Hanging Together

“We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” –Benjamin Franklin, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence

Greetings Dear Ones,

The other night, just as I closed the door to my shop, I heard whispers, soft whispers, such as the sound cloth makes when it rubs together.  I peeked back at the orderly rows of clothes hanging in the softening evening light---one bar waiting to be done, another bar of completed items ready to be picked up. On the waiting-to-be-done bar: A pair of grubby, jam-stained fairy wings await new elastics in their shoulder straps so that the four-year-old Tinker-Bell-in-training can resume her magnificent leaps from the coffee table to the couch.  With new elastics, she might just be able to soar up above the lamps, through the open windows, and out into the blue beyond her busy suburban neighborhood. Then she could dance from cloud to cloud, bouncing on pile after pile of sheep fleece sprinkled with star dust.   Next to the wings hangs a pair of uniform trousers that belong to a police officer; next is a nine-hundred-dollar suit that was handmade in Italy; followed by some Carhartt work pants that are bombed out at the crotch (a common breaking point), and a summer calico “maxi” dress that looks like it should be worn with a straw bonnet in the dry high tide of a summer wheat field.  There are bags of mending on the table whose contents are neatly folded and labeled, with painter’s tape at each moth hole, so that I can find them better.  The work of an artist who loves purple occupies several hangers at the back, next to some circus pants and an anorak that needs a new zipper before August or the snow flies, whichever comes first.

This familiar scene at the end of the day—assessing today’s progress and tomorrow’s priorities—never fails to warm my heart.  I gaze at a completed bridal gown with complicated beading with the proprietary fondness of James Herriot beholding a suckling calf after a difficult delivery.  I sigh and make sure the iron is not just off but also unplugged.  All the machines are off, the scissors collected and put away.  “Everyone, Behave!” I admonish gently, as I softly close the door for the night.

This night, I can hear snickering.  I crack the door a tiny bit and breathe so silently, all I can feel is my ribcage softly rising.  As suspected, the clothes are beginning to wiggle. Have I left the window open? No. What the…?

“I thought she would NEVER leave,” say the wings, brightly.  “I have been dying to flap around that fourteen foot ceiling all day!”

“You know you can’t really fly, right?” says the maxi dress in a voice that sounds vaguely irritated.

“Of COURSE I can,” reply the wings, hotly.

“It must be nice to relax and have fun like that,” say the uniform pants bluntly. “No one ever looks at me and smiles, the way they look at you.  They see you and go all silly.”

“Somehow I help them remember that they once could fly, a long time ago, before they were told to forget,” say the wings primly, almost self-righteously.

“Well, I seem to bring out the worst in people,” says the pants sagging.  “I feel so sorry for the young guy who wears me.  He has a terrible time. With all the bad publicity in the media these days, this guy gets people giving him the finger and cussing at him when he wears me. People hate to see me coming.  Apparently, I escalate the tension. This guy decided to be a cop around the time he was little enough to wear wings and think he would grow up and help keep people safe. He’s trying to be one of the Good Guys but people can’t tell that from looking at him.”

“People LOVE to see me coming,” bray the circus pants.  “I’m ALL about FUN!”

“Yes,” says the maxi dress huffily, “but absolutely no one takes you seriously. You are ridiculous.”

“Keeping my guy’s butt covered when he’s swinging from a trapeze is completely serious.  I can’t think of anything more so…”

“Well, I did my best to do that for years,” sigh the Carhartts.  “But it’s tough.  They just break you in the end.  My person bends at weird angles all day long with a tool belt dragging me too low on his hips.  Then he crouches down to look under a cabinet and pop! Bang! I’m done for. He works so hard.  I don’t know how many jobs this guy has and in his time off, everyone wants him to fix something—his wife, his sister, his dad… It never ends.  I don’t think this guy ever got to wear wings as a little boy.  But I know he’ll get a pair in the next life.  This guy ain’t nothin’ but weary. The day this crotch ripped was the first day he got to go home early in a long while.  He just couldn’t keep working with his dingus about to fall out the back side.”  

“Oh, Pul-eese…” says the Maxi dress. “Don’t talk to me about tired.  We all are.”

The Italian suit says nothing.  I’m not sure if this is because he is shy, or snobby, or both.  Perhaps there is a language barrier.  Not all Europeans speak English, though it often seems that way.

The clothes continue to natter and chatter.

“It’s fun to hang out together, isn’t it?” They all agree.

“When would we ever come across each other in real life?” they wonder.  “What would our people have to say to each other if they could?”

“I think they’d all want us to be nicer to each other,” say the Wings.

“What a childlike thought,” says the Maxi dress.

“But I like it.  I like it a lot,” say the work pants gratefully.

“Me too,” says the uniform.

From the crack in the door, I smile at them all fondly—these outer husks of embodied spirits currently walking the planet elsewhere—and think, not for the first time, how much of a “Sewcialist” I am.  I sew for Everyone.  In my shop, at any given time, you can find formal wear for celebrations and traditions in every faith, every creed, every religion and even slightly dubious made-up rituals involving compost.  You can find the coverings of those who have been maimed either literally or spiritually, as well as those at the fiercely magnificent margins of what should never have been called “standard.”  It’s all here. Every part of the curves finds this Bell.  And they are Loved, loved, loved each the same.

I embrace the invitation to get inside these clothes, right up next to where raw skin goes. I love having permission to mend or heal the tiny defects in my tiny world, where I find them. I’m grateful to be able to work as I wish in this “land of the Free” (where I am probably more free than most…)

A shaman who visited recently instructed me to perform a protection charm from the “energies” that these clothings contain.  They hold stories and “vibes” that are palpable to those who are energy-sensitive. But I love the stories.   I don’t want to protect myself from the sadness, the rawness of being Human. (Though I do draw the line at crotch dander! But in such cases, masking tape does the trick as well as any spell would.)  I know my customers, Dear Ones, are hurting and some don’t feel at all united, even on a day like today, when we celebrate the founding of our country and what it means to be American.  A friend posted on Facebook, “On Saint Patrick’s Day, we all act Irish…. why can’t we all act like Americans today?”  (Firstly, I must retort that NO, we do NOT act like the Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.  We act like bloomin’ idiots.)  Another friend commented dryly “and just how DO American’s behave?”  I look at what is hanging together in my shop, and ponder…

THIS, this is the Fabric (literally) of our community, our society, our country, hanging here in tatters yet together.  We are a people of hopes, of work, of beauty, of thrills, and most importantly, of Laws.  We need to nourish, delight, and protect each other through these difficult times. 

So many of our people do not feel hopeful.  They have soured on magic of any kind, even fairy wings.  It’s so hard to feel hopeful when we feel exhausted, unheard, overwhelmed, or shut down.  I know. The weights we carry make us move heavily, rip our pants, and feel more exposed and powerless with each step.  We neglect to remind ourselves of the value of Hardships—that they hone us, they hollow us, they toughen and prepare us for deeper union with our inner calling and our Gifts, gifts we are meant to share with one another.

To those who say these messages of Work and Love are silly, weak, insipid I say this:  We don’t need more hate right now.   Blessed are we who seek, who strive, who keep on Mending the wings of those who will soar tomorrow.  Blessed are our truth tellers. Blessed are our workers, our doers, our Dreamers.  Blessed are those who go on rampages of Kindness and spontaneous generosity. The real Tough Ones are not the ones who threaten violence, but we who Consistently Persist.   Those who want Change don’t just turn the other cheek, especially if it is hanging out of a ripped pair of Carhartts—we Mend that fabric of society one bloody stitch at a time.

Anything helps. Make a difference to someone. Nothing is too small. Like it or not, we’re all Hanging Together—it’s the only way democracy can work.  It turns out that Democracy is a nasty, ugly business. It’s the worst thing in the world, except for…well, anything else.

I love you Sew much,

Yours aye,

Nancy

More Beautiful Still

“Outer beauty attracts but inner beauty captivates.” –Kate Angell

Greetings Dear Ones!

You know when I miss a week or two of blogging that it’s never that I didn’t have something about which to write—it’s that all the things I will one day write about were busy stinging me, running me over, needing to be shorn, escaping their fencing, needing fifty yards of glitter hemmed on a machine whose needles keep breaking… you know the deal! Or, perhaps I was just on all fours, kneeling in the spinach patch, eating it as fast as it can grow out of the garden (it’s that good!).  Life gets hectic; stories come faster than pens and a gal’s gotta eat!

Last week an absolutely gorgeous woman came into the shop and gave me full permission to quote her here.  She is exactly the kind of septuagenarian I hope to be one day.  She has wickedly merry eyes and a smile that is like a twenty percent tip—you instantly feel richer just to see it.   She was getting a dress altered for her grandson’s upcoming wedding. 

“Do you think I look too much like a hippy if I don’t wear a bra?” she asked, clutching at the front of her gown.  “I fell and cracked a rib last week and it’s right where my bra strap goes so the doctor told me not to wear a bra for six weeks, or until it stops hurting.”

I’m not entirely sure what her definition of “hippy” looks like these days.  She had no flowers braided in her short bob of hair; she was wearing sensible, laced, orthodic shoes; and there were no acoustic guitars present. I assured her that she looked fine and proceeded with the fitting. She remained focused on her chest. 

“I just don’t know what I am supposed to do with my boobs for the next six weeks!” she said with an air of bemused vexation. “I feel like I am hanging out all over the place.  What? Am I supposed to throw them over my shoulder?”

“Like a continental soldier…” hummed Prudence privately to herself.

 “Tuck them in my waistband?”  The lady gave a snort that almost became a laugh and then pressed her hand to her side and winced.  Cracked ribs are no fun. 

Our bodies get used to clothing for support. I remember a woman a few years back who was unable to wear her customary girdle, who felt like her organs were falling out.  She could hardly bear the sensation.  The woman went on, talking about her breasts: 

“I suppose I shouldn’t complain about them.  They did help me find a good man and feed seven of his children.”

The part of me that remains Curious was suddenly at attention.  WHAaat? How?  How, that part wanted to know, did you use boobs to find a good man?  Do yours have a special light-up feature that enables one to search darkened caves for good men? (I assume that is where they hide.) Are they like flares you send up by the side of the road?  One might consider that if you are using standard-issue boobs to find men, you might not find the Right Sort of men. Much better to try Wit, or hand-knit woolens to lure them… (The Good Ones always appreciate the value of homemade socks with well-turned heels.) I don’t know why, but this puts me in mind of my friend who was trying to trap whatever was killing her chickens.  She kept (humanely) trapping her own cats until the day she used peanut butter sandwiches for bait and caught three adult raccoons.   Suddenly, I am imagining my dear customer, somewhere in the jungles of Borneo, setting her boobs in a trap (Wait! I’m pretty sure that is the living definition of a Bra, is it not?) so that she can hunt and capture a Good Man (as opposed to a cat).(Though there are definitely those who might prefer a cat! In which case, skip the peanut butter.)

To find a Good Man who happened to have seven children with him, now that’s a lucky find! Did he have more than seven? Did she roll those boobs out like a fire-hose and could only reach the first seven? Usually, when one meets a Good Man with seven children, one has more need of an acoustic guitar, clothing made from draperies, and a working knowledge of Solfege than mammary glands, but who am I to question her? There was so much that Curious Me wanted to ask but Wise Me didn’t.  “Too bad she’s no longer lactating,” thought Curious Me, “We sure could have used her super powers during the baby formula shortage!”

I thought about breasts a lot this week, especially after yet another customer came in after undergoing a double mastectomy.  She is healing from cancer treatments and doing incredibly well, though none of her summer dresses fit her quite the way her old clothes did.  She is wisely “fixing what she can” and letting the rest go.  The courage of these women never fails to inspire me—sometimes to tears.  We all get used to ourselves in certain ways—the challenge of reorienting ourselves in differently modeled bodies after age or trauma has ravaged the original, gets to the heart of insecurities some of us have carried all our lives about our bodies and what it means to be beautiful. 

I’m pretty sure that what makes these women I love beautiful is NOT the fact that there are two lumps of adipose, saline, silicone, or rubberized foam affixed to the front of their bodies.  It’s the way their eyes shine when they talk about the things they love to do, the way they glow a little brighter when they talk about those they love, and the way they radiate humor and resilience despite what comes.  As a seamster, I can tell you--Bust pads change the way dresses behave, not people.  

A person who has raised seven children, a woman who has triumphed in the fight for her life—these are Mighty Women of tremendous inner Beauty, Strength, and Power.  They, who have nurtured so many, often at the expense of themselves, deserve every tenderness and dignity we can show them.   They are Gorgeous—no matter where their lumps are (or aren’t). To me, they are More Beautiful Still.

That’s all I have to say about that.  There are heaps of greasy, raw wool to sort and the bald little sheep in the barn need to be let out to gnaw the dewy morning grass like a middle-aged fool whose spinach is in season.

Be well, my Darlings!  I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

How long will this take?

Greetings Dear Ones,

My office manager, who is a stickler for temporal hygiene (and absolutely no other kind), reminds me every day precisely at 1:20 pm that it is time for our daily walk through the graveyard.  Why he has chosen the time 1:20 is anybody’s guess but he is nothing if not punctual and adheres to his routines with the relentless devotion of a Jesuit.  No matter what else I might be up against or underneath or getting on top of, suddenly there he is, at my side, requiring my obedience.  Immediately.  I never have any idea that 1:20 is approaching, and he doesn’t even own a wristwatch, so his punctuality is impressive.  I’ve stopped asking him “How long will this take?” because it just doesn’t matter.  We set off, wordless, at a brisk clip to do our usual loop.  Discreetly, I carry a small compostable bag in my pocket just in case he decides to defile one of the graves.    

The graveyard is particularly gorgeous this time of year.  We cut through the back of our parking lot to access the maple-lined trails of peace.  The headstones are hot in the sun but the paths around them are shady and cool.  Ever since a friend turned us on to these trails, we have found it a mid-day blessing to walk silently among the dead and literally “take a breath” from Life.  It is here, during this daily memento mori that I embrace the absurdity of my rushings and doings and return to my hemming and mending soberly relaxed and refreshed.  I used to muscle through a whole day in one big hairy gulp but this office manager (who, no doubt, will sleep the rest of the afternoon curled up under the serger table) has shown me that breaking the day into smaller bites actually makes it easier to chew and swallow.  Smaller bites are easier to savor.  As I pass by in the cool shadows around the graves, I wonder what these people were good at?  What occupied their days?  What hot thoughts blistered their brains with anxiety? What cooled and soothed them? Who loved them? Who were they before they were empty seeds planted in rows in this vast garden of stones?

How many times did they wonder “How long will this take?”

So often I am rushing to catch up to a Time that seems to have left without me.  What a cool and pleasant blessing it is to Let it Pass in the presence of Eternity.  During Prom Season, I have felt like Lucille Ball in that episode where she and Ethel work at the chocolate factory.  The prom gowns kept coming faster and faster than I could stuff them anywhere.  (I even thought about eating some of them.) I worked nights and weekends and still the shop was a forest of fabric dangling from every possible hook, hanger, and peg.   Finally, the last gown left on Monday.  With a huge sigh of relief tinged with mourning I see that season close out.  Time has passed again.  All those “How-long-will-this-takes?” have been answered.

It’s sheep season now! During the month of May, I’ve been spinning wool and telling stories at the Historic Deerfield sheep festival and helping a friend show her sheep at the Massachusetts sheep and wool show.  This weekend, I’ll get around to shearing mine.  I’ve been honing the blades in the cellar.  The sheep are ready.  On hot days, they stagger panting into any shady place.  Waiting.  How long? They wonder.

The three days I spent demonstrating in Deerfield were really fun.  I love spinning and I love teaching—so to get to sit still and do both at the same time is Pure Delight.  But the question I got asked the most often is one of my least favorite, that haunting: “How long does this take?”  Some were people who wanted to learn how to spin themselves and were worried that there wasn’t enough Time in their lifetimes to manage it.  Does one have to spin for fifty years to see progress?  Does one have to spin for hours a day to get enough yarn for a mitten? What happens if we prick our fingers and fall asleep for a hundred years?

I don’t know what it is that irritates me about this particular question. It has pungent whiffs of urgency, exasperation, and defeat emanating from its very pores.  Perhaps it is that it comes as some sort of “bargain” motivated by some inherent, invisible, but palpable sense of capitalism.  “Time,” they say, “is money.”  No one wants to waste it. Someone wants to know if her investment in a new skill will be “worth it.”  Worth it to whom? I wonder.  What are you normally doing that is more important than honing a new skill?  (These are usually people Prudence assumes watch too much T.V.) Ask yourself who you will become if you learn this new thing?  Who will you be if you do not?

Essentially, they want to know “how long it takes to be GOOD,” as if the being ‘good’ part is the only thing that matters, utterly divorced from tactile pleasure or kinesthetic connection to history.  “You are literally asking me ‘how long is a piece of string?’” I tell them.  “You are going to spin a certain length of terrible yarn and that is a necessary fact you must deal with.  It could take you anywhere from six weeks to six years to complete your first skein.  It depends on how much you work at it. One thing I know for sure—To make Good yarn, you must make some bad.  To make Good music, you must make some terrible.  (Ok, quite a LOT of terrible.) The only way anyone ever improves anything is to practice mindfully, noticing everything Good and doing more of that and noticing everything bad and repeating it less often in the future.”

“What if I never make good yarn—er, the yarn I want to make?”  asks a nervous young woman who has just graduated from college.

“Well, I think the yarn authorities come and confiscate your spinning wheel and Rumplestiltskin shames you in the town square and you are forced to eat nettles without boiling them first.  I’m not really sure.  It’s actually never happened…” I say.

She looks first alarmed, then relieved.

“You have no idea how proud you will be of your first yarn—it will be filled with lumps and snaggles and underspun wool fluffing out next to wool that is overspun to the point of snapping.  But it will be YOURS and you cannot imagine the thrill of observing yourself “getting it” by and by.  One day, your spinning will be so even that you will miss the lumpy yarn and not be able to reproduce it, no matter how you try.” 

Her eyes are shining as if I am describing a mythical place where she wants to buy a timeshare.  I invite her to try my wheel.  I guide her hands, I manage her feet.  She is like a puppet I am trying to get to make her own strings.  She has good hand coordination and does well with the wool.  Her feet, on the other hand, (ha!) will take some time.  Often, the hardest thing about spinning is getting the foot to treadle slowly enough and still keep the wheel going in the same direction.

“You know how difficult it is to write your name with your non-dominant hand?” I ask her.  She nods. “Well, my left foot cannot spin.  Only my right foot can.  If my right foot gets tired, my left foot goes next to it to help but it cannot do it alone.  I practiced so much with one foot, my brain wired that foot only.  Brains are efficient, i.e. lazy; they only do what is necessary or demanded.  To learn these skills, we literally rewire our nervous system.  How fast you learn is partly dependent on how fast you can strengthen the message relay races running around your body—from eye to brain, brain to hand, brain to foot.  This is the stuff of months, not days. Years, not weeks.  You need to start TODAY, right NOW.”

She laughs and nods vigorously.  She is so much the “me” I once was too, before I learned to spin, that I want to hug her.

Everything we do or learn changes us--neurologically, physically, mentally, spiritually. The other truth is that NOT doing things changes us too.  Feeling our way out of the bodies we built in the past and into skills we want for the future takes a lot of patience and persistence.  But it’s the most exciting work we could possibly do.  We don’t have to be who we have always been.  We can reach for possibilities instead of limitations.  We don’t have to lament “How long will it take.” Instead, we can simply bend our heads and focus on doing more of what is getting us Good Results and less on what is getting us the bad ones.  Go for what’s possible and seek to improve that.  It’s the same for yarn as it is for racial equity and sensible gun legislation. It’s true that what stands between us and the Quality we seek is not just time but Devotion as well.  And we cannot worry about how long that takes.  We aren’t deciding what to make as much as deciding Who We Are and what we make always reflects that.

True Quality is Timeless. So is Love.  I send you all the love in my heart, Dear Ones.  Keep up the Good Mending!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Thorny Questions

“What one approves, another scorns

And thus his nature each discloses:

You find the rosebush full of thorns,

I find the thornbush full of roses.” –Arthur Guiterman

Greetings Dear Ones!

Last night, I spent a few extra hours just pottering in the barn.  The evening air was sweet and chewy with the scent of lilacs and apple blossoms. The bugs had all gone to bed early so the animals were relaxed.  After feeding time, their tummies were pleasantly full and their heads were pleasantly empty, which is the essence of Contentment for some.   I, hungry and anxious, lingered in the deep Peacefulness that is a barn at twilight.  I needed a visit with the sheep.

“I was not a very nice person today,” I confessed.

“We love you anyway,” they said.

“Don’t you want to know what I did?” I asked.

“We really don’t care,” they said, burping, bending their knees, and settling down for the night.

“Well, I was pretty crabby with someone who, it turns out, really just needed love.”

“Tell me anything you want, as long as you keep scratching my head like that,” said Little Prim.  She is called little Miss Prim because of the way she purses her lips together and always has such a sweet yet sassy look on her face.

“Well, I was annoyed before I even met this customer.  During the initial phone call, I had decided I didn’t like him because of the way he kept using my name over and over in every sentence, as if he was trying to sell me something.  No one close to me uses my given name—pretty much anyone who knows me uses a variety of silly nicknames.”

“Yes,” they agreed. “Some call you Alfer, one calls you Prance, one calls you Moo… To us you are simply SHE (which is the first half of the word ‘sheep’) who calls ‘Hey Baaaahs’ in a voice that means FOOD.”

“Well, this guy was using my name in every sentence, as if it was a chain he was jerking to get my attention.  He must have found that technique in some shoddy self-help-for-hucksters seminar.  It was damn tedious pretty quickly.  I don’t like being talked AT.  I prefer being spoken WITH.”

“We all do,” said the sheep.  

“He kept telling me how easy his repair was going to be for me, that his granny could have done it in no time, had she still been around. (There’s nothing I like better than knowing I am up against someone’s more talented deceased granny—who was undoubtedly faster, better, and Free.)  Twenty minutes later, he shows up at the door and I look at the repair and, dagnabbit, he’s right.  It is an easy repair.  Since his item is large, and I don’t have enough room on the rack, I decide to do it immediately, while he waits.  He stands around, commenting in what teachers call his ‘playground voice’ instead of his ‘classroom voice’ on how peaceful my space is (utterly destroying the tranquility) and how nice it must be to ‘just sit there and help people’ all day.  He made assumptions about my life and business as if he were staring at a wall rather than peering through a window.”

 “That’s too bad,” says Prim, angling her head to get scratched in a new spot.

“I just gritted my teeth and felt the hackles on my neck, and tried not to turn into a she-wolf and bite him.”

“You can turn into a Wolf????” said Prim, backing away in horror.

“Oh, I can turn into all sorts of horrible things,” I admitted.  Her eyes widened.  Chip suddenly looked more interested; his main ambition these days is to turn into a Horrible Thing.

“I got on with his job, coldly and pointedly ignoring his babble, and as soon as it was done, I handed it to him and he could not remember which side of the garment had needed mending.  He’d forgotten. ‘Well Nancy, if I can’t find the problem, it must be fixed all right! Har har har!’ The next thing he said was ‘Hey, Nancy, I think I forgot to bring any money with me.  I’m gonna owe you some money, right Nancy? Work like this doesn’t come free, like Grandma’s house, does it, Nancy?  How much do I owe you? Nancy, can you take a credit card?’  Prudence had had enough.  She wanted to charge him five dollars for the labor and five dollars for every time he said the word Nancy.”

“What did you do next?” Prim wanted to know. 

“Well, savagely, I just wanted to get him out the door.  I didn’t want to charge him five dollars on his credit card because we would take a big hit for that in terms of transaction fees, so it wasn’t even worth it.   I didn’t even want to make three bucks off this guy.  I said “Never mind about the money.  Why don’t you pay it forward and just give your next waitress an extra five dollar tip.  Or leave a donation for a homeless shelter or something like that….’  ‘Wait a minute,’ says he, ‘You were only going to charge me five dollars for this?’  ‘Yep, five minutes, is five dollars,’ I said. ‘That’s crazy, Nancy.  Nancy, I’m from [a very big city]. Work like this is worth a lot more than five dollars.’  ‘Well, this is Vermont,’ I told him in an uncaring, off-hand way. ‘I say five dollars. Just take it and pay it forward. Be a gracious receiver.’ ”

“Did he take it and go away?” Wally asked.

“No.” I said. “He looked at me long and hard then burst into tears.”

“Because you were so mean to him?” asked Chip.

“No, Dear,” I said. “It’s worse than that.  It’s because I was so NICE to him.”

“Nice to him? But you didn’t even feed him cookies or scratch the itchy spots on his back that he can’t reach!” said Wally.

“I know,” I said, hanging my head. “and there I was being almost rude.  I just wanted him to go away and stop talking at me in such a loud voice.  I just wanted him to leave. ”

“It doesn’t sound like you were very nice in your heart but you were sort of nice in your actions,” said Prim. “Which one is more important?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I think they go together.  When our hearts and actions are aligned, it makes us feel great. But I sure have felt crummy ever since.  I can’t stop thinking about it. It was the most powerful exchange.  It’s really shaken up my whole day.  I want to be a good person, doing kind things, but I was sort of a bit of a jerk to him. And it was the nicest anyone had been to him for a long time.  How sad is that?”

“Pretty Sad,” they all agreed.  “What happened next?  Did he stop crying?”

“No.” I said.  “He stayed and cried for a long time.  He said God had brought him to me for a reason and now he knew what it was, to experience the kindness of a stranger in Vermont.  (Ugh! Talk about the guilt!)  His nose started leaking and he wiped it on the work I had just done.  I handed him a box of tissues and he opened his heart and told me a lot of things about how his god had Big Plans for him, how he was just an ordinary guy but he was being tested by lots of things so that he could be made stronger to do God’s amazing work.”

“What kind of work is that?” asked Chip.

“He isn’t sure.  He is young and very strong, like Gus and Otie, with huge neck and heart muscles, but he is still basically just crashing into peach trees.”

“Ouch,” said Wally and Prim together.  They’ve seen Gus and Otie yoked together hitting a peach tree.

“He has no idea what God wants him to do, but he knows it’s going to involve a Terrible Sacrifice. He’s trying to be brave about it but he looks exhausted.”

“Well, his god sounds tough,” said Prim, self-righteously.  “I’m so glad our god calls us lambs and says stuff about Green Pastures and lying down in them and whatnot… We are just here to love and be loved.”

“Hey, he calls us lambs because we ARE lambs,” insisted Chip belligerently.

“I think that boy was frightened,” said Water Lily from her corner, “that’s why he talked so big.”

“He sounds like the mind coyotes are after him all the time,” said Prim, shuddering.

“Yes, I think so too,” I said. “I wish I noticed it sooner. I feel so terrible.”

“And does that make you feel nicer to him now?” they wanted to know.

“Yes.  Only, I worry that it’s too late. He kept saying that he was just an ordinary person being called to do an extra-ordinary job. But he said it like he was overwhelmed and not up for any kind of toil. He just needed a bit of kindness. ”

“What was your advice?” asked Prim.  “Could you mend his thoughts or just his clothes?”

“I tried,” I said. “I said ‘Young Man, you need to flip your story. You are not an epic character from the Book of Job.  God did send you to me to hear this. It’s a very vital message. Are you ready?  His eyes brightened.  He looked at me as though I was flaming shrubbery speaking to him.”

“Didn’t he know that is just the Henna in your hair, making you look like a cactus in fire?” asked Chip, butting Wally playfully.

 “Knock it off, boys! Behave yourselves,” hushed Willow.

“I told him, ‘Young Man, you are NOT just an ordinary person. You are AMAZING. You are EXTRA-ordinary, Magnificent even.  Try doing Easy things, Ordinary things. Just do them well and chill.”

“Wow,” said the younger sheep. “Good job.  Did he understand?”

“Of course not,” interrupted Willow. “People never do.”

“She’s right,” I admitted. “This confused him greatly.  He really wanted to be Up Against It, Thwarted, Alone, Misunderstood, HEROIC even… After all, he is very Young and very Strong.”

“The worst combination…” sighed Weak Old Willow.  

“He wanted to know What To Do Next so I said ‘I’m a storyteller. To live a Good Story, you must do three things.  (Things always come in threes in stories.) But relax! You have the whole rest of your life to do them.’”

“What are the three things?  Eat, Drink, Sleep?” yawned Prim. I shook my head.

 “Dream, Dance, Dare?”

“Eat, Pray, Love?”

“Poop, poop, and poop?” said Chip, mischievously.  Prim shot him a dark look.

“No,” said Willow wisely. “Humans need to Hurt, Heal, and Help.  For some reason, they all collect a bunch of pains along the way, the way we drag clumps of thorns behind us after being in the briars.  Before they can be much good to each other, they need to pause and feel that pain, ask it what it needs.”

“What it needs is a kind Shepherd to step on that thorn branch and hold it down while they walk away,” said Prim knowingly. “It happens to me all the time.”   

Willow continued. “Once they know what their pain needs they can start to heal.  They can tell they have healed enough when someone else who is hurting comes along and they know how to help.  Then they can be Really Happy.  Then, they find that they can just be Ordinary and that that is Good Enough. People want to be Magnificent and Tragic, instead of Curious, and Open.  She-Who-Sounds-Like-Food, perhaps you weren’t your Best today but you were probably just Good Enough and that’s ok. ”

Suddenly, I felt like someone had just stepped on my branch of thorns and allowed me to move forward.

“THAT, Dear Willow, is JUST what I needed to hear. Thank you.”

I left them then, all snug in their individual nests of hay. Humble and Forgiven, I made my way up the hill beneath a blanket of stars, into a night of Good Dreams.  I hope you will too.

Peace, Dear Ones. Keep Mending.  Good Enough is Good Enough. Tomorrow is a New Day.

With sew much love,

Yours Aye,

(Alfer, Auntie, Fancy, Prancy, Nan, Nanoo, She-who-sounds-like-Food, or Moo)

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