you guessed it. Once I fill my daily jar with sand, there is no room for golf balls, even those without goose turds.

Nothing makes me think about Wasting Time like sitting in a courthouse waiting for something to happen.  Or about ebbs and stages of grand Life cycles like migratory water fowl and sap buckets on Maple trees.  Or the short-term effects of filling my gas tank with what used to be the grocery budget for the entire week.  Do we have what it takes to make True Progress over the Long Haul?  Can we stay committed to goals larger than a day’s work without succumbing to the anxious pettiness of mere Survival?  Do we know how to prioritize our Future Selves over these exhausted wrecks we have become?  How/why should we demand more from current selves when we are already so damn tired? How can I hope that my county, my country, my world community will continue to strive for What is Right over what is Easy or momentarily insistent when I cannot even accomplish this in my own wee shop?  

I don’t know.

I just watch the news from Ukraine and see that Those who Get Things Done choose courage over comfort.  They do not have the luxury of waiting. Their Someday starts NOW. Right now.  

And Sew it Is.

Keep up your Good Work, my Loves!  There is too much Mending to do alone and it is going to be a Long Haul!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Summer Sunshine

“Remember Man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”

Greetings Dear ones!

Happy Ash Wednesday—Prudence’s favorite holiday—when we pause to grieve all that we are and think that swearing off chocolate can help. “We’re not here for a long time, OR a good time,” she insists, producing a list that looks uncannily like the New Year’s Resolutions I have refused to adhere to once already.  The next forty days will usher in mud-season and prom-season, with heaps of gawd-awful glitter. Why not add a dash of penance and atonement too? “Offer it up,” she says with a saccharine smile.  Meanwhile, I gaze around me.  If men are turning into dust, this place is covered with them.  I’ve had very little time for “Man-removal” from under beds, inside fiddles, and all those over-head places I cannot reach.  I’ve been in a swirl since returning from fiddle camp last week.

It was amazing to work, cook and play together again.  Our hearts, our spirits, our tummies are full.  But are we talking about how good most of the meals were? The oatmeal, the tatties, the neeps? No.  We are still talking about how we all forgot to put the oven on when we tried to cook fifty pounds of baked potatoes for lunch, only to discover that they were damp, raw, rocks twenty minutes before we were about to serve them!   We are reminiscing about how some conscientious night-clean-up volunteer turned off the lower oven that was supposed to roast meat slowly all night—so that it was all still raw in the morning, setting us back twelve hours in prep time.  Are we steeped in gratitude for all the times we went into the walk-in fridge and didn't get trapped? No. We are laughing (with relief) at how two young men went in and got stuck and pounded on the door for about seven minutes before thinking to call me on a cell phone.  (When the call came, I was sitting down for the first time all day and assumed my leg, which was buzzing, had fallen asleep and ignored it.)

From the mishaps come the moments we remember most.  From the love and care comes the ability to team up and laugh.  We carry on by carrying each other.   

And so it is with Summer Sunshine.

The first time I met Summer Sunshine, she was a soggy little mop of wool lying in a patch of sun near her mother.  Of course, I had no idea then that it was her.  No one did. She was just another anonymous lamb born in another anonymous Spring three years ago.  She grew quickly and ran and played with the other lambs.  When they were cold or tired, they curled up on their leeward side of their mamas in warm, snug, smug little bundles.  Sometimes, if the mamas were lying down, they cuddled into the wool on their backs and slept on them like giant smelly pillows.   Their shepherdess is a dear friend of mine who was not well at the time and was having a tough spring after a double hip replacement.  She relied on the kindness of neighbors and friends to help with the heavy farm chores involved in caring for eighty head of sheep. (It wasn’t just heads; they had legs and tails too.)  By fall, the lambs were weaned and my friend had Lyme disease, bringing yet another series of set-backs in a difficult year.

One horrible day, someone noticed that the lambs were “acting funny.” When a farm animal acts “funny” I don’t mean they dance around with oversized hats and rubber chickens and tell a few good rippers.  No, these lambs were walking in circles, drooling out of one side of their mouths and pushing their heads into corners. They looked haunted. They weren’t eating. They had listeria poisoning. Within forty-eight hours, most of them were dead.

Listeria is a deadly bacteria named in honor of British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister (1827–1912), an early advocate of antiseptic surgery. It is found in soil, water, manure—three things your average sheep farm has plenty of.  In this case, the lambs were probably infected by mouldy hay, which may have been given to them by an unwitting volunteer who did not know any better. We will never know for sure.  Recovery of sheep from listeriosis depends on early detection of illness, together with prompt and aggressive treatment prescribed by a veterinarian, most of which does not work. Brain tissue of the animal is usually infected, which causes all sorts of motor issues.  Long-term recovery is extremely rare. Only one lamb survived—and my friend named her “Summer Sunshine.”

Each day, my friend would limp to her barn and sit with this lamb on her lap and perform Reiki healings and feed her orange slices as treats.  Because of her neurologic deficits, the lamb was unable to walk for more than two months.  My friend had to teach her, patiently, and put her in a pen with sheep who would be gentle and not knock her over all the time. (Sheep need company and are not happy alone.) On a farm of 80 sheep, this one became a special pet.  

Two years later, Summer Sunshine, still wobbly, is not a good candidate for breeding.  The coyotes have made a few kills in the field and are becoming a relentless threat.  My friend has to keep the sheep penned up and feed them hay, which is expensive, due to the poor weather we had last June.  Two years in a row of soaring hay prices for sheep and food prices for humans and my friend has to cull her herd.  She has no choice.  She sells what she can but she cannot find a home for Summer Sunshine and she cannot afford to keep her.  She can no longer turn her out in the field with the others because she could never outrun the coyotes.

I talk to this friend on a daily basis to check on her.  One day her voice sounds hollow, dead.  She has taken a bad fall at the barn and is resting.  I can “hear” that something else is wrong.

“I took Summer Sunshine to Barney’s with the ram lambs this morning,” she admits finally. “I feel just sick about it but I think it is really for the best. I think I fell because I just don’t want to get up any more today.  After 60 years of raising sheep, this never gets easier.”

Barney is her friend, the butcher, who processes all her meat, which she then sells.

Silently, on the other end of the phone, I nod tearfully.  This is why I don’t raise my sheep for meat.  I too am battling the exhausting price of hay the way all of us, world-wide are battling the exhausting and prohibitive cost of fuel.  I could not have afforded another mouth to feed either, not that I had the chance to offer.  The deed has been done.  Instantly, I think of a plan. 

“Please, let me buy her meat!” I say.

“What?? That’s crazy,” she says. “You don’t even eat meat!”

“No,” I admit, “but I have friends who love lamb.  I’ll share it with them.  I’ll bring Summer Sunshine to the fiddle camp and have her turned into music.  She won’t go to anonymous carnivores—she’ll be enjoyed by the most amazing and talented people I know and she will power their songs well into the night.”

My friend sniffs.  “That’s perfect. I certainly couldn’t eat her myself.  And I need the money so badly.”

“It’s settled, then” I say feeling suddenly happier. “These camps I cook for support local farmers and I always try to source our meat responsibly when I can.  What could be better than knowing she was such a loved animal from a good farm, always cared for?”

“She’s over two years old and totally grass fed so use a lot of spice.  This meat will be very lean but extremely flavorful,” she advises.

Those who ate the Shepherd’s pie and lamb curry told me it was extremely flavorful.  Some got nourished by the meat, some by the story.  No doubt, some of you Dear Ones will be horrified by this story.  (I know I will get “letters” about this.)  I feel your pain, sensitive empaths and vegans. Truly, I do.  More than you could ever know. Still, I think the story of Summer Sunshine is worth telling.  (Not telling a story doesn’t make it any less true.)

We humans make the best stories from our tragedies and the best music from our pain.  Hopefully, those stories help us to see ourselves, not as solitary individuals, but as part of a web with concentric circles and strands that stretch across counties, countries, the entire globe.  Buying “local” IS global.  Our music doesn’t come from the radio any more than our food comes from a grocery store.   

I think of this as we witness the terror unfolding in Ukraine—a terror that puts raw potatoes and a decent lamb curry into a totally different perspective. We talk about how the Darkness comes to overwhelm us and yet, through the stories we tell ourselves, the heroism we observe in others, we survive.  We rally. We simply refuse to perish.  We ask the nearest Joan-of-Arc-of-Baked-Potatoes to stand by the microwave and do her best. And she does.  We ask our grandmothers to make Molotov cocktails and they do.  Who made this mess? We did.  Who needs to clean it up? We do.  

Bad things happen to lambs and countries. For all the horror happening in the world right now—may hopeful seeds jump from the bad things and take root in our hearts.    Sometimes we do all we can and it is simply not enough. It’s what we do NEXT that counts too. 

 May those who are fighting find peace.

May those who are fleeing find refuge.

May those who are staying behind find safety.

May those who are despondent find hope.

May all of us whose hearts break at the suffering we witness become the comfort that others need.

May we help each other to Mend.

 Transcendent realism confronts truth:  Life is hard. Farming is hard. Playing an instrument is hard. Being at Peace can be hard. Peace is not the absence of war.  Peace is when we can transform our pain into something useful or beautiful or nourishing as we begin again to be better stewards of our world and each other.  Take heart. What is horrible and sad can become our means of Grace as surely as limping Lambs can become dance music. 

Let the Mending Continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Feeding Love

“And if you are to love, love like the moon loves.  It doesn’t steal the night.

It only unveils the beauty of the dark.” –Isra Al-Thibeh

Greetings Dear Ones!

I seriously considered not writing a blog this week.  I have every excuse: I’m tired. I’m busy. I’m cold. I’m tired of being tired, tired of being busy, tired of being cold…  But then I realize I have these same excuses every week; this week is nothing new, just a little more so.  Some of you Dear Ones are occasionally kind enough to write to me and remind me that you too are Hungry, Cold, Tired, Busy—longing for warmth, laugher, a nap and some crumbs…  So, because I love you SEW much...

I was awake half the night last night with anxiety about this weekend’s upcoming Pure Dead Brilliant fiddle weekend—a fiddle-frolic-frenzy I have been cooking for, for nearly seventeen years… Is that right? Honestly, I’ve lost count… I just remember that when they began, in my former home, every bed and floor space in house and barn was taken and there was no place to put my toddler son to bed except in a small nest in a cupboard under the stairs. (This was before we ever heard of Harry Potter—though there does seem to be Magic imparted to those who are forced to sleep beneath a staircase!)

Every President’s Day weekend, anywhere from 40-200 of us gather to fiddle, cook, and nourish our tribal bonds to Each Other, Our Spirits, and The Music.  And just about now, I begin awakening in the preceding nights to fret and frazzle about whether I should have almond milk or oat milk for those who cannot tolerate dairy.  Should I buy both?   I bolt upright in bed, eyes starched wide, and think “Did I even remember to put Potatoes on the grocery list?? What if I forget to buy the potatoes???”  This group eats an average of 35 pounds of potatoes at every meal.  What about peppers? Eggplants?  (“Have we ever served eggplants?? Why are you thinking about eggplants at a time like this, daft cow?” says Prudence, primly from beneath her nightcap. ) Then I crash backwards onto the pillows.  It is like I am on a raft at sea in rough waters, spluttering, drowning, counting Nightshades and calculating the amount of non-dairy creamer we might need in an emergency.

Out the window, the full moon is lighting the snow so much that I think the lights have been left on downstairs.  I drift silently through the dark house in my sheep pajamas to check.  No. It’s just the moon.  In the light of this gorgeous moon, the fears subside and feel ridiculous.  The moon is my lighthouse, calling me home to myself, away from the shoals and whitecaps of frothy coconut milk and the Freudian phantasmagoria of vegan sausages.  Prudence, who has been muttering that “vegans are just trouble-makers; no one should have to be vegan at ALL times” lapses into silence in the glow.  

It’s February, the perfect time to think about Love, which is a damn sight more cheering to consider  than contemplating  cabbages and serving sizes of rutabaga, so I sit in a pool of light from the full moon and try to think of things I love:

I love the way the moonlight is dancing on the snow. 

I love the silence of the paw tracks leading into the darkness of the woods.

I love reminding myself that sometimes we need Peace more than we need sleep.

I love Serving the Music in any way I can.

And… (damnit!) I love the vegans.  Truly, I do.  I will buy them both Oat milk and Almond milk.  

Wickedly, Prudence reminds me that if I buy almond milk, then I do not love the Earth (which is one of the main reasons to go vegan) since almonds are grown where there are water shortages and the almond industry is causing environmental trouble… Ugh… Cashew milk then… Prudence has no idea if cashews cause trouble.  I make a note to research that in the morning.  But what of those with nut allergies?? Does this affect them?

I love those with nut allergies.  “Yes, but the poor vegans will not have enough protein if you do not offer nuts,” says Prudence slyly.   It’s a nut-free facility, I tell her.  No nuts allowed.  Except for me, of course.  I must be nuts to take this on, year after year, especially while having to listen to her yapping.

I love the Gluten Free people.   The homemade soups, sans noodles, croutons, or crackers, are all for them.  So is the salad bar.  Gluten free people cause very little trouble.  “Unless of course, you want to serve pizza, or pasta, or anything that is typically considered cheap and easy crowd food,” mutters Prudence, rolling her eyes and tutting,  “Thanks to them, the gravies will be thin.”

I love the vegetarians.  Especially those who eat fish and sneak bacon when no one is looking.   “These are the people who sprinkle cheese before them as they go and eat up all the vegan options,” says Prudence, “leaving the poor vegans no choice but to smuggle peanut butter in their dorm rooms.”

I love omnivores with no dilemmas—especially the ones who can cope with spices more exotic than salt and pepper and don’t consider adding vanilla to French toast “going wild.”  Omnivores who obediently eat everything on their plate without complaints are Prudence’s favorites.  That’s how she was raised. Why wasn’t everyone else? How DARE they have dietary preferences based on knowledge of their own body-wisdom?  I sigh.  I envy others their body-wisdom.

“You need to feed this camp the way you feed your barn animals,” says Prudence.  “There should be designated troughs and buckets and locked chutes, gates, and pens so that only those who are supposed to eat the vegan options get access to the vegan options.  Check their ear tags and tails as they enter the dining hall. Meat people can be locked together in the meat pen; Flexi-tarians will have to make their minds up once and for all and stop poking their snouts through the fences.  People who eat curry should be fed outside so that the smell doesn’t carry and make those who are simply chewing lettuce think that they have accidentally wandered down a back street in Calcutta.   Above all, those who partake of the midnight chili should be forced to sleep alone.   People are more like sheep than you would like to admit.  You can try to keep them away from foods that contain toxic levels of copper, but that just makes them want it all the more!”   

“Prudence!” I snap, “We are supposed to be looking at the moon and feeling LOVE. Now, hush!”

She drums her fingers but keeps quiet.

I am trying to find a way to love her too.

There are so many kinds of love all over the world.  I want to remind myself of all the important ways Love finds me in my day.  There is the Sheep Love, which pushes and shoves and demands scratches and wooly head rubs.  There is the Steer Love, with its nuzzles and bumps and huge scritchy tongues swiping my neck and cheek like 80 grit sandpaper. There is the Chicken Love of cooing and pecking and rushing towards me to investigate what their hot mash brings today.  There is the Dog Love, so small, furry, insecure and needy it must be cuddled under my robe and held against my chest in the dark.  It cannot bear to be separated from me for a moment.   Each of these Loves must be fed differently.  So it is.

I feed them daily—not as much as they want, but always as much as they Need.  I feed them so that they can continually replace and continue being the parts of themselves they have used up against the cold, in growth, in work, in wool, in capers, in Being Themselves.  We all need that renewal—multiple times a day.  Part of Loving another being, is figuring out how to Feed it—to feed its body, mind, or Spirit.  What are treats and what is true nutrition?  (You cannot raise a baby duck, or a septuagenarian, on cheerios alone!)  In Love, we feed the Hunger where we find it—hunger to be Accepted, Nourished, Welcomed, Included, Protected.  

One of the things that makes this upcoming camp so unique is that I have always insisted that the campers help with the cooking—partially because I am, at heart, a Slacker and this is way too much work for one.  A Big reason is that coming together to make and break bread (or oat cakes for the GF) creates community.  It’s vital that members of a tribe learn to feed each other. The Best reason of course is that the food simply tastes better. The first ingredient is Togetherness:  Someone in that togetherness has watched enough episodes of “America’s Test Kitchen” or the “Great British Bake-Off” to be dangerous and gets teamed up with someone who volunteers at a homeless shelter and/or someone whose granny made the best gazpacho and then some young college kid who just now learned how to peel an onion joins in and MAGIC  ENSUES.   It’s true democracy at work—a little messy, a little chaotic with “too many cooks” hovering over the broth—but the end result is way better than any dictator, no matter how benevolent, could hope to provide.

There are no recipes. No measuring.  I never watch what herbs or secrets go into the pot.  We all take turns tasting and figuring it out.  In Spices as in Music, we “jam.”   We seek a Harmony where all the yummy differences add complexity not discord. Perhaps it is the music that makes it all taste great. A little Hunger helps. But at the end of the day, Music, Love, and Spices are team sports.

Come what may, I know my team will pull me through.  Gradually, the buzzing in my head stops.  Prudence has succumbed to her lavender & laudanum and slumps slack-jawed, drooling.  The little dog against my chest is snoring.  I look at the bright circle in the sky—Is it the Mother’s night light showing us the beauty of the darkness? God’s mirror reflecting the light of the sun? Or just a giant slice of non-dairy Provalone up there, waiting to lure this sailor back to sea? Who can say?

“If I just remember the potatoes, all shall be well,” I mumble wearily and shuffle off to bed.

Today, Dear Ones, may every delicious kind of love find you. May you have enough to nourish yourself and others.  Keep up the Good Mending!

With sew much love (and non-dairy creamer),

Yours aye,

Nancy

Duty Calls

“Some people get out of jury duty by lying. You don’t have to lie. Tell the judge the truth. Tell him you’d make a terrific juror because you can spot guilty people.” –George Carlin

 Greetings Dear Ones!

 The recent cold has been Bitter.  Jack Frost doesn’t just “nip” my nose; he threatens to bite my ears off and swallow them whole.  With stabbing pain, my fingers and toes feel the sharp grind of his molars as I try to get through the barn chores.  He prowls invisibly, on padded paws as big as the coyotes’ who slip in and out of The Dark Forest on silent snowy tracks.  My housemate wants to set up a “critter cam” to see who it is who makes these tracks; he suggests mounting a camera near the garage.  First I agree then Pause.  We will have to be careful how we position this thing.  The last thing I want this nice young man to catch on film is my unorthodox method of scraping the ice off my car each morning—climbing a chair, kneeling precariously on the hood, occasionally sliding off the front fenders as the force of my scraping sends me flying in furry sheep pajamas and welly boots into the nearest snow bank.  I simply cannot reach the windshield from the ground. Coyotes or no coyotes, no one needs to see footage of my wooly arse flopping backwards off the hood of a Ford. “God Forbid,” mutters Prudence. (The cold is not all that has been bitter…)

Well, the Longest little month of the year is taking its sweet time.  Last Wednesday took a week of my life away and yet February only seems all the longer… As luck would have it, it took the EXACT week I was going to Get Organized.  I was going to finish up all my custom sewing work and get all the regular alterations out with so much time to spare that I was going to sort out the fabric stash and start doing some design work I’ve been daydreaming about…  I was on the verge of actually finishing a thing or two when I was summoned to report for jury duty.  In other states where I have resided, one shows up for a jury pool and either gets selected for a trial happening that day or not. In Vermont, you must show up for three consecutive pools and be assigned to upcoming trials, possibly three of them.  There are questionnaires to fill out and procedures to follow. The first day takes a whole day. The pools seem to be held monthly, so I must report in March and April as well.  (This means, of course, that I cannot expect to Get Organized before June, at the earliest, thank goodness!)

I get to the courthouse and wait in line to be checked through security.  As I get closer, I notice a sign that reads “No guns or knitting needles beyond this point” as if these things are in some way equivalent.  I have never read a headline that said an elementary school was terrorized because someone ran in and waved some knitting needles. The fact that these are the only two items listed tells me something about Vermont and what folks are likely to be carrying.    

NO Knitting??? What?? Instantly, I am depressed.  I leave the knitting needles in the car and ask the guard if pencils are allowed.

“Yes,” he answers accommodatingly, “of course. We will give you pencils and paper if you need them.” 

“Yes, please,” I say.  “I’ll need two number twos right away, with extremely sharp points on them, please.”  He looks at me with the wary curiosity of a calf watching a tarp flapping.

“I’m going to knit with them.”

He is young and just trying to do his job. He rolls his eyes and laughs nervously. “Ma ‘am, we just don’t allow knitting. I’m sorry.”  Now I am the one confused.  Is the knitting itself considered dangerous?  Does it induce unexpected homicidal rage? Well, now that I think about it…if one gets so interested in the testimony that one accidentally forgets to switch colors in a complicated intarsia and doesn’t realize it for four rows.… I guess…  But rather than insist on monochromatic knitting, The Court, in its infinite wisdom has decided to ban stitchery altogether (along with metal travel mugs—which one might be tempted to use to bludgeon those who inform you knitting is forbidden.)

Robbed of anything useful to do with my time, I survey my fellow jury candidates, my “peers” in this realm, and imagine that I have been invited to an exclusive fashion show instead.  I check out hairdos then shoes.  I award extra points if I can perceive dung on either.  Most people are dressed more for warmth than style but the ambient quality of knitwear is fantastic.  There is abundant evidence to suggest that plenty of Vermonters are rage-knitting at home, or perhaps at their local firing range.  I always find Happy people to be the most beautiful and not many here are smiling. Of course not, they have left Important Jobs to sit here and be paid the princely sum of $15 (equal to hemming a pair of pants) to judge their fellow citizens.  At best, they appear politely stoic as they gaze blearily at their phones. A few—especially the lads clad in Carhartts and work boots, with thick beards and arms folded across their flannel chests—look genuinely “un-gruntled” to say the least.  To make matters worse, they are asked to remove their knitted caps from their heads while in the courtroom, which makes them scowl more.

Gradually, the room fills up. I wait for the lawyers and judge to come out and speak to us.  What?  They’re out? Those kids at the podium?  Those are the lawyers? They look like high school graduates wearing suits for the first time. On closer inspection, the bagginess of their suits betrays them. They are either older than I think or clueless about modern male fashions, which are designed to look like they came from a can.  In any case, the truth is that I am getting older than I realize.  I put my glasses on in order to see better but then my mask fogs them up so I cannot see at all.  Justice is blind, and so am I.

The judge and the two lawyers in the case take turns thanking us for “our sacrifice on behalf of Vermont” and begin to explain what, exactly, that sacrifice—which includes lunch and bathroom breaks—will entail.  We get a very informative training about what jury duty is and what is expected of us.  Already, hands are going up amongst the potential jurors.

As a professional seamstress, I work so hard NOT to judge my customers and fellow beings that I realize I might be a little out of practice.  Prudence decides we need to use our time wisely and get my judging chops up to scratch.  I want to be able to do a wonderful job on this jury, should I be lucky enough to get chosen.  I want to serve Democracy with all my heart. We start with the gal with garish nail polish who is obviously chewing gum and work our way up to the gentleman who has asked four questions in a row.  And by questions, I mean the kind of things a third-grader needs to be reminded are STATEMENTS, not questions.  His sentences do NOT begin with Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How.  He is telling us all he has a colonoscopy scheduled for the start of the trial before he has even heard the charges.  Next he thinks he recognizes the defendant, who vehemently denies this.  When he tries to make a lame joke about himself as a retired senior with nothing better to do (than what? Hold up court proceedings?) I am grateful Prudence does not have access to knitting needles and metal coffee cups after all.  Good job, Vermont!

Finally, we hear the charges, which are Bad.

VERY Bad. 

Some of the potential jurors promptly burst into tears and claim they need to be excused because they are triggered by past trauma in their own lives. Instantly, I stop judging.  The air feels gritty and brown-paneled like the walls. I squirm in my seat, stare at my poopy shoes, and wonder if I will be able to hear the testimony myself.  This is the kind of story which, if I even read about it in the paper, I will be up all night for days, er…nights… Many nights.  I once sent a three-page letter to the mother of such a victim because it was the only way for me to be able to process my grief.  Grief for “a stranger” (those with mother-hearts, regardless of gender, whether they have given birth or not, are never strangers) thousands of miles away.  

Most of my life, I have been told that I am “over-sensitive.” I think of it as a Good Thing, generally.  It enables me to talk with animals and to hear the Oak trees in the meadow say “Psst…I am HERE.” But it also makes me very vulnerable. I find it difficult to do Hard Things for someone else’s own damn good.  I have a great fear of looking at What Is Awful and deciding what to do about it. (This includes pin-wale corduroy embroidered with ducks.)  I greatly admire doctors, nurses, veterinarians and all those willing to commit pain for the sake of healing another.  I couldn’t even remove a splinter from my child’s foot without weeping and needing a consolation popsicle myself.   

“It makes you weak and apt to be melodramatic,” insists Prudence, who is inconvenienced by emotion of any sort.

Can I do this trial?  Honestly? Can I presume this defendant innocent until proven guilty? Can I hear all that will be so hard to hear and still be fair and impartial? What if my child was the victim? What if my child was the accused?  Who would I want on the jury?  Would I want a person like me? I close my eyes and shudder.

Yes.

God help me, yes. 

One by one we are questioned, first by the prosecuting attorney, then by the defense.  We are asked if we know how to tell the truth when we see it.  “Does crying mean someone is telling the truth?” “Is a police officer more likely to tell the truth than someone else?” “Can you think of reasons why someone might not report a crime right away?” “If eleven members of the jury think one thing is true but you are convinced the truth is different, do you have the courage to stick to what you know is true?”  As we hear each other’s answers, it’s clear that a very tiny minority is (rather obviously) wimping out because it doesn’t want to take a moment away from previously scheduled programming—it doesn’t matter what the crime is or what is at stake. “Selfish bastards,” hissess Prudence, who is still in active Judging mode. “de Tocqueville said jury duty was supposed to rub off that private selfishness that is the rust of society. He should have seen this lot!”  She talks like she knows Tocqueville. She doesn’t. He died in 1859.

When questioned, a woman on the other side of the room talks in difficult, unraveling gasps about what Truth means to her and I notice that the level of Courage in the room rises.  Collectively, we are starting to breathe again, to find ourselves. The level of bravery in the room continues to grow.  I hear the stories and the opinions of my fellow Vermonters and I am very much in awe of the general Goodness of their hearts.  They believe in Innocence until proven guilty.  They believe in the right to a fair trial.  They are willing to suspend their lives for an indeterminate amount of time to ensure that Justice prevails.  I have never participated in something like this and I am deeply moved.  I feel the renowned “community spirit of Vermont” coalescing in the warmly-dressed bodies around me.  We are looking out for each other and the Law. 

The law might be made elsewhere, far away, in courtrooms or congresses across the land but WE, we the people, YOUR people, will apply it locally.  We, your neighbors—with our flat hat hair, garish nails, poopy shoes, and gorgeous knitwear—We are the face of the Law in this town.  We can be trusted to do the Right Thing. When you hurt one of us, you will be held accountable and we will stand together to make sure of that.  We don’t hire professionals to decide. We got this.  No monarch or bureaucrat gets to determine your fate. We do.  You do not even have to testify against yourself.  No tortured “confession” will be wrung from your lips against your will.  We believe you until all “reasonable” doubts are removed.   You are one of US. We are here to protect you. Essential to the very core of our beloved democracy is the notion that we can come together in this courtroom to look each other in the eye and say “Hey! We matter. YOU matter.  Your behavior matters. What we hold dear matters.  Now, who needs to Shape the hell up??”

When he gets to me, the Defense attorney says “Ms. Bell?” (To Prudence, this always sounds like “Misspell?” which delights her no end.)

“Misspell, after reading your answers on your questionnaire [answers in which I confess to knitting without license to carry, chatting often to sheep, and never watching television…] I imagine that you do not wish to participate in a trial of this nature.  The topic would be too hard for you.  Would you agree?”

I look at him steadily.  The room goes very quiet. Even Miss Gum-chewer and Mr. Colonoscopy stop fidgeting and listen.

“No, sir. I do not agree.”

 Our challenge in this courtroom, and in our community, is to share in the brokenness and figure out how to begin the Mending.  Some accusations are wretched indeed. No one wants to listen to the lurid details of what happens in the Dark.  Sharp-clawed Predators are not just at the edge of the forest.  They are among us, even within us.  “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts,” says Henri Nouwen, to weep with those weeping (and remove their splinters!), to become weak with the weak, and vulnerable with the vulnerable.  When we attempt to live a life of pure, unconditional love and infinite care for each other, we are called to serve the Truth, so help us Oak Tree.

And the Truth is… there is SO much Mending to do!  Keep up your Good Work, my Darlings!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. Yes, I was called to serve on the case.  

P.P.S. Yesterday a key witness came down with an illness we were led to presume is Covid.  The trial has been indefinitely postponed and the court will now choose a whole new jury for the case.  I have two more jury pools to go. Stay tuned!!

Unfinished

Groundhog found fog.  New snows and blue toes. Fine and dandy for Valentine candy.  Snow spittin’; if you’re not mitten smitten, you’ll be frostbitten! By jing-y feels Spring-y. –The Old Farmer’s Almanac

Greetings Dear Ones,

Just now, as I scuttle down the Cotton Mill hallway to my studio, with my jeans unzipped, hoping they do not fall down, clutching among other things a dirty coat, a blanket, my phone and keys and a damp, resentful dog whom I have just scrubbed as best I could with liquid hand soap in the ladies’ bathroom sink, I think to myself “Wow, this day certainly isn’t turning out as planned…”   It’s been what can only be described as totally goofy.  I’ve been trying to get this blog done since 5:am this morning but a series of intriguing derailments—most of them in the form of dogs, mud, customers, and chaos have prevented me from finishing…well, ANYTHING, including zipping my pants.  

It’s been a mostly Good Day, but with confusing interludes that included a man knocking on my door at the precise time another customer was due.   

“Cheryl?” I ask, as I open the door to view a heavily bearded man.

“No,” he says, frowning. “My name is not Cheryl.”

“Oh… Sorry, the appointment was for a Cheryl…”

“I’m not Cheryl. I didn’t make an appointment.”

“Oh,” I say, as nicely as I can, “my hours are by appointment—I’m not always here. I work a couple jobs… I just ask for appointments so that I don’t miss people.”

“Well,” he says with some resolve, “You didn’t miss me, so you’re fine. I just showed up. I didn’t know I had to make an appointment. It’s my first time here.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I soothe, “I’m ever so happy to help you. It’s just that I thought you were someone else.”

“I’m Me,” he insists, “and I didn’t know I needed no appointment.”

“You didn’t know you needed AN appointment,” corrects Prudence, silently.

“No problem; Come on in. Usually people who read my website know we need to make an appointment.  By the way, how did you know how to find me?”

“I saw your website.”

“Ah…but…you neglected to actually read it?”

“Yeah.”

 When I woke up before dawn, a small, elderly mammal, remarkably similar in size and weight and temperament to a groundhog, emerged from his lair under my duvet, saw his shadow, passed gas, and attempted to return to his burrow.  He wanted six more hours of nighttime.  I wanted to gag.  I plucked him from his nest and ushered him into the nearest tundra outside the front door.  That tinned prescription dog food he eats is the most effective Morning alarm I have ever had.  

“Do you know what today is?” I ask the sheep when I go to feed them.  They just look at me blankly.

“It’s 2/2/22!!!” I say excitedly, trying to give them a hint.

“Twos-day?” asks Prim, hopefully.

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s Wednesday,” says Blossom bossily.

“I’m Thirsty,” says Chip, pawing at the water bucket.

“No, I just told you, it’s WEDNESDAY,” repeats Blossom, butting him for emphasis, “not Thursday!”

“What’s a Wednesday?” Gus and Odie wanted to know, smacking their chops. “Can we eat it?”

“It’s Groundhog Day!” I say.

No one cares. 

They live pretty much the same day every day, no matter what we decide to call it.

“Is there such a thing as Sheep day?” they want to know.

“That’s Every day,” says wise old Willow, “if you are a sheep, that is.”

At 7:15, I hurry to the kitchen and tune in online just in time to see Punxatawney Phil decide that there will be six more weeks of winter.  Only Six weeks? That would make winter pretty short for these parts.  Winter in Vermont might last until June.  I never take the winter coats off the sheep until the end of May. Around here, we observe “Spring” the way some people claim their ethnicity and culinary heritage but not Creed—we are “Spring” in name only—not in practice.

  “Please, never let me make any major Life Decisions in February,” pleads a friend. Gone is January’s Optimism.  February has a completely different vibe: The main goals seem to be basic survival and discounted chocolate after February 15th.  Still, without much water to haul, wood to chop, or hay to stack, my Winter body needs something to do besides eat Klondike bars and knit. I need to run. Recently, my dear young wood-stacking, possum-wrangling, cabbage-slashing lodger/tenant helped me set up my old treadmill in the cellar.  It’s about twenty years old and seems to be constructed of cast iron.  It takes two of us to move it. As we are struggling to position it, he pauses, surveys the scene, and asks which way I wanted to orient it. On one side of the cellar is a workbench piled high with spinning wheel parts, broken oak chairs, and interesting boards I intend to use, fix, or up-cycle.  The wall behind us contains dry goods—tins of beans, rows of canning jars, small metal trash cans filled with bulk flour and oats.

“Do you want to run towards the food, or the unfinished projects?” he asks.  As I stand there considering, he decides for me: “Probably the projects. They will inspire you to keep going.”

Few things have made me laugh harder.  Honestly, I would run faster and farther towards the food, even if it’s just dried beans and oats.  (I seriously consider dangling a donut from one of the rafters.) There is something about an unfinished project that sags me in my tracks. Poet Mary Oliver talked about “the sag of the unfinished poem” and the “release of the poem that is finished.”  She has no idea how much sag a disemboweled spinning wheel can cause! I look around at a cellar filled with half-baked projects—projects which represent seeds that landed on poor soil, or butterflies that were too weak to claw their way out of the cocoon. Is it my fault or theirs?  (Peevishly, I blame them.  They should have known better than to break!) Sometimes I assume that there is a natural selection to projects and that those not robust enough to sustain my energy or interest are destined to languish in this purgatory. But in truth, it’s not always their fault. Creatively, some things require a lot of “me” and there simply is not enough of “me” to get a job done. I’ve used every inch of “me” to get my jeans on instead. (On, but alas, not zipped…)

The first song on my play list is “Run, Run, Run” by One Republic.  Really, given the setting, and my level of cardio fitness during midwinter, it should be Schubert’s Symphony No. 8--“Unfinished Symphony.”  I take off plodding uphill (the machine is broken at the steepest incline) and think about how every culture has its own story of what Hell is.  To the ancient Greeks, there was no greater punishment than to begin a task over and over and over again and never get it finished.  I feel like Sisyphus, rolling his stone up the hill. Only for me, it is my own thigh meat, rolling upward, as I gaze around at all that will never be Finished.

I think about a friend’s comment.  She has just lost a beloved neighbor. “February is a great time to die,” she says, thinking she is being consoling. “It’s like the whole world is dead too. Somehow, I think it would be worse to go when Lilacs are in bloom and things are just beginning…” 

I disagree.  Dying is Finishing. Nothing is finished in February.

“February is about Love,” I insist, “and Hope and maybe some over-priced roses if you are lucky. Mostly, it’s the idea that perhaps all that feels Unfinished is just waiting for a better chance… Even Death is not the End.”

“Sex and Death,” huffs Prudence, who sat in on her fair share of English Lit classes, “This is what you think of Poetry, and now February too? How convenient that this ‘month of Love’ is also the shortest!”

It’s a short month but already there is so much to celebrate. Yesterday was both the Lunar New Year (Tiger, Tiger, burning Bright! In the Shadows of the night!) and St. Brigid’s Day, Imbolc, the ancient Celtic festival celebrating the half-way point between the winter solstice and the Spring Equinox.  We won’t know warmth for months but at least there is more light and a New Moon. The hens are starting to lay again.  There are hopes, round and dormant, that keep freezing in the nest.  A thaw will come… 

Tonight, after the evening chores, I go into the Winter Woods and listen to all that seems, on the surface, to be dead.  It’s not.  It’s merely Waiting.  

Schubert won so much acclaim for his “Unfinished” work—“work so well constructed, only a genius could have done it.”  Sadly, my unfinished work garners no such praise!  No one wants to rave about a vintage dress from Harrods that has had the sleeves hacked off and the armholes left unfinished.  Ditto the dirty quilt that smells of maple syrup and toddler sweat, nor the jeans that “broke” right at the crotch.  Some things Must be Finished. And as quickly as possible!

Others, like an essay, or a True Love, can never be finished.  That’s why I cannot edit this to explain why I had to wash the dog and could not zip my pants… I'm just going to hit “send” and start over. (Again).

With all that is yet Unfinished in me,

I love you still. Keep mending!

Yours aye,

Nancy