Another Season

I need a six month vacation twice a year. --unknown

Greetings Dear Ones!

Greetings from soggy Vermont! This blog might be a bit more rambly than usual. Let’s just say that it’s been a wee bit, um… DAMP here this week. By that, I mean Monday brought the kind of epic, biblical downpours that had Prudence pondering the sinfulness of mankind and researching the length of a cubit. The lambs had on their life jackets and snorkels and were marching around, two by two, wondering when I was going to fashion an Ark from some old wooden pallets. (I fashion everything we need around here out of old wooden pallets.)  Thankfully, we live on a steep hill.  The water didn’t get over their hooves.

Others were not so lucky. The torrents may have closed roads, neighborhoods, and businesses but they also opened hearts. I am awed and humbled by the sense of Community here and the willingness Vermonters have to help each other.  So many folks have checked in with me to make sure I am ok.  It’s lovely and instructive. THIS is how we live Together.  “Vermont Strong,” is not just a saying.  “We take care of our own, mend what’s broken, and extend our hands in aid to those in need,” says an email from a local corporation urging us local business owners to help our communities rise from this challenge. All fourteen counties of Vermont qualify for disaster relief and Mending. With yet more rain expected Thursday, it’s Flood season.

There are so many “seasons” in a tailoring shop.  Prom season and Wedding Season are the most famous, but there is also “Vacation season” which is also happening now.  This is when people give you three days or less to get everything done for them because they are going away somewhere that requires a whole new uniform without which they cannot survive the duration of their adventure. None of their regularly scheduled clothing will do.  For some it is sundresses and formal evening wear, for others it is rock climbing gear. 

“Did you have a nice vacation?” asks a customer recently.

“Vacation?” I mumble, scratching my head.

“Yeah, you were gone for three months.  I couldn’t get an appointment online.  I figured you must be traveling.  Did you go to Ireland?”

I stare at her in disbelief.

“No, ma’am.  I certainly wasn’t on a vacation.   It was prom season, lambing season, wedding season, and graduation season. You couldn’t get an appointment because all of the time slots were filled by other customers.  I was bringing work home with me nights and weekends to try to keep up.”

I said it as nicely as I could but still she curled her lower lip downward.

“Don’t you have a helper? I needed things done,” she said. “I assumed you were away.”

I may have been ‘round the bend’ as they say, but I was NOT away.

To be honest, I don’t want to go away.  Though it’s lovely to go to fun places and do cool things, my dream is to stay Home, piling aged sheep dung on the “poo-tatoes,” pottering in the garden, and hanging out with the animals (animals who are NOT in the garden, just to be clear.)  I have not created a life for myself that I am trying to flee.  I relish the urgent turbulence of each season.  Just when I get tired of hauling and stacking firewood, it’s time to relearn how to start the weed trimmer without flooding the engine.  Just when I finish vacuuming the last of the prom glitter, it’s time for people to haul in their crop tops and swimwear.  That’s just how it is here in the land of 36 seasons.   And SWEET CORN Season is coming up soon!  Wah-HOO!!!! Who’d want to miss that? I’m stock piling butter and salt.

For those who are taking vacations in Vermont, well… the test of a place is how beautiful it looks in the rain.   As in Scotland, we can tell it’s summer because the rain is warmer than usual.  There was one day when the “sunny” and the “warm” actually coincided, which caused some locals to part with their long johns for an afternoon.  But the joy was short-lived.   Had the ancient Greeks lived here, there would be a myth about some immortal toddler randomly spraying us with Demeter’s garden hose,  laughing violently, then getting spanked by his mother as Phaethon goes galloping by in the Sun chariot momentarily ablaze. Thunderstorms, flash flooding, and damp lambs have been the norm lately.  

The interstate is populated with SUVs with out of state plates loaded with camping gear. I see them and sigh.  Those families are heading off to create the kind of memories that will only become funny years from now, after intensive therapy, when everyone who has to spend a week eating cold beans out of a tin and taking turns to poop in a bucket under a tarp has healed.

I’m telling everyone to keep an eye on their friends with naturally curly hair. It might be hard to tell the back of them from the front. Check to make sure their airways are clear, that they haven’t accidentally Velcro-ed themselves to the inner ceiling of their cars, or gotten snagged in some brambles during a hike in the woods, never to return. It’s a treacherous time for those of us with corkscrews for follicles. We struggle to get adequate nourishment and hydration under all that unruly wool.   I look like a dandelion gone to seed. Years ago, in barometric conditions such as this, I once had a tufted tit-mouse dive bombing my head, ripping out nesting materials. (True story!  We have it on video.)

This level of humidity is tragic for both hair and hay. A local at the feed store said to me recently, “Welp…gonna be a BAD year for hay this year…”

“I beg your pardon, Sir, just exactly when have we had a GOOD year?” I inquire.  Every year there is hay drama.  We grump if it’s too dry; we grump if it’s too wet.  This year, apparently, it’s been too Much of everything. We’ll see.  First cut, “out of the field” (that means you go get it yourself, right where the baler dropped it; there’s no delivery) is already averaging seven dollars a bale.  Out of the barn is a dollar more.  Delivered is yet more.  As ever, I am hastily constructing and extending fence lines as quickly as I can so that my animals can eat grass instead of money.

“Nothing is more conducive to enhancing tranquility in a bucolic setting than setting two young steers loose to graze upon a lawn without fences,” said NO farmer, EVER.  My bright idea was that (read the next part in a sing-songy tone) ‘they would stay right in the middle of that green, lush buffet and behave themselves like grateful gentlemen until I called to them in dulcet, domesticated tones that would prod them to proceed politely back to the barn.’ HA!.It turns out that their bright idea, once free, was to buck and plunge around the house—looking in the windows, tromping on the septic tank, messing up flower beds, and eating giant pots of cherry tomato vines right off the deck, then take off and cruise the neighborhood looking for something more interesting to do.   Instead of dulcet tones, the neighbors heard a middle-aged banshee hanging out the open window of a Ford Explorer, screeching for her cattle, as she drove around clanging a feed scoop against the side of the car.

The steers have decided, rain or no rain, that there’s no point in living in a barn again when there is too much fun to be had outside the gate.  This is probably how some people feel about vacations and freedom in general, though the two are vastly different.

Freedom, as I am fond of saying, requires Fences. In an effort to get my flock to eat as much free greenery as possible, I spent three hours bush-whacking a trail around Gus & Otie’s pasture to extend their current fence line into the woodlands behind the barn.  They stood on their side of the wire, watching me intently the whole time.  Apparently, Gus had no idea what I was doing. Otie knew.

As soon as I had the new wires hooked up and disconnected the old, Otie crashed right into the underbrush and began to munch.  Gus paced the old familiar path and looked anxious.  Where was Otie?  Otie had just disappeared beyond the magic force field!  Gus mourned.  He went to his stall and lay down and moo-ed in a forlorn manner, grieving.  Just a few yards away, unconcerned Otie was happily stuffing himself.  To Gus’s utter relief, Otie returned an hour later with a full belly, plopped himself down in his usual place to cud and doze. He had great stories to tell. He had gone somewhere new to refuel and returned safe, happy, and replete.  Gus, stuck behind strong mental barriers, could not do that.  To his horror, Otie lurched to his feet and wandered off again.  For two days, Otie got fatter and Gus grew nervous, lean, and gaunt, before he worked up the courage to follow Otie into the Great Unknown. “The vacation we often need is freedom from our own mind,” says Jack Adam Weber.   When I went to check on them this morning, Gus peeked out from behind a mountain of multiflora rose brambles and smiled a guilty smile.  He still doesn’t feel quite right about leaving his usual groove, though he’s filling out some.

Leaving our usual groove is harder for some of us.  Sometimes it takes the violence of a natural disaster, or the gentle, persistent persuasion of a friend. Having said all that…the dream is happening again… the dream that I will do two things this summer—I want to hike one of the smallish mountains nearby and spend one whole day at a beach, basting myself with sun sauce and reading the kind of novel that requires one to go to confession. Too many summers have passed since I have managed to do either of these things. Both will probably involve picnics with a bit of sand in the sandwiches, friends, and a temporary absence of cattle.  I’m ready for Something, if not a true vacation, at least a New Season for a day.  Bring on Deep Summer: when laziness becomes respectable and we can disgrace ourselves with heaping piles of sweet corn and Gluttony. (I hope all this rain is making the corn grow!)

Maybe we’ll dry out by then…

Thanks for your Good Work, my loves!  Send some of your good Mending energy to Vermont! The folks here could use it.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Gettysburg

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Greetings Dear Ones!

Happy Fourth of July!  I am a Bell at Liberty today and I am Grateful for that. 

A dear friend rang me up last night. “Do you know what today is?” she asked.  I paused.

“It’s Monday, right? It’s not the fourth already, is it?  Am I off a day?” Her question puzzled me.  Was she the one confused? What day did she think it was?

“It’s July 3rd.  A hundred and sixty years ago, you and I were dead by now. The battle was over.” 

“Ha! Yes!” I laughed.  When I first met her nearly eight years ago now, she told me before we parted, “You and I, we aren’t meeting for the first time.  I’ve known you before, from Gettysburg.”

“Gettysburg?” I searched her face for clues. How did she know? She was not someone I recognized from my youth, or undergraduate years at Gettysburg College or the subsequent years of combining a pilgrimage to my favorite fabric store in town with a visit to my parents who still reside nearby. Every summer, I usually take my children, friends or visitors on a tour of the battlefield—I offer anyone who can recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by heart at the end of the day a slab of the best homemade cheesecake ever at the Lincoln Diner as a reward.    Was this lady a faculty member? A park ranger? A townsperson?  Did she serve cheese cake at the diner? Gettysburg is a very intimate place; one gets to know most people quickly, from Billy the hat maker on Carlisle street to Jim the high school librarian. I could not place her.

“Your neck,” she said pointing at the lines above my collar bone, “you’ve died violently at least three times in past lives. I can tell. You’ve probably been hanged as a witch at least once.  And I know you died with me at Gettysburg.”

That was our first meeting. As I grew to know (and positively adore) this woman, I came to understand that all her favorite people “died with us at Gettysburg.” When I introduced her to the beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow, she confided, “I knew the instant I saw him; he died at Gettysburg. One look at those eyes and you just know.”  

“Know what?” I want to know. I have no idea how she determines such things, whether she “reads energy” or, like a great storyteller, just knows her audience.  A New Englander through and through, as far as I know, she’s never had anything to do with Gettysburg personally, except that she believes we both once died there and have been drawn to return there as part of this life’s events.

“Utter nonsense! She’s stark-raving mad!” says Prudence, reaching for her prayer book, “there’s no such thing as reincarnation.”

“But Pruddy,” I protest, “energy is neither created nor destroyed.  We all contain some of Napoleon’s last breath…”

“And some of Napoleon’s last fart, too!” chirps my inner fifth grader.

“Who’s to say if we don’t pick up some of the energy from the places that are dear to us?” I continue, ignoring the fifth-grader, who is still snickering. “When we love a place for its hills, its rocks, its water, wind, and weather—is there not some alchemy by which we leave a part of ourselves behind and trade it for some indelible groove Love carves upon our heart? Is there not a sticky sort of Transcendental Oneness that means we can go nowhere, and do nothing, without simultaneously marking and being marked?  Do the atoms which make us Now, not contain something of Then too?”

“That’s a far cry from telling me that you, as you, marched around clutching a bayonet, with crumbs of hard tack stuck in your beard,” sniffs Prudence. “It’s hardly the same thing at all, though I do think that all atoms ought to be thoroughly sanitized before being used again.”

“Did I have blisters, from all that marching?” I wonder. “Ticks? Lice? Dysentery? Jock itch?  What was life like for soldier me? Did I have a tent? How bad were the mosquitoes?”

“Pretty bad,” says Walt Whitman, who has appeared from behind a leaf of grass. “But you were young and manly and beautiful, and I loved you so!  Ignore Prudence. Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes… if you want me again, look for me under your boot soles (Leaves of Grass)…for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you….”

Whatever magic or miracles are at play in recognizing each other as kindred comrades across time, my friend is right:  Gettysburg is a dear and hallowed place for me.  I cannot explain my connection to it.  On the hottest, noisiest day, there is a palpable Silence, a shimmering Reverence emanating from the grass, and continually the barely suppressed impulse to turn suddenly and look behind oneself, as if to catch something there.  The nameless, invisible Presence may be Life itself, haunting the dead rather than the other way round.  The hollow dead are at peace, having emptied out what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.”  For years, I rode my bike all over the battlefields, sometimes at night after the park had closed. Oddly, the Silence is softer at night, after the tourists have taken off their headsets, tossed away their guide books, and retired with cardboard buckets of fried chicken or Tommy’s pizza to watch T.V. in their air-conditioned motel rooms.  The Silence relaxes, breathes a whisper in the woods. What is not Serene surrenders. Peace smothers all with an Ache distilled by cricket song.   The crickets are native—descended from the very crickets who witnessed the horrors of brother mauling brother.  The turkey vultures circling ominously overhead? Well, legend says they came from the south, following the daily feast of carrion as the battles led them northward on full bellies.  They soar there to this very day—descendants of those who dined on the mortal remains of Courage, Fear & Fury.

I think soberly about all these things, today, as we celebrate the founding of a country that still has Mending to do.

Like today (here in the northeast, anyway) July 4th, 1863 was a day of rain. General Meade, having won the battle, did not press his advantage and rout Lee once and for all.  Had he done so, some argue, the war would have ended then, instead of dragging on for another two shattering years. It’s possible that Meade, who had only been in his post as General for little more than a week, had no idea how decisively he had won.  He had lost many of his generals and commanders and wasn’t fully aware of his command structure to start with.  After 96 hours of high-end combat, his men had reached the limits of human endurance and were not able to transition from holding a defensive position on a hill to active pursuit of the enemy.  Lee was able to slip away under the cover of drizzle and darkness and get his exhausted men across fifty miles of Pennsylvania mud and Maryland before crossing the Potomac and reaching the safety of Virginia.

Gettysburg, considered the high water mark of the rebellion, accomplished three things: it finally stopped the Confederate momentum after a string of southern victories, gave the North a badly needed boost in morale, and most likely obliterated any chance of European countries intervening on behalf of the South. And, with over 50,000 to choose from, it left my dear friend a lot of potential comrades who “died with us at Gettysburg.”  It was the deadliest battle of that un-civil war—untethering as many as 23,000 Union and 28,000 Confederate souls who were killed, captured, or wounded in the course of just three days.  The wagon train of wounded Confederates leaving the scene was 17 miles long. And that’s just the humans.  What of the oxen? The horses? The dogs? The farm animals nearby? Estimates are that around 5,000 military horses and mules were lost in that battle.

Having had to bury dead livestock in the full heat of summer, I know that it is only hours before a foul, greenish foam is leaking from their nostrils and from under their tails.  Their abdomens bloat, then burst and it’s an unholy mess that requires frequent puke breaks to clean up. FIVE THOUSAND of these things?  Dear God…

Townsfolk carried around vials of peppermint oil and pennyroyal to mask the stench of death that hung in the air until winter.  They hurriedly covered everyone they could in ad-hoc hasty graves, some of them in trenches filled with as many as 150 anonymous bodies (there being no dog tags then).The shallow graves were easily disturbed by weather and wild animals.  The appalling post-battle scenes prompted then Governor of Pennsylvania Andrew Curtin to establish the Soldier’s National Cemetery on the hill overlooking the site.  It was at the dedication of this cemetery on November 19th, 1863, that Lincoln gave his famous, sacred address—calling us all, then and now, to dedicate not the ground, but ourselves to a cause which remains unfinished.   

Today, as we turn to fireworks, soggy hot dogs and potato salad, to celebrate the triumph of enduring Democracy, we can acknowledge that sure, it’s not everything our founders ever dreamed of—as Peace-filled, civil disagreement and the gritty Grace of compromise come with steep price tags.  But it sure beats the hell out of every other alternative.  One hundred and sixty years ago, we had to fight our own sisters and brothers to ensure that “…government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  I hope my friends and I did not die in vain.  Perhaps the atoms rearranged themselves to give us one more chance, in Kindness and Gratitude to “take increased devotion to that cause”—that noble, blessed proposition that ALL people are created equal. 

Menders, we got us some powerful work to do! Maybe we all died together at Gettysburg, maybe we didn’t. We are ALIVE NOW. Let us use our needles, pens, fabrics, fiddles, and bows to bind up our nation’s wounds… and let’s rejoice that we don’t have to wear button-up boots and hoop skirts while we do it! Yee Haw!

Let the Mending Continue!

With SEW much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Liberty and Law

Greetings Dear Ones!

Today is the Summer Solstice here in the Northern hemisphere—the astronomical start of summer—though we all know that “summer” in Vermont might just be a few hours where we whip off that last layer of wool sometime in mid-July or August.  Still it’s nice not to have to light the stove to thaw digits and dogs each morning.  It’s beautiful to bask at twilight in the chorus of the bug choir and see the fire flies (some call them lightening bugs) twinkling in the meadow like the whole farm is the scene of Edward Robert Hughes’ painting “Midsummer Eve”—though instead of an enchanted barefoot sylph of a maiden with a wreath of flowers in her hair, picture a stocky, middle-aged woman in grubby overalls and welly boots.

The lambs are getting big—they are two thirds the size of their parents already.  I have one friend in particular (the one whose mama tried to smash him every day for the first week of his life) who comes and stands next to me every time I am near.  He just stands, quietly, looking up at me.  He has appointed himself my special assistant at feeding times and he always lingers at the gate for extra cuddles and scratches before going out to join the rest of the herd.  We have a unique bond that was born in his trauma, when it was safer to be close to me than to his own mother.  He probably has no idea why he likes me anymore—he just knows that he does.  He’s moved on with his life but his lingering connection to me feels like Gratitude.  Naturally, I can’t help feeling like he is my secret favorite.

My secret least favorite is the little white lamb I helped birth. She wouldn’t be here either, without me, but she shows no damn gratitude whatsoever. She never goes where she is supposed to go (with the other sheep) and blazes her own trail around the outside of the pen instead.  She is as skittish as a fawn and refuses to be captured or caught, even with the temptation of a scoop of grain.  Sometimes, I have to get the entire herd in and out of the field several times before they are all united and little miss smarty-pants has joined the group. She’s the reason my next dog will probably be a Border Collie. She’s bigger than the other lambs because she is a singleton and has all her mother’s milk for herself. The other lambs, being sets of twins, must share.   

“Why don’t you follow the rules?” I ask her.

“I don’t like rules,” she says impudently.

“No one does,” says Prudence, “which is precisely WHY we need them. If everyone just did the right things, then there would be no need of them.”

“Rules help keep everyone safe,” I say.

“I will keep myself safe,” she says, still balky. “I know what I am doing. Rules are fine for others, not me. I’m ok without them.”

She is as infuriating as the dog-owner who lets her dogs run free off leash in public areas and yells to everyone they jump all over “They’re just being friendly!”  I have met these dogs twice now and they are NOT friendly.  They are young, stunningly gorgeous pit-bull terriers whose “pack” mind takes over when an elderly Jack Russell tries to pick a fight with them.  (Despite foggy eye-sight, half his teeth missing, and poor hearing, my delusional darling thinks he can take on two pit-bulls in their prime, especially if I hold him up high enough to reach them.)  

“They’re friendly!” screams the owner of the pit-bulls as they bolt towards us.

“My dog’s NOT,” I bellow back, “He’s going to start a fight. CALL OFF YOUR DOGS!!!”  I struggle to maintain my grip on eleven pounds of enraged rascal as the growl and bark of the younger dogs gets more intense.  Jaws are snapping in my face and their claws are scratching my back, arms, legs as they try to get to him.

“They just want to play!” their owner calls, totally deluded about the tenor of their growls.

Their blood is up.  I know better than to run. I do my best to stand firmly and to speak with authority to the animals: “NO, OFF, BACK” but they ignore me and the situation escalates with each leap, turn, twist and snap.  It takes the woman several agonizing moments to cross the distance to us and manage to pull her dogs away.

“PLEASE,” I pant, “keep your dogs on leashes. This is not safe.”

“They were not going to hurt him,” she insists defiantly.

“Yes, yes they were. You cannot trust pack animals in a prey situation.”

“They’re good babies,” she says, as she struggles to pull them away.

I lose my temper.

“Keep your dogs ON A LEASH.” I yell, “THIS IS TERRIFYING!! YOU HAVE TO KEEP YOUR ANIMALS UNDER CONTROL. THEY ARE NOT UNDER CONTROL!” I am shaking all over.

“Ma’am, you’re FINE,” she yells back, as if I am being ridiculous. “They would never hurt you.”

I march away.

“Have a blessed day!” she screeches after me in a tone that tells me I can actually do otherwise. It’s Christian for “Go engage in sinful lust with yourself.”

I stomp to my shop, where a bride is waiting for an appointment.  She’s early.  I ask if I can have a moment to compose myself.  I cannot stop shaking.

Just then, a tenant from down the hall arrives. 

“I saw the whole thing,” he says. “I tried to film it for evidence for you but then I realized you were in trouble so I started to run to see if I could help, so the video is just of the ground as I run… But let me know if you file a report.  I’d be glad to testify as a witness.”

I haven’t considered filing a report.  I haven’t considered anything. I am still flooded with rage, disbelief, relief, and adrenaline.  I thank him. It feels good to be witnessed, even if I never saw him.  All I could see was those hot pink mouths, popping like firecrackers in my face.

“She was not the least bit sorry, was she?” I ask.

“No,” he admits. “She wasn’t.”

She was the one with her dogs off leash acting like I, the one with a dog on a leash getting jumped on, scratched and barked at, was being unfair and unreasonable.  When did the leash law become optional?   

Doing the bridal fitting helps me calm down. The bride is “a dog person” and can sympathize with all sides of the issue.  I have nothing against pit-bulls.  These dogs are beauties and all dogs deserve to be walked in public—but On A Leash! What’s so hard about that? That woman clearly has NO control over them, which just makes having them unleashed all the more dangerous.  It’s Dog Owners who are ruining things for dogs.  There are trails in town that say “No Dogs Allowed” at their entrance, no doubt as a result of irresponsible owners. How sad is that? The dogs will be the ones to suffer in the end.

Another building tenant comes to visit.  He’s heard of the incident and has a dog himself. He tells me the lady with the pit-bulls is not a tenant.  Even though this incident happened on the campus of our building, I should not report it to our management as it could jeopardize the rights of us tenants to bring our dogs to work.  None of us want that.  We are happier and our animals are happier when we can live respectfully in community with each other. My dog sleeps in a little bed underneath the sewing table.  Most customers have no idea he is there.  He is content just to be near me, instead of home alone, having anxiety attacks and destroying things with nervous energy.

I can’t wait to get home at the end of Monday to be with the sheep.  I need to talk things out and find my Peace again.

“Why don’t some people want to follow the rules?” I ask them.

“Rules are not fun,” they admit blithely, stating the Obvious.

“Rules are inconvenient,” says Willoughby, “Restrictive.”

“Your problem is that you get upset that they don’t follow the rules.  It’s like it shakes your faith or something.   You get insulted when people don’t respect your boundaries and disregard your safety.  You make it all about you.  But that’s silly. That’s not their job—to take care of your feelings.  It’s not their way. They DO just think of themselves.  You need to accept this and not get upset,” says Watson.

This is hard to hear but it lands like Truth.

“Yeah,” says Waterlily, “How are people any different from us?  We all want to get to the feed room door and find it open and get in there and gulp down anything we can.  That’s just the way of things.”

“It’s not your job to grieve the fate of the world and get all morally indignant about rules.  Just keep the feed door shut and the grain bins sealed. No emotions are required,” says Prim.

“But LEASHES are…” I protest woundedly.

“Hey, Wait! Is the feed room door open?” ask Molly, who hasn’t been paying attention.

“NO,” we all say at once. I say it with authority, they say it with regret. I go back to mulling over what we are calling The Incident.

“I’m not upset with the dogs…  This is just what poorly trained dogs do,” I say.

“Dogs are just coyotes you let live in your house,” say the sheep shuddering. “We ARE upset with the dogs, just as a matter of principle. All dogs, any time, any place.”

“I’m upset with the people,” I say. “People have a CHOICE.  People have access to reason, consciousness, compassion that enables them to create and follow laws that make it possible for everyone to play fairly and survive.”

“Are you saying that people are better than animals??” asks Prim, backing up with flared nostrils.

“Well…. I’m with Aristotle on this.  He says something like ‘At our best, we can be the noblest of animals.  Separated from law and justice, we are the Worst.’” The noble animals around me just listen, considering. Some of them wander away to graze on some fresh poison ivy they have found.

“I definitely felt like the Worst sort of animal today,” I admit. “I’m upset that I lost my temper and screamed at her but secretly, I really wanted to bite that lady myself. Now I am afraid to take my daily walks.  She truly doesn’t care and this has happened twice and will just keep happening. John Locke is right: The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

“He sounds like the type of guy who kept his dogs on leashes and his grain bins sealed behind doors,” observes Wally.

“Yes, he does.”

I sit in the deepening gold of evening, surrounded by munching lambs and gradually feel better, grounded, Resolved.  I’m glad I live in what John Adams called “a country of laws not men.” Laws are important though it’s disappointing to need them in the first place (as a replacement for what should be common moral decency amongst the citizenry) and even more disappointing to have to enforce them through a justice system.  I want to live in a world where we all respect each other and our good boundaries but I live in a world that IS—where our Natural (animal) instincts are fiercely subsurface at all times, and where unleashed pit-bulls and politicians run violently amok.  In THIS world, where selfishness occasionally runs rampant, where everyone from dog walkers to presidents thinks it’s ok to flout the law… our choices are to protect our Laws or surrender our freedom. Either way, it’s a nasty fight. 

“Fight,” says the white lamb, “fight.”

For a cute little lamb, she certainly is a tough one. 

Love yourselves to itty-bitty bits today, Dear Ones!  We’ve got some mending to do! I love you Sew Much. Thanks for your Good Work.

With Liberty and Justice for all,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

P.S.  May your Mid-summer’s Eve be Magical!!!

A Festival

“It is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.” —Seneca

Greetings Dear Ones!

The windows are still dark when I am awoken by a small stirring, a shifting on top of the covers by my feet.  Something the size of a football comes paddling up the bed and sticks a cold nose on my cheek.  I open one eye and then close it.  A harsh scratch follows some persistent nudging.  I open the eye again and glance at the clock.  It’s well before 5 a.m.  “Are you kidding me?” I snarl in the direction of the small furry face that is only barely darker than the room gloom surrounding it. As soon as I make eye contact, he begins to wiggle all over.  I reach out to grab him so I can stuff him under the covers and snuff his ambition but he is too fast for me and flings himself off the end of the bed and starts his celebration dance.  “Hooray!  You survived the night! A new day has begun! Let’s go outside and find stuff to pee on!” he dances, wiggling his bum like a bee trying to show other members of the hive the way to more flowers.  He alternately hops, then perches like a prairie dog to see if I am up yet.  I have not moved.  His urgency increases.  One end of him wants to get filled, the other emptied.  He scowls. I do not emerge.  He barks.  My covers are soft and warm; who cares about the fate of the carpets?  His hopes capsize as I submerge into slumber again. 

The next thing I know, he is sitting on my chest, fixing me with bright, beady eyes.  Someone is with him.  He’s brought a friend. A shadowy man in a toga stands next to the bed, gazing down at me with eyes that are not there.

“Get up!” the shadow commands. “Your bonus has arrived.”

“Seneca?” I ask. “What are you doing here?”

“Get up!” he says again. “Death has cancelled his appointment with you.”

“Death? Appointment?” I sit bolt upright.  I had not realized Death was one of my customers.  I hadn’t seen his name on my schedule.  I flop back on my pillow. That damn schedule—people make appointments via the website but if I don’t go through all the confirmation emails and manually transfer them to the Google calendar, well… things slip through the cracks.  I try to get them all but they are like lambs trying to slip past the gate while I’m not looking.  It has happened twice in the last month—once to a groom needing his suit trousers hemmed at the last minute, and once to a bridesmaid who accidentally scheduled three different appointments and did not know how to cancel the two she did not want.  Inevitably, I was not there for the one she actually wanted.

“What does Death need?” I ask Seneca. “Cloak patches? New leggings? His biker jacket lined with tie-dye?  Whatever it is, just tell him to make a new appointment through the website.  I cannot cope with phone calls. I forget what people tell me as soon as we hang up.  Use the website.”

“Death is the worst customer,” says Seneca solemnly. “He comes without appointments.”

“It figures,” I mutter. Death is like a few people I know, who think they can just stop by unannounced.  They have no idea how disconcerting this is.

Seneca continues on, in his native ancient Greek, which I cannot understand. Prudence translates.  She thinks memorizing a semester’s list of Latin prefaces makes her a master of the Classics.

“Your arse,” she says, “Get it out of bed and be grateful you are not dead.”

“Your Bonus has arrived,” says Seneca again, ignoring Prudence and switching back to English.

“Bonus??” I sit up again.  THIS interests me. I would LOVE a bonus! Did someone leave a tip? Or better yet, a great review?  Did my tax refund arrive? Did I earn enough points for five bucks worth of store credit at the local feed store?

“This DAY,” says Seneca. “This whole blessed day--It is your Bonus.”

“What??? This day? Really?” I thought I was going to have this day anyway.  If this day was credit, I’ve spent it already.  I have a full rack of work to do, customers to placate, chores waiting, animals to feed, oxen to train, pants to hem, bridesmaids to slip-cover in organdy, fences to build, animals to tend, gardens to weed, keys to lose and find again, lawn to mow—each and every noun a stone in disguise and each and every verb a lash… None of this feels like a bonus.  The time is already gone—frittered away on yesterday’s debts for yesterday’s crusts.  I might as well pour myself a nightcap and stay where I am, lodged between the sheets of Comfort and Denial.

“Today IS a Bonus,” says Seneca stridently. “You were NOT promised this day.  You have no such contract. Regardless of your so-called promises and obligations, you still get to choose your actions today.  So Celebrate!  Make of it your own Festival.”

A festival?  A festival sure sounds like way more fun than the day that Yester-Nancy had planned for us.  Yes!  Let’s have a festival.  A Frolic of Absurdity! Bring it.

“Whom will you love Today?” Seneca wants to know. 

I lie there, thinking of all those I want to show love today.

“HEY!!!”yaps the little dog, “Love ME!!!  Love ME!!! Take me to the dog food and let the FEASTING begin!”

I carry him carefully down the stairs and out to the patch of wildflowers he has been watering daily. We race each other back to the kitchen and dance and do the Morning Howl while I prepare his food and heart medicine.  Thanks to his medicine and good veterinary care, he has this bonus day too.  I am suddenly Grateful to have any day with this dear little buddy at my feet.  

I think of the others I wish could share this day.  I sip my tea and pretend I have endless blessings rising like the steam from the cup of lemon balm and peppermint.  Mentally, I lob them like light balls at all my kith, kin, creatures, customers—and YOU, dear soul. Yes, YOU.  I wasn’t even going to write this blog today (before it became a festival) but I thought of YOU and how much more fun it would be to write and tell you about the Festival I am having, instead of a regular day.  Tedium is Cancelled. I hope you can join the festival, wherever you are.

“What prisoners will you release?” Seneca asks.  “It is customary to release a prisoner or two during festivals.”

“Well, I cannot release the chickens.  The coyote is waiting. I heard her howling in the night. Not the bulls either—that is generally not a good idea.  Those two will ramble around, knocking things over and generally making a mess.  They got loose in the barn a few weeks ago and it took two days to put things right again.  They broke the gate to the sheep pen and set all of them free as well.  It’s a good thing the grain room was locked or they all would have died of the glee of overeating.”

“We can’t have that,” admits Seneca. “Feasting has to be kept at healthy levels.  There are no vomitoriums for ruminants.”

“I will set the lambs free,” I concede, “but only for a moment so that they can run up the hill to the pasture where they will be safe within fences.”

“Good Fences are important,” says Robert Frost, who pops in unexpectedly, “especially if you want good neighbors.”

“Thanks, Bob. Good to keep in mind,” says Seneca before turning back to me. “What are YOU setting free today?  Besides sheep for a few minutes?  That doesn’t count. What criminals lurk within your jails—behind the bars of tyranny and regret? Who are the Unforgiven? Could one of them be your own mostly innocent self?”

“I’m not doing that,” I say flatly. “I do not wish to wander through the jail during a festival.  That does not sound at all fun.”

“Who said it all had to be fun?” he wants to know. “It must be JUST.  It must be Fair. This takes courage and strength of spirit. Trust me, it enhances the celebration to see Justice done and the prisoner freed.”

“I take no prisoners,” I lie.

He waits.

“Ok, maybe I take a few…”

Chin lifted, eyes on the horizon, he keeps waiting. I crumble.

“Ok…fine. I’ll set a one free…”  

I get out a pen and paper and make a list of grudges, grumbles, gritches and culprits I wish to set loose for the Festival.  Seneca is right.  This is feeling Great.  I go giddy and decide to set every last one of them free. I go to their hiding places where they languish and skulk and I root them out with the point of my pen. “Go Away,” I command them. “I declare our debts paid. I will house you no more.”  I put on some music and put the list in the woodstove and light it.  The smoke of regrets is carried away with the lemony steam of Blessings. 

“Now you are ready to claim your Bonus!” announces Seneca. “What will you celebrate today?”

I celebrate the song of the birds as dawn comes, as the fog rises, as the sun burns through the clouds and coats the freshly-sprouted sunflower seedlings. Everywhere I look, there is singing—in the melodies of scented herbs blooming in their pots, in the grayish green baby blueberries, the tomato seedlings scaling the wall of the compost bin, the deep, shaggy tangle of green that crawls all over the land, the land itself, tumbling like laughter and rocks down the hill to the secret meadow…

I celebrate the feel of hugging a lamb I’ve caught trying to escape the gate—how his belly feels like a water balloon covered in wool, how his burp smells of milk and clover, how he feels too fat to have any bones at all, as I toss him back in with his rock-hopping colleagues. They leap and play, bounce and frolic. Today is their Bonus Day too.  They know it.

I celebrate the smell of steer breath and the feel of my cheek on his shoulder as he eats his breakfast.  I see the liquid emotion in his eyes, hear the forlorn ‘moo’ with my heart, as I part from him.  I have a friend who has recently lost a pig.  Our whole group holds her gently in her grief.  We understand. There are inter-species bonds and losses that some folks cannot comprehend.  I celebrate the blissful Ache that comes from loving deep and wordlessly.  Every day with these creatures is a Bonus.  

I celebrate my own Yearning—that we cannot have what we want all the time. It is in the reaching for the toy she cannot grasp that the baby learns to move, choose direction, stretch and develop new skills.  It is Wanting that creates Mending and Creativity itself. 

I wasn’t going to write this blog this week.  I thought I was too tired, too busy, too depressed.  But then I got this lovely BONUS!!  Wahoo!  I’m choosing to sing and dance and feast and sew and do things for those I love simply for the sheer joy of it, because I am so LUCKY I got this bonus! It looks like my regular day but, secretly, it’s a FESTIVAL!!! Yay! What are you going to do with yours?

With SEW much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Managing

The Manager does things right; the Leader does the right thing.” –Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

Greetings Dear Ones,

Every day, Heartsoul walks into my shop and sighs with happiness. She sings, “This is such a beautiful space!  Look at those windows!  That Light!  All this fabric, thread, tools!  What amazing things we could create here! Let’s make a linen wrap dress—you have so much fabulous linen in that box up there… maybe some quilted hoodies… No!  Let’s do something amazing with that collection of tartan scraps!  A wall hanging depicting the Highlands maybe?” The glow radiating from her dims the dapples peeking through the trees by the window.

“No time for Creating,” snaps Prudence, “There’s too much work to do. These wedding dresses are NOT going to hem themselves. And the mending rack has been full since Prom season. Then there are all the bridesmaids’ dresses that need to be done by Saturday. Get to it!” Instantly, Brain begins to strategize.  What color is already on the machine?  Where shall we start?  Who’s deadline is most immanent? Arghhhhh!  What to do first???

Heartsoul sags…

“We never talk anymore… it’s time we have a Conversation,” she says, tugging on Brain’s sleeve.  Brain is distracted.  Brain has been distracted a lot lately.  Brain is the reason we have been breaking into the shop with a butter knife for the past three days.  Brain has no idea what happened to the keys.  Luckily, there is a spare car key, or we’d have to travel by Ox Cart and Gus and Otie can’t even manage to stay on opposite sides of a pull chain yet.  Brain starts to run in circles, flapping arms, panting.

“Conversations between Head and Heart, along with epistolary novels, went out of fashion during Thomas Jefferson’s administration,” says Prudence says dryly to Heartsoul. And to Brain, “Stop Dilly-dallying!”

“I think we need to get re-aligned,” says Heartsoul. “There’s nothing for me to do around here. I’m bored.”

“I’m not happy either,” admits Brain, turning on Prudence. “I miss Heartsoul.  I like it best when we work as a team.  We do our best work then.”

“Who cares, as long as all this work gets done,” huffs Prudence.  Disconnection between head and heart are just fine with her.  She becomes ever more brisk and bossy.

“Who is giving us all this work to do, anyway?” asks Brain.

“Our Worthy customers, obviously,” retorts Prudence. “Their needs are way more important than yours, so get going.”

“But why can’t we say ‘no’ to a few things?” asks Heartsoul. “Now you even have a workshop space at home. You work until bedtime. Then you get up and work in the morning. It never ends.”

“It CAN’T end,” says Prudence. “That’s what running your own business with a poverty mentality and steep hay bills is all about.”

“Surely we could have a few limits. Like maybe we should not return business emails and texts during non-business hours… Maybe we could not overload ourselves like this.  You cannot pour any more water out of an empty cup.”

“But then we wouldn’t be the BEST,” says The Pleaser, Prudence’s sycophantic side-kick. “We MUST be the BEST.”

We all turn to stare at The Pleaser.

“It’s YOU!” cries Heartsoul in horror.  “You are the reason we have too much work to do. And get paid so little for it!! YOU are the one promising away all our evenings and tomorrows and times to swing in a hammock with a good book, or sip tea with a friend, or sit around hugging fat little lambs for no reason except for the sheer joy of it... YOU….”

The Pleaser gives a guilty-but-not-sorry grimace-ish smile and steps slightly behind Prudence for protection.

“You realize, of course, that by agreeing to please everyone, you actually please no one. Our friends are sick of hearing we are ‘So Busy.’  Being Too Busy is an exhausting, self-consuming way of insulating ourselves from more busy-ness—some of which we might like.  With no boundaries, we actually have no choices either. No hammocks. No hikes. No choices, no Freedom, no true creativity…” Heartsoul slumps with her heart in her hands.

“This is what female entrepreneurs have to deal with,” says The Pleaser defensively. “Without Unparalleled Excellence and Accessibility, what is there to protect your reputation against bad yelps from people who could not have their ski suits and prom gear fully restored half an hour after they dropped it off?”

“But that’s the thing,” says Brain, “I’m just beginning to realize how long it takes to do all this stuff.  You’ve taken on so much, we’re lucky to get things back to people within a month.  You’ve made it so that everything is an ‘emergency.’”  Brain, thinking of several things at once, remembers last seeing the car keys in the car, and begins itching to go check. Brain disappears.

“This is hopeless,” says Heartsoul. “We have this fabulous business we have created—the three of us—Heart, Head, Hands, and we do wonderful work for wonderful people.  We love what we do. We love whom we serve. Why does it feel so overwhelming?”

“Well,” says The Pleaser, “I guess we love it so much, and we know we could love and serve more people, so we need to do More.”

“Sometimes Doing More is actually Doing Less,” says Heartsoul sadly. “People don’t get the same service.  They start to think they need to call ‘to check on their things’ and give sweet, subtle complaints such as ‘I was just wondering…no rush of course…but…’  So how do we remedy that?”

“Easy,” says Prudence. “You simply Work Harder.  You work at night. You work at home. You decide that work is really your ‘play’ and that you don’t need friends, or relationships of any kind.  You get addicted to the satisfaction of completing things, instead of dancing or playing your fiddle.  You Keep Calm and Sew On.”

Heartsoul is too sweet to even think of kicking Prudence in the shins so she just wilts with weariness.  There is no fight in her—just a longing for Authenticity, Connection, and Beauty united to Purpose.

 “This is Survivorship,” she muses. “I didn’t come here just to eke out survival. I came with a Gift, to Share, to Shine, and also to Receive what it is I need, in order to keep on Giving.  This is what a lot of artistic people face and why there is so much Mending that needs to be done among the population of Sensitive Souls who substitute monetization, obligation, or mere production for Creatorship.  This is what happens when we allow certain pressures to mold us in ways that seem “good” but are ultimately destructive, ways that ultimately sever us from our true Purpose.” 

“Morality requires us to put the collective interests of a group ahead of our own needs,” reminds Prudence. “We are born into families, relationships, bonds of kinship and community.  Our safety is contained within our membership to our group and its fate. It borderline Immoral to put your own needs first.”

“But what about the other side of the Golden Rule?” asks Heartsoul. “Are we not also instructed to treat ourselves with the same love, respect and dignity with which we treat others?”

Prudence is Silent. She would love to contradict Jesus, but she doesn’t dare.  We have her there. Brain, who has returned triumphantly, car keys in hand (they were wedged in a sun visor between the car seats), seizes the advantage.

“We can be doing perfectly “Good” things but if they are not actions that connect, motivate, and inspire us—what good will they be? How long can we run a vehicle on one tank of gas alone? Provided we can still locate the keys…” says Brain, smugly dangling them in front of us. “Knowing How to do something is great fun.  But that fun fades when we forget WHY we are doing something and we just keep doing it without Heart.”  Heartsoul smiles gratefully.

“What if we really do feel and think more in terms of a true Collective Mentality?” asks Heartsoul. “What does that look like?”

“Now you’re talking!” says Prudence, approvingly.

“Ah!  But ‘We’ are not outside of ‘Them,” says Heartsoul slyly.  Prudence’s eyes narrow.

“WE,” continues Heartsoul, “are Connected to a dynamic, playful, consciousness—a wide swath of The Fabric of Life—of which we are a beloved and worthy part. To Mend or heal any part of that fabric is to serve the Whole (and the Hole). To take good care of ourselves IS to take good care of each other.”

“This sounds a lot like New Age Narcissism disguised as embroidery, stitchery without function, N-Bell-ishments, on the Fabric of Humanity,” says Prudence warily.

“It isn’t,” insist Brain and Heartsoul, holding hands. “It means that if we adhere to regular business hours, if we operate with Integrity, Honesty, and Clarity, we will actually serve our people better and we will not be tempted to crawl headfirst into a bottle of Scotch the next time the Iron spits more black shit on a wedding dress.  Nor will we procrastinate by spinning yarn when we should be paying bills.  Doing what Jack Russell and Jodi Marquis, in their book Self-Sustaining Leadership, call “the right thing for the right people at the right time based on increased self-knowing” is what will lead us from gritty, tear-streaked survival to actual Creatorship.”

“I would love that so much!” says Heartsoul hopefully.

“All we have to do is take inspired action on the Right tasks,” says Brain. “No matter how much we love them, people do not get to come into our life, or our shop, or our home, and take from us our time or energy or resources without our permission, unless they are an elderly canine or an incontinent lamb. We must stop issuing permission to anyone else!! Ok Gang, who wants to be in charge of Boundaries?”

Everyone falls silent, even Prudence.  She loves restrictions but restrictions and Boundaries are not the same thing and she knows it. Boundaries, especially those that allow us to fill up with Infinite Love of all we are and all we do, are not on her list of favorite things.  She is addicted to being Needed and Resentful.

“How about…” says Heartsoul, whispering softly, kindly “we all agree to TRY to love each other more dearly, just as we are. How about we accept our flawed results and grandiose intentions ‘to be and do Our Best,’ even when we fail.  Just for today, we stop telling everyone how busy we are and tell the truth about our abundance. Let’s stop saying ‘Yes’ to things that make us feel tired and crummy; saying ‘yes’ because we did not know how or why to say ‘no;’ saying ‘yes’ because we were actually seeking attention, approval, or reward, rather than giving from the heart?”

How about we only say YES because we are truly giving, not seeking? How about we call an end to the conflict between fixing what is broken and creating something different. What if they were one and the same?

With Sew Much Love to you all, Dear Menders!

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Home of the Brave

“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…”

Greetings Dear Ones,

“Nothing is happening TO you; everything is happening FOR you,” say The Wise Ones, who apparently never had to reenter a kitchen to discover they had left a pan of eggs cooking and it is now on fire.  I am trying to keep this maxim in mind as I navigate yet another week of coyote strikes, ants in my pants (literally), and attempts to plant fifty pounds of seed potatoes during black fly season in temperatures that force me to choose between wearing a personal sauna or having arms that look like lunch meat gone bad.  With so much happening FOR me, I don’t mind boasting a little that I am going to be an amazing creature one day, ant bites on the nether regions not-withstanding...  The ants came in on a load of cedar logs that I hauled in my vehicle.  I need them (the logs, not the ants) to extend the cattle pasture so I don’t have to mow anything while my mower gets an overhaul at the local tractor repair center.  Because, who needs a working mower when one has perfectly good, hungry cattle?  And I am tired of using hand shears to clip buckets of grass for them as treats.

 Apparently, in the Living of my Joy and fostering the growth of my soul, I could not make enough Spiritual Progress with simple things like forgetting all the passwords to my bank accounts.   That’s for beginners. Try the Zen of focusing on highway traffic while being swarmed by ants!  Yep! So accelerated is my Divine growth that it even required a full bottle of Kombucha to explode into my keyboard before starting this very blog.  It’s all happening FOR me… (and for YOU, dear ones)! Lucky, Lucky us…

It’s no easy task, even in the best of weather, to pursue Happiness in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  For one thing, not everyone is free and hardly any of them are happy.

 “Why can’t we go outside?” plead the incarcerated chickens.  “We don’t think it’s fair to punish us, since we aren’t the ones who got eaten!”

“Relax,” I tell them. “Have some frozen corn on the cob.  This is for your own good.  It’s not done TO you; it’s done FOR you. Trust me.”

“We don’t want corn. We want grass and ticks!” they plead.
“I’m sorry,” I say.  “There is a coyote nearby raising a den of pups and I don’t want you to be the next chicken dinner! We’ve lost too many of you already.” I gaze forlornly at the empty spaces on the roosting poles. I miss the plucky little rooster the most.  He was a Bantam form of Mickey Rooney in a feathered tuxedo, who took himself and the protection of his ladies very seriously, though he was always very respectful of me, after he and I came to a little agreement two years ago that if he attacked me again, I was going to swing him around by his feet until he changed his mind.

“We demand our freedom!” pine the chickens.

“Freedom means the constant threat of death,” say I.

“Isn’t that what Freedom ALWAYS means?” they ask. “Freedom means the highest risks, the highest rewards, and all the bugs you can stomach.”

And so it is.

The lambs too are royally pissed off.  Their pursed lips and perturbed looks are tragically comical—ridiculous expressions for those who only want to bounce and play and run imaginary Sheeple chases around and over piles of rocks.  This coyote is a terrible problem.  It goes at these chickens like a black Friday shopper trying to get the last Nintendo Switch.  It is huge—larger than a German Shepherd, and unphased by my efforts to scare it away from the chicken coop at 4:am when I am awakened by commotion.   I shout from the back door of the house and it saunters to the edge of the woods, folds its arms, and stares at me with belligerent contempt.  This is an all out battle between the haves and have-nots and I am determined to defend “my” property.  The coyote, eyeing me warily from the edge of the Dark Forest, is momentarily inconvenienced and shrewdly content to wait until I am out of site.  I go inside feeling like that mother whose child’s visiting friend is just waiting for me to leave the kitchen so he can steal cookies.  This animal hunts in the middle of the day, at dusk, at dawn… No time is safe, especially when my back is turned.  (I’m mostly talking about the coyote here, though I suppose such could be said of the child’s friend too.)  It has taken to leaving a dump right by the front door for the dog to find (ok, definitely only talking about the coyote now)—a calling card of sorts—that says “no place is safe.”  

“You are too small and delicious,” I tell the lambs, grabbing one, squeezing it tight and burying my face in the heavenly scent of his baby soft wool.  “Stay right here in this nice, safe pen and climb your mothers instead of rocks.  You’ll be ok.  I’ll babysit you in the big field when I get home. You can’t be out alone.”

I leave them bawling with regret.  (I mean the lambs are bawling…though I too have a throat tight with sorrow.)

I think about sad lambs and suicidal chickens and what Freedom requires as I go to work on Memorial Day.  I meant to take the day off, really I did. But the on-line calendar booking feature embedded in my website has no idea which days are holidays and accepted seven appointments before I even realized it was happening.  People had booked these appointments weeks ago and it was going to be a nightmare to try to reschedule everyone. So I went to an otherwise empty building and worked.

“It was not my intention to be engaging in commerce on a national holiday that honors our veterans,” I explain to the first customer as she shuffles in the door with a dress over her arm. As luck would have it, she happens to be a disabled veteran.

 “It’s fine! Personally, I’m so glad you are open on Veteran’s Day,” she says. “I have this wedding to go to this weekend and I just found the dress and no one else could do it on such short notice.”   She has driven a long way to get here and on the way has enjoyed discovering more of the scenic beauty of this country she was willing to die for.  She is not originally from New England and finds it charming.  (I notice her arms are free of black fly bites.)

“Well, I guess I’m glad I get to thank you in person for your service on Veteran’s Day,” I say, feeling lame.

“Let’s thank each other,” she says generously.

Not much has been asked of me in the service of my country and I know it. As we strategize about how to accommodate her unique needs and challenges, painful results of dedication and sacrifice, I am grateful that my own moral courage need only extend far enough to be able to open a pair of pants seams that I know are filled with years of rotting leg dandruff.    Aside from voting, showing up for jury duty, and abiding by the laws (mostly) of the land, and eating red-white-and-blue cupcakes on the Fourth of July, not much is required of civilian citizens in this “Home of the Brave.”  We are mostly free to sit on the couch, flattening our bum fluff, pursuing  whatever Happiness we choose, whether it is in the form of bargain seed potatoes from Facebook marketplace, or the right to watch Nascar 24/7.

So what gets in the way of this “Happiness?” Why aren’t all Americans “happy?”  Well, honestly, I’m beginning to think our collective unhappiness is actually rooted in the belief that we should be happy—at all times, at any cost.  If we live here, in America, purely for the pursuit of Happiness, then sadness becomes our failure.  When difficulties become framed as the opposite of Success, we reject half of the entire ebb and flow of what is Life and to be Whole-Hearted.  My life in the shop and on the farm teaches me that loss and sorrow can be intensely beautiful and grace-filled at their core, in ways that surface glee and the shallow dopamine hits of finding bargain farm equipment on E-bay cannot sustain.   I told a Dear One who expressed regret at the loss of my sheep and her twins, “I’d rather weep at the grave of a beloved sheep than wander through a glitzy cocktail party not knowing what to say or whom to talk to…”  Life, in all its gritty Mystery, seems more Complete down here where I can see the dirt.   A full life, a big dream, a whole-hearted Vocation requires a lot of work and sacrifice, the commitment of inspired daily actions, and occasionally, tiny, savage, unexpected bites to the bum.  

As Humans, we try to organize our lives around uncertainty. This means having rules—rules for how we treat each other, how we protect what we earn or love or create, and how we drive.   Some are the Laws of Nature—such as how long it is possible to apply heat to a raw egg before it explodes and begins to smoke.  Some are the laws of Man—which means one cannot plow straight through the next five cars with out-of-state-plates in Memorial Day traffic just because a bunch of ants have found one’s butt crack!

It’s so easy to confuse Rights with Responsibilities.  We think we have an inalienable right to Happiness—as if Pleasure had no other side to balance it.  What is food without hunger? What is water without thirst? Rather than divide experiences into negative and positive, we can see things as part of a whole. When we look at a rainbow, we wish to see ALL of the colors, not just our particular favorite.

“Um…Excuse me,” interrupts a little lamb, “Is there such a thing as a totally green rainbow?”

“Yes, Love,” says her mother, “look down the valley at that field below—every shade of green in the whole world is growing right there, on top of the earth. Now use your mouth for chewing, not talking.”

Emotional diversity, not the presence of “happiness” alone is the real indicator of Well-being (Beings who are Well).  The more variations of emotions we are ready, willing, and able to feel—the less we need to engage in potentially destructive behaviours around the ones we seek to avoid.  In such cases, our “safety” can come at a terrible price—such as all the –isms that inevitably lead one to a dreary church basement, a circle of metal chairs, and luke-warm coffee where The Grateful meet to help one take the first of 12-steps to sobriety. (I’m still waiting for the twelve-step program for those of us who numb out by knitting fourteen pairs of slippers in less than a month. Don’t kid yourself, ANYTHING can be an –ism.)  Barricading ourselves from our feelings comes at incredible costs.  Any veteran will tell you that living in a state of siege is not really living, for either side.   

Let us forgo the pursuit of Happiness and pursue Wholeness—in the work of our heads, hearts, and hands.  May we Mend and help others with their Mending!  Creatorship is a form of Leadership. We create and hold hard boundaries (fences, laws, chicken coops) to keep those we love both safe AND free, recognizing we allow some peril for a price.  We pledge our sacred honor to defending those we serve and serving those we defend, even as we dance—with ants in our pants.  

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Amor Fati

My formula for human greatness is Amor Fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity.  Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is falseness in the face of necessity—but to love it. Friedrich Nietzche

Greetings Dear Ones!

Someone asked me recently if I had one day of my life to live, what would I want to do with it.  I said “hem prom gowns with eight layers of tulle each—then at least it could be the longest day of my life!” The list of things I could do on my “last day” includes things like discovering a new lamb has glue for poo and needs his bum washed (not just washed, but picked clean by my gloved hand because the “glue” has hardened like epoxy, effectively sealing him closed), or attempting (for hours) to get the mower to start, and when it finally does, I cannot drive it up hill because the safety mechanism shuts it off when I don’t sit fully back on the seat, which I cannot do uphill because my legs are stumps that don’t reach the pedals...  These (and attending a swim meet or golf tournament) are all things I would definitely save for “last.”

I’ve been at the shop until eleven p.m. every night this week growing more and more vexed with Marcus Aurelius, who taunts me from the quotes adorning the margins of my work table.   “Make every day your best day,” he chirps.  “Who’s best day includes having to vacuum the work table for glitter four times?” I want to know. “Sweat more in practice and you’ll bleed less in battle,” he says smugly, as I accidentally jam a needle under my thumb nail and cause it to spurt a cranberry drop on fabric intended for a white dress someone wants to wear to an upcoming graduation ceremony.  “What does a 2nd century Roman statesman know of suffering?” I say to him, “What are kilted men with swords and grudges, who bind their wounds with red wine and raw garlic, to a bride who has just glimpsed what she thinks is some extra fat on her back?” Marcus goes silent a moment—he knows we can face no more devastating foe than the one in the mirror.  He says quietly, “The Happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts. Therefore, guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notion unsuitable to virtue.”

“Listen here, my good man! I’ve had quite enough of your chipper little platitudes,” I grunt, as I heave a dress the size of a Volkswagon onto the table and begin my foray into a forest of bramble-ridden tulle. I am definitely having thoughts unsuitable to virtue. I’d rather be de-pooping a lamb.

“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength,” whispers Marcus encouragingly, unable to help himself.

“Oh, for God’s sakes! Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one!” Barks Prudence.

“Hey! That’s MY line,” says Marcus petulantly.

Attempts to philosophize, to draw wisdom and understanding from the ordinary are how I make it through Prom season.  It’s no use thinking thoughts like “how did this [the full rack behind me] get like this? Who said yes to all these things we now have to do? Could we have done differently? Could we have known better? Would a different system (such as simply refusing to answer the phone… EVER) have netted us fewer negatives and ultimately more positives, or at least slightly less glitter?

Stoicism is not going to cut it at eleven o’clock at night with four gowns to go.  The part of me grieving sleep is going through Kubler-Ross’s five predictable stages: denial—“it’s not so bad, dawn’s a long way off”, bargaining—“if we go to bed now and get up early, we can knock this off then we are good and fresh,” rage—“why the hell do we even have events that require such dumb things as having teenagers spend an entire family’s disposable income on a gown they will wear ONCE?” grief—“no one is coming to save me… I am pitiful…alone… I will die here, choking on glitter,” to…finally…Acceptance of my fate.  Back to the Stoics.

“The Stoics were good, but not quite good enough,” says a new voice.  It’s Nietzche.

“Hey Nietzche,” I say wearily. “Welcome to the party.”

“We don’t want any of that shit about God being dead,” warns Prudence. “The only thing keeping us going right now is the thought that Saint Peter is the desk clerk at that fabulous Hotel in the clouds and  will one day scan his list of reservations, find our name at the top and say Oh! You! We’ve saved a special place for you.  You hemmed nineteen prom gowns in four days? Welcome! You get a non-smoking room right next to some quiet Mormons and the ice machine.”  

“Don’t worry,” says Nietzche calmly. “There’s more to what I said than that. As lives go, mine contained its share of misery so I studied the Stoics too.  Every generation invents its own form of fashion and  misery—the ultimate union of which has to be gowns constructed of swimsuit material that runs like Hussein Bolt when you pull one bloody thread the wrong way, but I digress.  The trick is not just to accept the inevitability of our suffering but to try to fall in love with it.  All of it. Love and embrace Life exactly how it is—with all the good and bad, success and failure, the satisfaction and pain, yummy vegetable pakoras you got at the co-op and the blistering glitter that is ruining your iron.”

 “Are you asking me to LOVE glitter?” I ask Nietzche.

“Yes,” he says, not in these actual words, “Instead of stoic acceptance of our fate, what if there was enthusiastic and total adoration of What Is, a declaration against Regret, a version of affirming that it’s not just ok if we are not ok. It’s actually Magnificent.”

Love glitter… hmmm….the best I can do is love some of the people who wear the stuff.  Some of them are truly adorable. Why otherwise fabulous people want to roll themselves in sparkling crumbs of toxic waste confuses me but I try not to judge (not much, anyway).

“If she just controlled herself better, she wouldn’t have this fate, be it miserable or Magnificent,” tuts Prudence. “I remind her daily, to no avail.”

Prudence and Nietzche grumble amongst themselves for a while. 

There is always the mirage of Wishful thinking lurking like the remnants of a bean burrito in the dressing room—the idea of “if only…”   We regret and yearn for “otherness”.  (If only I was playing fiddle right now… if only I was in a hot bath outside under the stars right now…) We all assume that if we made better choices, we might have better outcomes.  There were potential different options of ways for things to go in the past and there are still potential ways for things to go in the future but in the reality of NOW, the reality we must live, there is no option to have done anything differently and there is no way out except to grab a  gladius or rotary cutter and get in there and start chopping. Every decision we make is the one we must live out.  

To regret or desire to go back and edit the past assumes that the things we wish to change, especially the things we perceive as “wretched” now, once contained an option for a camoflaged “best” we should have recognized. We become obsessed with how things could have gone differently (had we measured twice before cutting) and that somehow everything would be different now had we done so.  This is the sentiment of every bride who enters the dressing room wishing she had simply confronted her future mother-in-law like a grown-up, instead of spending her time between fittings stress-eating her feelings with two pals called Ben and Jerry.

Eventually, we realize it’s not that “Life could have been different” (or even should have been) that is the problem but that we resist finding the Beauty in how it inevitably has gone. Resenting what has happened to you or because of you only heaps additional misery onto the Now—adding more to resent or resist. (Prudence loves that part—the compound interest of Regret.)

Can we fall in love with things right now, as they are?

Nietzche says,(his real words) “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.  I do not want to accuse; I don’t even want to accuse those who accuse.  Looking away shall be my only negation. All in all, and on the whole, some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

The notion of what people will say yes to boggles the mind. “Like four-inch heels and underwire bras,” observes Prudence. Why not add in a little treachery and loneliness, failure and disaster, loss and death? It’s hard to imagine crowing “YES, I lOVE it” in a case by case sense, especially when poo-glue and glitter are involved… but in a larger sense, we CAN gain perspective.  (For those who cannot, there is this lovely stuff called Scotch. When you’ve had enough, there are 12-steps back to Serenity.) But when sufficiently distanced, when in high enough Spirit (NOT the Scottish variety), like after a soak in a rusty cast iron tub out under the stars, it is possible to practice a certain love for the Whole of It.

I’m with Nietzche on this--to see all things through the lense of love. Perhaps the only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about them beautifully. Yep… that includes glitter. And zippers people have removed themselves “to help you.” And lambs who are glued shut with their own poo. This is a Gladiator-sized struggle in a society which values self-overcoming, achievement, power—the constant defining and accomplishments of goals set forth in the image of what one views as their “ideal self,” (“a self devoid of back-fat,” sniffs a bride).

If we try to overcome life itself, we fail, as the end has already been determined. (Our Heavenly Hotel reservations have been pre-paid!)  But overcoming the Ideal of Overcoming—surrendering the notions of an unattainable ideal self and ideal life, to smile, even as we are being defeated… Wow.  Prudence finds the conundrum too dizzying and falls silent.

 Amor Fati—to “love one’s fate” and accept at last the way things have gone and will go—to love a life that in many moments will try to make you hate it or yourself—to look it in the eyes in the dressing room mirror and say “Yes, I love YOU,” even with your hair a mess, your raccoon eyes, and that armpit meat hanging peeking out from each side of your bra. 

This Life is Beauty and so are YOU.

A wise person once said “He who works with his hands is a laborer.  He who works with his hands and head is a craftsman.  He who works with his hands, head, and heart is an Artist.”  If we must labor, let us labor with Love.  It might not change the outcome but it certainly changes US.    

I’d love to write more…to write all day in fact… but I’ve got two more gowns that just came in.   Keep up your Good Work, Dear Ones!  I love hearing from you!  Thanks for sharing these letters with our fellow Menders.

With sew much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Within

“I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man.  It was like holidays with pay to me…. I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.” –James Herriot

Greetings Dear Ones!

Whew… Last week carried with it some intense energy and challenges!  (“And you say that as one always in keen sight of THE EDGE,” marvels Prudence.)  How long is Mercury in Retrograde, exactly?? Is it nineteen years?? (slump) The current theme seems to be ‘releasing what was formerly held within…’ Whether it’s Good, Bad, or just plain Ugly, Life continually offers us gifts, opportunities for learning, and wonderful silver linings within… Being With what is IN takes courage. Some of the discoveries are nasty. 

“What the hell are you doing?” I say to the gravity fed steam iron in my shop.  It is burping ominously as I hold it up to the hem of a prom dress.  It starts to spit.

“I don’t feel well,” it mumbles as I quickly hold its face over a linen pressing cloth.  It proceeds to throw up black gunk all over the cloth. Like an eighteenth century quack physician, I give the thing a damn good bleeding. I drain steam until it turns to water; I empty the water tank and flush all the tubing; I scrub the face plate until it gleams.  As a precaution, I even order all new replacement parts from the Cleaner’s Supply outlet where I got it.

“How can you DO this to me?” I say to the iron.  I am frantic. “Do you KNOW what season it is?  It’s PROM season.  I have no less than twenty gowns to hem and five, count them, F-I-V-E lily white bridal gowns hanging on the rack waiting to be done. I need you, damn it!”

“I’m sorry,” says the iron, continuing to burp up watery stains tinged with rust, “I don’t like Prom Season.”

“That’s no reason to go on strike!” I say, “Do you think spraying ink makes you into a writer?  All I see in the Rorschach blobs you are creating is tales of disaster.”

That iron is no longer my friend.  I cannot trust him. Who needs a passive aggressive iron?  Around denim he’s totally normal.  Work gear, fine. Get him near a wedding gown and he’s spits like an umpire for the Yankees.  Apparently, he sees himself at one with the proletariat.  Bourgie prom gowns be damned.  The betrayal is hard for me to take.  In my shop, we serve EVERYONE.  We draw no lines.

“I’m so sorry,” I say to a bride trying on her gown in the fitting room. “My iron is on the blink and I didn’t dare smooth out all those creases after I let out the other stitches.”

“Oh, I’m so grateful!” she gushes.  It’s hard to be thanked for NOT doing something that really should have been done. I glare at the iron, who is gradually sliding off the metal stand and working his way towards a fall onto the ironing board, where he threatens to burn the whole place down.  The insubordination is astonishing. I’ve had to bring in a smaller, domesticated iron to replace him.  This one is dainty and requires distilled water to function.

I’m also seeing the inside of every sewing machine more regularly than I might wish.  We’ve had a rash of broken needles due to sequins.  The needles hit the sequins at speed and splinter, requiring me to pick all the shards out with tweezers when they fall into the bobbin mechanism underneath.  One gown, which resembled the skin of a mackerel, took five needles to make one lap of the hem.  I briefly consider adding a “needle surcharge” to the bills that involve beads, sequins, or glitter then decide against it.

Such events require me to “Go within” myself, to reach for reserves of Patience I save for special occasions and when it’s really NOT ok to throw a disgruntled steam iron out of a second story window.  I think about my customers and how much I truly love most of them.  The prom kids are adorable, especially when they arrive in giggling gaggles, forget their shoes, and have to stand on piles of books to have their dresses hemmed the right length.  They remind me of lambs balancing on an apple wood log. The brides are radiant with hope and lists of “all they have to do yet,” one of which is inevitably to get the fiancé in to have a suit altered. In the midst of all these determined damsels, I even have a dashing knight who brings in a sweat-stained gambeson for me to repair.  He is heading for tournaments and workshops where he wields a broadsword.  I love these people, their stories, their events and dramas.  I love chatting to funeral directors who refuse to allow bereaved relatives to fill the pockets of those soon to be cremated with popcorn, strong, lithe women who dismantle antique houses, and cheery education consultants whose friends want them as bridesmaids. 

“It must be heaven to work alone,” says one.

“It must be hard to work alone,” says another.

I am never alone.  I am surrounded by stories—some haunting, some inspiring—and beset by constant visitors.  And I get to work with my hands in a Time-made-tangible sort of way that is immensely satisfying.  This job is a joy. Especially when one can trust one’s iron!  It’s a wonderful place to Mend and be Useful.

Of course, my other joy is the farm.  Apple trees in blossom are like bridal veils strewn throughout the meadow. Gus and Otie just turned two and have a new yoke to fit their larger necks. They are back to work and very happy about that.  On days I cannot work them, they stand and “complain moo” over the fence.  No amount of hay shuts them up.  They want to Work! And a good grooming wouldn’t go amiss either. (I know how they feel!)

The sheep are slowly getting back to being things that eat grass and don’t cause too much trouble.  Putting Primrose in a headlock until she accepted her babies worked beautifully.  She is now a decent mother to both twins, who go sproinging about the paddock like wooly popcorn with the rest of their pals in soft, lambie jammies.

Lambing season came to a dramatic end Monday night. Poor Waterlily, the last to deliver, had a rough time of it. She’d been off her feed in the morning and I was surprised to come home from work and find no lambs tottering behind her.  Most of the sheep have delivered within a few hours of refusing food. She looked into my eyes with a soulful gaze that told me something wasn’t quite right.  Half an hour later, her water broke and I thought things were finally moving along.  Not so. Two hours of hard labor later, she had nothing to show for it.  I called my dear fellow-shepherdess friend. As we talked, I could see a nose, then a head, emerge from underneath Waterlily’s tail.  There were no feet.

“Scrub up and get in there,” said my friend. “Push that head back in and find the feet.  The feet have to come first.  She will die trying to get a lamb out head first with no feet. Call me back when you’re done!”

All the James Herriot books came flooding back to me as I scrubbed up, donned gloves, smeared the head of the lamb with Vaseline and tried to push it back where it came from.  Waterlily was not having it.  She’s worked too hard to get that much done. She jumped up and started running around the pen with an unembodied head sticking out of her backside.  With no one to hold her down, I had to wait for her to lie down again on her own.  This time, as she pushed one way, I pushed the other.  Eventually I won and the lamb went back within. I slipped my hand in too.  Sure enough, there was a foot, resting right on top of the lamb’s head.  Wait… On top??? I inched my fingers up the leg. The ankle bent the wrong way.  This was not a foot that belonged to this lamb. It was a hind leg of another lamb trying to come through backwards at the same time.  I followed the face of the lamb, past an ear, to the neck, and down the neck to where I could feel the shoulder.  Below it was the right leg. I was able to grab it and draw up next to the face. Below it, slipping away from me, was another leg.  That one was very hard to get into place.  With the next few contractions, I managed to get one leg and the head back out of the ewe.  It was a huge lamb.  I could feel it wiggle and struggle, making sucking movements with its jaw against my arm. It was Alive!  Suddenly, in a big, slippery flop, there it was on the hay behind the ewe. I cleared all the slime out its nose and mouth and it instantly popped its head up and began to mew.  The mother sat up and talked back to her. All three of us took our first big breath in a long time.  The second lamb came along, back feet first, about fifteen minutes later, without too much effort from Waterlily.  It too was a huge ewe lamb. Sadly, it was stillborn.  

All month, I had been wondering what secrets Waterlily held within her.  She was so rotundly pregnant, I assumed she had triplets.  Some days I feared she had as many as nine in there.  Was her birthing going to be like one of those clown cars where more and more babies keep rolling out? In the end, it was just two.  A triumph and a tragedy.  Both Huge.  A charcoal (dead) baby and an ivory little fighter lying there together on the straw like Yin and Yang.  

There’s some of each inside us all, I suppose.  There is the garbage the iron needs to spit out.  All that does not serve us must be purged. There is also the living dream that needs light and air to grow or it will die.  Things get jammed in the birthing canal when we try to produce too much at once.  The next step is always “bury the dead; care for the living.”  Keep working with our hands to do some Good in this world.

That’s how it’s going here---on the farm and in Prom Season.  It’s a blood and glitter sort of Spring. May you be filled with the Joys and Heartaches of a life well-lived, Dear Ones.  May your hands find the work they are meant to do.

With SEW much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. Waterlily and baby are doing GREAT. Shetlands really are rugged little creatures!

Breathe in... Breathe out...

I took a deep breath and listened to the brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Greetings Dear Ones!

The Spring days are lurch-galloping into their annual rhythm of too-much-many things to do all at once.  I probably cannot afford to sleep again until late August at this point.  The lambs have been a lot of work and happy distractions and the prom gowns keep coming… “Prom?” say people who care about other things. “Gosh, I forgot all about prom… can you hem a couple pairs of pants for me anyway?  They are just easy…simple hems…shouldn’t take too long…”

It’s true NO ONE thinks about prom unless you are going to one, are distraught because you are not going to one, or are the parent or guardian of someone in either of those situations. OR…you are a seamstress.  Then “Prom” becomes your entire world.  It makes you forget to breathe.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

I’ve been thinking about Breathing a lot lately, especially as I get to witness what James Herriot called “the miracle that never grows stale” as newborns awaken with their first breaths of raw air in their lungs.  As you read this, Right NOW, you are doing an incredible thing, absolutely fundamental to your consciousness and Being.  Miraculously, you do it as many as 22,000 times a day without thinking: You are breathing. We are powered by breathing. Our lungs fuel us with oxygen, our body's life-sustaining gas, passing it through our bloodstream, where it's carried off to the tissues, muscles, and organs that allow us to slice off yards of tulle with a rotary cutter, or vacuum up glitter three times a day, or dart around a barn or tailoring shop in total panic, wondering what to do next.

When people are anxious, (like when a mother brings in a suit that is five inches too big for her son in every possible direction and wants it to fit him by next Saturday) they tend to take rapid, shallow breaths that come directly from the chest. This kind of breathing actually heightens anxiety. This causes an upset in the body's oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, resulting in increased heart rate, dizziness, and muscle tension, especially for the seamstress listening to her. Deep breathing helps one avoid acute stress responses to mentally or physically terrifying situations, such as the urge to fight (seam rippers at the ready!), or take flight (jump out the window) when ten people call you in the same morning for help with prom gowns due in less than a week.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

Breathing creates consciousness. Literally. I was heartened to hear from a dear veterinary friend (Thank You Cynthia!) that when Blossom died, taking her lambs with her, they had not suffered because they had never become conscious. When does the magic of consciousness begin? With our very first breath. Studies reveal that states of sleep-like unconsciousness are likely to be continuously present in lambs until well after birth. In utero, a lamb fetus is actively sedated by the low oxygen pressure, its warm, cushioned environment, and a range of neuroinhibitory and sleep-inducing substances produced both by the placenta and the fetus itself.  The lambs are in either of two sleep states—the active state (kicking, swallowing, blinking), or quiet state—kind of like a teenager who does or does not have access to a cell phone.  And that’s what they look like as they are born (lambs, that is, not teenagers)—drowsy, stunned creatures just washing ashore from the Land of Nod…small, wet, empty lamb sacks waiting to be filled with air and milk and the sound of tiny, chirping baahs for their mothers.  Within the miracle of minutes, body and spirit unite. They become Present through Breath.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

It’s been a tough year for lambing.  I only had four pregnant ewes to start with. In percentage terms, 25% are dead, 25% are wonderful mothers, 25% have yet to lamb, and 25% are total psychos who want to murder their babies.  

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

Last Wednesday, just after breaking my ninth needle on a hem studded with sequins, I came home early to check on the sheep.  As I got to the barn, I heard a little voice, the size of a thimble, bleating for its mother, who answered with a warm, encouraging nicker. I thought it might have been one of the lambs in the far pen, born last Sunday.  But no, it was a NEW lamb! A tiny, mostly dry ewe lamb standing on shaky legs just near her mother.  Proud Miss Prim licked her baby then did the sheep equivalent of an angry scowl, fixating on something in the far corner, just near the gate.  I entered the pen and looked down behind me.  Something small and black was tucked into the crack near the wall. It looked like a plastic bag, a bit of trash.  How did that get here? I wondered.  Then I realized it was a tiny twin brother!  Only the mother was NOT having him.

“Do you breathe, little buddy?” I asked him.

“I do,” was the answer I saw in his soft, shallow gasp.  It’s the kind of gasp I have myself when someone brings in a dress with eight layers that takes up the entire dressing room.  Something as big as Life had just hit him and knocked him flying.  He didn’t move until I touched him. Under my hand, he jerked, struggled to attain consciousness, decided against it. His mouth was cold.  I picked up the damp rag of new wool and offered it to his mother.  She stamped her foot and charged.  He was an Intruder.  NOT Welcome. 

Oh, shit…

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

I knew better than to dry him off.  Instead, I tied Prim to the wall and smeared him with the afterbirth hanging from beneath her tail while congratulating myself yet again for having the gorgeous, LUCKY true-love kind of life that enables me to handle sequins and placentas all within the same hour.  I rubbed him all over his sister too so they would smell the same.  Still, the mother would not have him.  She re-cleaned only the female. I forced the unwanted baby to her teat to get his share of the colostrum (that precious first milk full of antibodies that means “live” or “die” for lambs).   He drank lustily and gratefully and cheered up instantly.  He could stand and walk.  There was nothing obviously “wrong” with him.  In fact, he appeared to be quite healthy and strong.  He gave a little cry, tottered towards me and hid behind my legs for protection.  He was imprinting on me, thinking I was his mother.  Prim was incensed.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

“What the hell is the problem, Primrose? You’ve always been the sweetest!” I asked his mother.  The change in her personality wrought by motherhood was astonishing. She was in a fury to smash him again.  I had to keep her tied up while we came up with a plan.  The same exact thing had happened two years ago with another first-time mom, Blossom, the mother of this Primrose.  Prim had been accepted, but the little male, “Chip” was not.  Chip moved into the house that night and was bottle-fed all summer.  I had thought that another sheep had cleaned him off before his mother realized he was hers.  That was the story we told ourselves and it made a lot of sense at the time.  Sheep have about a 30-minute window in which to bond with their newborns and claim them as dependents they will defend.  Otherwise, they are abandoned, or worse, attacked. This time, each mother was alone in her own birthing pen.  No one had cleaned him up.  What happened?

“Does this sort of maternal savagery simply run in your family?” I asked Prim. “Is it what you saw your own mother do to your brother? Or is it that your line of females simply cannot count to two? Much as I love your babies, I really DON’T want to raise one as my own.”

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

Prim, still tied up and anxious, sucked down half a bucket of warm water with molasses while I dipped the lambs’ navels in iodine, gave them each a blast of nutradrench (a mineral supplement), and completed my health inspections.  Things got a little calmer. I didn’t know what to do next.  I kept forgetting to breathe.  I DON’T want to bottle feed another lamb unless there is no other option.  I want him to have a proper mother and sister and be welcomed (and feel at home in) his own herd. How to make that happen?

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

The Internet and our beloved Hermit from Hermit Hollow came to the rescue. He helped me build a wooden stanchion out of pallets.  We cut the boards off the pallets in places so that the lambs could walk in and out of the box and have access to her udder for nursing.  It was clear that both could nurse unassisted and would figure out quickly how the system worked.  We put Prim’s head between two boards with room for her to get up or lie down.  We piled hay in front of her put a bucket within reach so she could drink whenever she wanted.  She got a lot of corn chips and explanations and calmed down immediately.  She actually seemed relieved to be confined and to have that vile imposter out of sight.

As she munched, I laid out the plan to her. I tried to be positive, though we were both still a little wild-eyed.

“According to the internet,” I panted, “you will take your baby back if he drinks your milk and his poop begins to smell like ‘you.’ You will sniff his wooly bum and know you shouldn’t kill him. Hopefully, you will decide to adopt your own damn son within 24 hours.  If not, you might have to stay in this penalty box for a week or two.  With this method, you have a shot at an 85 percent success rate to become a decent mother. And I have a shot at NOT spending four hundred dollars on powdered milk only to wind up with a problem child with attachment issues.”

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

The best mother of the bunch is little black Mollie, the orphan who a few years ago spent most of her early days in my bathtub (without water in it, of course!) and riding to work each day in my car so that she could get noon-time bottles on schedule.  She lived in the house, hopped all over the furniture, and was terrified of other sheep at first. Though adored by her adoptive mother (me), I have to admit that she had a rather twisted upbringing that left her with poor “sheeping” skills.  I was worried that she, having never had a proper mother herself, would have no idea how to mother her lambs.  Well, she’s a star!  Her babies are clean and fed and marvelous creatures with springs for legs. They go sproing-ing about the pen and play wonderful games of dash and chase and bounce.  They are totally healthy and vibrant.  She is warmly attached.

Breathe in…Breathe out… Something Sacred is arriving.

It just goes to show that our past experiences do not determine our potential.  We can come back from hard things.  Hard boundaries, responsibility, and discipline are actually our path to sanity in some situations.  As of this writing, a full week later, the stanchion box solution seems to have worked.  Allowed to go free, Prim is tolerating her son with bland indifference and she does let him nurse.  They don’t call to each other or share special vocalizations, but he’s bonded to his twin and they cuddle nicely and keep each other company.  Both lambs are thriving.  It’s time to Breathe a huge sigh of relief!

Life hands us all our own stories of blood and glitter, Dear One.  Breathing vastly increases our chances of survival!  May your breath inhabit your body with the full sureness with which your precious body belongs in this world.  May you know your value.  May the creative companionships around you inspire you continually to learn, to grow, to adapt, to Mend…and most of all…

Breathe in…Breathe out…

Something Sacred is arriving.

Now… Back to the Glitter!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Altercations

We are going to have Peace, even if we have to fight for it. –Dwight D. Eisenhower

Greetings Dear Ones,

A young woman marches into the shop with a bag slung over her arm.  She heaves it on to the counter and begins to rummage.  She draws out a long purple thing.   “I’m not sure how much of an altercation this dress is going to need,” she says cheerfully, “it actually fits pretty good already.”

“I’m relieved!” I announce. “I despise altercations!  Peaceful persuasion is more my style.”  She looks momentarily confused, then shrugs, and enters the dressing room to try it on.  (I guess we all have to pick our battles.)  A minute later, she calls me in.

She’s right, this bargain scored from the local thrift store is generally flattering but she pokes at a few things she does not like.  We agree to do some tweaking here and there—just a few Peaceful, easy negotiations with the garment where it disagrees with her body type.  I talk nicely to the dress, hang it on the rack next to the prom gowns, and turn back towards my work table where a bunch of zippers lie in wait to beat me up—four pairs of heavy duty work pants with busted crotches and a jacket zip that was originally installed with three rows of stitches so tight and tiny they had to have been done under a microscope.  Removing them has caused me to lose blood and curses.  Altercations indeed!

It’s been a week of wild energy.  I’ve been too busy sitting in the maternity ward in the barn, having my hair and earlobes nibbled by newborns to check in on the cosmic forces at play and figure out why so many nutty things are happening.  I know Mercury is in retrograde.  (A planet never actually moves backwards; it just seems to, much the way a train sitting on the tracks feels like it is moving backwards when the train next to it pulls forwards.)  I know how Mercury feels.  I’m going forward so slowly, while everything else is rushing, it feels like I am going backwards.  I know that Things Happen For a Reason.  Everything happens FOR me, not TO me. And yet, there have been a few meddlesome DISTRACTIONS (beyond the glitter everywhere) that make me wonder whether the mischief is being done by sportive pixies having their play or if more malevolent forces are at work.  In random order, they are:

a.       A customer who needed his suit altered right away refusing to answer his phone when the work was finished because he thought my calls were coming from the Dominican Republic.

b.      Attempting to jumpstart a customer’s car that wouldn’t start, accidentally dropping my own keys through my own engine into an unreachable spot behind the front grille so that we could not start my car or hers.

c.       Locking myself out of my shop and having to break in using one of those slide rulers I call “a stick with numbers.”  

d.      A person asking me to recreate their favorite underwear that features an external “sock” to hold, um… (what pop-eyed Prudence called “the stem of the apple,” before she passed out).

e.      Briefly considering the dazzling life of Crime I could lead if I was unscrupulous about my use of a stick with numbers and a seam ripper…

f.        Nigel Braveheart, the elderly, nearly blind, nearly deaf, nearly toothless, totally Senile Jack Russell deciding to take on three young pit bulls (of course he did!) who were off leash in the cemetery where we walk each day at noon. As I scooped (leashed) Nigel in my arms in the nick of time and had barking, snapping pit bulls jumping all over me, their owner appeared and yelled “Hey! I really like your outfit! You look really cute.”

Such things are doing nothing to stop the deepening of that groove between my eyebrows that my beloved sister calls the “WTF Wrinkle.” It’s becoming a permanent trench in my face.

And then there’s the Tractor… This is probably WAY more information than you bargained for, but I must preface this by saying in Modern Lives as busy as ours, we can all agree that we cannot do as much “nothing” as we want at some points if we don’t multi-task like fury at others, especially during morning routines.  Some people brush their teeth while reading inspiring affirmations taped to their bathroom mirrors.  Some do their morning commutes listening to good literature. Some simultaneously talk on the phone, pack all the lunches, drink a day’s worth of caffeine and provide minor veterinary care to all the household pets.  Some use any “chance to sit down” as a time to “wipe ‘n swipe” on social media. Me? I use my time on the throne to shop for used farm equipment.  Hand on heart, there is nothing that hastens peristalsis like the discovery of a vintage manure spreader in the Northeast Kingdom or that a champion hay elevator is for sale in Littitz, Pennsylvania. (“There’s a Vintage Manure Spreader right here,” says Prudence, eyeing me disdainfully.)

It helps tremendously to be positioned appropriately for the crap of a lifetime when one comes across a low mileage John Deere 4032 (with not a scratch on it!), located an hour away, for the miracle price of $3,200. (“The unbelievable price is your first clue that you should not have believed it,” says Prudence, groggily working her way to her feet after the underwear scandal.) The Dream Tractor was being sold in haste by a woman who had lost her husband and needed to get rid of it quickly because she was moving and this thing reminded her too much of him.  I could barely contain my joy. I was instantly so deliriously busy—mentally clearing brush, building stone walls, digging fence posts with a fresh auger, I nearly forgot to pull my overalls up. 

Then it hit me. A woman has lost her husband.  A husband who took such loving care of his tractor (not a scratch on it!!) probably took good care of his family too.  Who was I to mentally rearrange garden beds and manure piles with a pristine front end loader when this woman was suffering? I was suffused with remorse that I should profit from her loss.  

My shame was embarrassingly brief.  Moments later, my inner scrappy lady farmer decided, “whelp, better me than some other wheeler-dealer!” I promptly composed a heartfelt note of condolence and offered to buy the tractor, telling her how sorry I was for her loss and that I would cherish the tractor in his memory.  I even promised to clean the garage and keep it indoors.   

Her reply was curt.  No, I could not see it in person. I could buy the tractor but “for the safety of us both, she wanted to use eBay services to arrange payment,” which was odd, because the tractor was not listed for sale on eBay.  And she wanted to be paid in gift cards, poor thing.  Who prefers gift cards to cold hard cash?? Meanwhile, I continued to pray for this woman and the soul of her departed husband. 

I also excitedly called my Lone-star All-star brother-in-law who, being from Texas, knows a thing or two about tractors.  Breathlessly, I told him about this amazing deal.  I sent him the picture and the model number.  “They don’t match,” was the first thing he said.  “That’s not a 4320. This deal is bogus.”   

A Scam???

WHAT????

Suddenly, I felt like Richard Pryor in that scene “whaaaaat’s happening-ing-ing to me-e-e-e?” Thankfully, I did not go through with anything, or purchase any gift cards.  “Neither, I must point out, did you clean the garage!” pipes Prudence.

I know I am leaning in to leading a life of “Wonder and Awe” but the bewilderment that arises from narrowly avoiding a potential scam-artist is not the sort I am seeking...  Who does these things to honest, well-meaning, scrappy lady farmers?

“Bad guys,” says Prudence firmly. “really Bad guys.”

“But WHY?”

“Seriously, Nancy?” she says rolling her eyes. “For money. People do bad things for money.”

“I do bad things for money,” I say.

“We aren’t talking about when you open the cuff on a pair of pants and ten year’s worth of leg dandruff falls out on the table. We’re talking about Crime. Most people don’t want to install zippers in down jackets or chop four inches worth of glitter off a dress someone will only wear once.  They want easy money, not good hard work.  Crime…”

My inner kindergartener is stunned.  My inner criminal wants to meet this tractor scammer in a dark alley with a seam ripper, a stick with numbers, and some underwear that will not be needing a “sock” of any length after she gets done with him.

Prudence has been having a field day with all this chaos.  She’s a Godly woman out to teach me that the world is a dangerous place and that people cannot be trusted.  She can hate and pray for someone and it’s basically the same thing.  Both depend on her believing she is “Better than...”   She’s not the kind of “Christian” you know is a Christian by her Love.

Frankly, I’m sick of her muttering.  I’m not sorry I am such a Fool.  I’m not sorry I get easily tricked. It means I am a pretty nice person (mostly) who gives and expects the best in others.  I might be a Fool, but I am nobody's victim. My life runs way better when fueled by Faith and Trust than fear and anxiety.  I know. I’ve tried it both ways.

So Pruddy and I have had an Altercation of our own. I’ve had to get stern with her and tell her that she can judge people, including me, but only for the purposes of awarding prizes to worthy contestants in this Game we call life. (I’m trying to get that bitch to focus on the Beautiful and Positive.)  So far, she has grudgingly awarded prizes in the following categories: Best Brother-In-Law, Most Full-Service Tailoring shop (includes automotive work), Most Appreciative Customer, Bravest (Idiot) Jack Russell, and Most Teeth (awarded to the pit bulls, not their owner).  

I’ve won awards for Poopiest Pants and Most Ingenius at getting car keys out of places in cars where they don’t belong.  The poopy pants are my favorite prize. Especially since the poopy is NOT mine (hay feeders and vintage water troughs notwithstanding).  It comes from the two little lambkins born Sunday afternoon during a heavy rain shower.  Their mother did a wonderful job for a first-timer.  She had been off her feed and looking uncomfortable at breakfast so I knew birth was immanent. Shetlands are very private and sneaky about lambing so I couldn’t tell how long it would be. The little darlings were all cleaned up in their soft new pajamas and tottering around the nest when we came back to check on her again.   

So!  Here they are, two braw lambs, strong and healthy, curious and comical—a little black ram and a little morrit (brown) ewe. Both have “the Bishop’s blessing” in a little white star on their foreheads.  Twice a day, I crawl over the fence to sit in the corner of their pen and return to Pure, unadulterated, un-altercated Innocence. I become a jungle gym for them to climb upon.  They jump my boots and hurl themselves up the mountain range of my knees.  These, Dear Ones, these are my lambs of God. They restore my spirit, my love, my faith.  They help me Mend from all of Life’s “altercations.”

Keep mending Dear ones!  Keep bringing all the YOU—innocent, foolish, or savvy YOU—you can to this crazy, amazing, mixed up world of chaos, wonder, awe and Beauty. Avoid unnecessary altercations when you can.  But when your WTF wrinkle gets so deep it requires a healthy altercation… just know I’m right behind you, a scrappy farm lady with a seam ripper and a stick with numbers.  We GOT this!

I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

P.S. If you don’t have your own awesome brother-in-law from Texas, maybe check out “popular online scams” before attempting to purchase used farm equipment from widows!

Mad Robins

“Sell your Cleverness and buy Bewilderment.”--Rumi

Greetings Dear ones!

Well, we have reached that time of year when I go on a colored egg hunt every day.  No, not just because it’s Eastertide… because my heritage-breed chickens (who lay pink, blue, green, and brown eggs) are now free to roam the countryside.  As soon as the snow melts and the dog starts bringing in the first ticks of the season, I set the ladies free on parasite patrol. They take their mission so seriously, they don’t take time to return to the coop to lay their eggs.  Instead, I need to hunt the mangers, the hay mow, empty tubs, and even once an abandoned sweatshirt for their oval treasures.  As I try to discover each day’s new hiding place, I am reminded of that (terrible) joke that having senility is so much fun because you can hide your own Easter eggs.  In my case, its vitamin supplements. I sent away for some that insist they reduce menopausal brain fog.  The first months’ amount was clearly not effective enough for me to remember I had bought a three-month supply so I finished the first bottle and ordered more.  Now I have a five month supply. I can’t help thinking I am the stuff of an online marketer’s dreams.  If I continue on like this, I’ll be eighty with a warehouse full of pellets I keep forgetting to eat. (If only I had done this with toilet paper before Covid hit…) To be honest, I’m not sure menopause is to blame.  If so, I may have been in menopause since the fifth grade.

I’m not the only one going mad. The weather has been nutty.  We had three days of dustbowl Summer, complete with sunburns, and then a big cold rain turned the grass St. Patrick’s Day green, except where the cows have licked it down to the mud.  I planted peas and spinach and told them “Good Luck! Go for it!  I have no idea what gear the sky will be in by the time you pop your heads up to look around.” The weather is like a teenager learning to drive a manual transmission vehicle for the first time.

There is also a mad robin on the windowsill doing battle with his own reflection.  The poor fellow keeps flying into himself in a fury.  Occasionally he takes a long, stunned rest (and a watery crap) on the windowsill before resuming the attack.  Three of the windows are streaked with shit and fury. Apparently, North American Robins are very territorial and deeply resent the presence of other males, including shadowy reflections of themselves.  Like high school seniors, years of evolutions and societal influences have shaped this guy to pit himself against his peers.  He’s not satisfied with the new-age notion that we are all winners. He took one look at himself and didn’t like what he saw. Not one tiny bit. (Who doesn’t have a day like that, sometimes?)  In the dressing room at my little shop, the prom girls are doing the same thing. Luckily, none of them have crapped on my mirror. (YET)

Instead of turning in a new direction where he can truly Soar--make a good living at a shitty job (literally, the compost/manure pile behind him is crammed with worms), troll everything from timber to Tinder to find a tolerant mate, save for a down payment on a nest, home-school a couple of offspring, do his best to teach them right from wrong and how to avoid the plagues of feather mites and social media…instead, the little robin keeps wearing himself out by fighting his own shadow.  The poor chap is exhausted from imaginary drama. Life won’t progress for him until he stops focusing all his attention on himself.

I can relate!

Not everything goes as Planned in Springtime. Poor Blossom, the moorit ewe, died last week, taking a belly full of twins with her to the vast hole in the earth that our Beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow dug with his backhoe.  Toxemia took her life but what precipitated the decline which resulted in toxemia, we do not know. The rest of the flock (who eats the same food and drinks the same water) looks robustly healthy.  The vet did his best but her demise seemed a foregone conclusion. (Wait, are not all deaths? Including our own?)

We laid her to rest, deep and snug in Mother Earth, below the reach of digging paws and munching jaws, and smoothed the blanket of dirt above, caressing it to the edges with our metal rakes.  Then we scattered grass seed and a layer of old hay mixed with sheep turds.  It seems up-side-down to think that grass will grow and frolic over lambs, instead of the other way around.  But life is a Wheel-of-Fortune circle and you never know exactly which side will be pointing up as it rolls around a season or a farm.  Inside the sorrow is deep satisfaction, merely to be a part of it all.  

 In other news, this blog turns five this week. I’m trying to think of a way to celebrate but I feel like that runner who staggers across the finish line with brown dribbles running down his legs.  We’re proud of him and wish him well but somehow intuit that he’s not quite ready for his complimentary medal and free banana.  Neither am I.  It’s has been hard going and I definitely should have trained more before I started.

These have been five pretty grueling years, on so many levels.  I’ve moved twice, bought a farm, started my own business, survived depression, menopause and a global pandemic, just to name a few things...  I can’t begin to count the number of trousers I have hemmed or the numbers of times I have heard bridesmaids tell me “Oh? I need my shoes? Can I just stand on tiptoes while you mark the hem?”

 Writing is my form of cherishing everything from the mundane to the absurd.  There is an undeniable amount of naiveté and narcissism embedded in the premise that anyone would want to crawl inside my heart and peer at these scribbles on the walls. Why not just keep the cell locked and confine myself in private journals, as I did for thirty years before starting this blog?  In anxious moments, I fear I have the endless self-involvement of a mad Robin glaring at himself in the window. It’s easy to feel furious and on the brink of defeat.  As an artist, the worst, most troublesome thing I do (and I still do it!) is seek to value myself by looking to others for assurance. Some people make glib remarks when I meet them in public—throw-away seeds I take home and sprout and nourish into monsters that devour my resolve.  The worst is when no one says anything at all.  When I get very depressed and think I will never be “good enough,” I think about a conversation with a fiddler I adore:

I asked if he could give me “One quick trick” that would instantly totally improve the sound of my playing.  He laughed delightedly and said “Yep!  Totally.”

“What is it?” I wanted to know, feeling excited about a fast-track to excellence.

“PLAY.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I slumped. “I already DO that and it sounds terrible!  Why would I practice sounding terrible? How do I make it sound better?”

He said, “I’m serious. Play. Just play. Don’t practice anything.  Play because you love to play. Play for hours every day.  If you just played every day you’d sound better. You have an amazing ear but your music is all in your head, not your fingertips.  DO it. Stop thinking. If you really want to improve your sound, play SLOW.  Nothing over 70 beats per minute for months and months.  Listen for the Quality and go for more of that.  Figure out what kind of bow hand pressure results in “pretty.” Repeat.  Listen to yourself. Pay attention.  What’s beautiful? What’s excruciating? Optimistic curiosity will get you far when you are trying to embody (bring into your body) a skill.  Don’t do it to be “better”; do it so that you can have more Fun. It’s so much fun to know a lot of tunes and play them well. Just Play.”

This seems like the best advice ever for anyone trying to play an instrument or Write, or Mend, or Create on any level.  Connect to joy. Keep going. Stay curious. PLAY.

I’ll keep playing at writing because on another level, I believe that Life (and Love) is, at its essence, a sacred transaction.  Witnessing it is an act of dignity, courage, hilarity, and Gratitude.  Writing is my prayer. It’s good for my soul.  I share these stories because I love them.  I love this life.  I love YOU, dear reader.  I will keep writing these love letters because I want us all to have more Love in (and for) this world and definitely MORE fun!

Madly, with all my heart,

Yours aye,

Nancy