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

Greetings My Dear Ones!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The lining is twisted,” I say.

“What do you mean?” he wants to know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of us are twisted.

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

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

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

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

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

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy