Greetings Dear Ones!

After all the drama around the shouting match that was woefully and inaccurately entitled a “debate” last night, it is wonderful to write to you this morning from the peaceful quiet of the new sheepfold here at the Land of Lost Plots, where animals don’t act like people! Well, not rude people. These wooly darlings are placidly munching, burping, and cudding like they are the cool kids at school—those nonchalantly gum-chewing fifth-graders who know where the water cooler is and don’t have to ask to go to the lavatory. They own this place and they know it.

Getting them here safely was a trick. Sunday, as I drove away from Hermit Hollow with a car full of sheep, and one stepped on the automatic window button, put his window down and jumped out, I made a mental note to check my PCI (personal craziness index). It just might be getting above normally acceptable levels, even for me. I might need to make a few changes before, as one elder Hermit warns, my whole existence begins to resemble the 1999 Serbian sensation “Black Cat White Cat” (a movie which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, but nevertheless, one doesn’t want to live that way!) With three sheep in the vehicle, air conditioning and music blasting, and one running loose down the driveway back to his beloved hut at Hermit Hollow, it certainly seemed that way. (Perhaps he simply wasn’t a fan of Scottish fiddle music?) Transporting all four a mere eight miles, in two trips, with the subsequent application of child safety locks on the windows, took more than three hours. I later took a bath and completely changed colors.

The whole weekend was wildly productive yet exhausting. My children and two of their friends helped excavate a mountain of debris and trash from two stalls in the back of the barn. Seeing that rather daunting pile of junk made me think about the difference between what is holding us vs. what is holding us back. Often, it’s just a series of decisions. What is useful? How can things be sorted, repurposed, or re-homed in order to minimize the amount that would enter a landfill? In the process, we came across some wonderful tools—rakes, shovels, an antique planer, and multiple broken gizmos for manicuring a “lawn” that now resembles a Covid hairdo with brambles and burrs. I noted with some amusement that the simpler a thing was, the more likely it was to retain its usefulness. Complicated isn’t always better.

Monday, I left my newly restored old-fashioned barn and headed to a current job I have taken as a contractor-seamstress. I have my first Corporate Gig! It’s so exciting! It’s in an extremely smooth, square building that has been polished inside and out. I have a magnetic name badge and everything. My inner space-traveler is thrilled that locks click open with a wave of this thing. It’s only programmed to work until 8:pm so I have to make sure to be out before then or spend a long night wandering fluorescent hallways hung with somewhat questionable modern art.

Along with masks, mandatory temperature taking, and other Covid-19 precautions, they have installed clever devices at the bottom of the doors so that no one is required to touch doorknobs in this place. Once I figure out how to open a door with my foot, which makes me feel like that T.V. horse, Mr. Ed, trying to count to four before I smack myself in the face with the swiftly opening door, I am to sit in the corner of a lab and sew whatever needs to be sewn. One of the designers is a man who has spent more than forty years working in the garment industry. He created and maintained the textile machines that resulted in the 1980’s craze for “Cowboy wear” spawned by the popularity of the 1980 hit movie “Urban Cowboy,” starring John Travolta. Their shirts were sold in Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue and worn by presidents Ford and Carter and Ronald and Nancy Reagan (who wore matching shirts). He shows me a picture of actress Goldie Hawn, on the cover of Newsweek, wearing one.

I lift up the cover of the sewing machine and am vastly relieved to find that it is a very uncomplicated, old-fashioned, no-frills Bernina. I exhale audibly. The woman training me looks at me inquiringly. I explain, “I’m so happy that I am already familiar with this machine. I was worried it was going to be some new-fangled thing I couldn’t use.” I scan the lab and see so many machines that confuse me.

“Oh, no!” she says, “ we aren’t allowed any smart machines here. No computers. Nothing that could be programmed or copied. Stupid tools only.” I smile inwardly. I have never met a stupid tool. Even the most uneducated blind-hemmer knows when it is Friday, or when you are working on a delicate silk that should not be chewed to bits. They are about as dumb as sheep who can open windows when they choose. In the end, I hardly use the Bernina—the thing I do most is use a needle and thread—stone-age technology. This suits me just fine. Hand sewing is one of my greatest joys, though even a needle can get the better of me if I am not careful! It absolutely cracks me up to find myself here, in a sophisticated laboratory full of state-of-the-art equipment, being asked to “sew.” Scientists and engineers are designing specialized clothing and my job is to help make prototypes. “I’m not kidding you,” says an engineer handing me cloth that has been cut by lasers, “you have no idea how hard it is to find people who know how to sew—I mean really sew.” (He means with needle, thimble, and thread.) I guess we cannot create the new without the old.

Hands busy, my mind free to roam, I ponder the elegant simplicity of old tools and return to the weekend of barn cleaning and the look of utter joy on a young woman’s face as I taught her how to use a sledge hammer. She had been painstakingly removing old, bent nails from a bit of rotting fence—hearing them squeak like mice as she pried them from their holes with a nail grabber. It was a dainty, awful business.

Some situations call for Dainty. Others call for SMASH. “A Lady must be prepared to do both,” I explain as I show her how to whack the boards from the backside of the fence. “You must summon a delicious Rage. Think of something you wish to release from your life. Get Mad at it and Swing!” I hand her my heaviest sledge. She pauses, smiles, coils from ankle to wrist like a wet towel being wrung out, and gives an impressive Louisville Slugger to the nearest board. It shatters in a most satisfying way. Laughing, we stoop and scoop the shards with our gloved hands. She looks at me with eyes filled with layers. “You feel your own power, don’t you?” I state more than ask. She nods, beaming, wordless. I gesture broadly at the rest of the fence, which is sagging under the weight of vines in the afternoon sun. “Smash away!” I say. And within moments, six eight-foot sections of fence are reduced to rubble for the burn pile. We scrape the Past away with rakes. We can start fresh—rebuilding with smaller hammers now.

Two hours later, I have taught her how to use a come-along and we have a taut, shiny new mesh fence attached to the old, black locust posts, which stand like Stonehenge in a circular paddock around the back end of the barn. I’m so proud of her! Now she can build a good fence and use Tiktok. I can only do one of those.

My reverie is interrupted by the arrival of an earnest young man from some part of the building devoted to making sure people have filled out surveys. He is here to help me download an app on my phone so that I can sign into a company website and then get two codes sent to two locations so that I can cross-qualify to get into the survey. They need to be absolutely Certain that a random stranger is not getting into their system to fill out daily two-page questionnaires about Covid-19-related symptoms or risks. Naturally, my phone, being a very Smart Machine (far smarter than I) does not behave. It does the equivalent of putting down its window and jumping out of the car. While the kind young man is trying to sort this out, he is asked for a password he does not have. “Try asking if it is an Amazonian Swallow or a European..” I suggest. He is puzzled. He needs to scuttle back to the mainframe in the cellar to figure this out. And… to retrieve a password. “Men have become the tools of their tools,” said Henry David Thoreau long before there were such things as cell phones.

I put my thimble back on and continue to sew and daydream about how exciting it is to have a clean barn. Within moments, the young man has returned with a printout of things to try. Touching my phone with a thimbled finger does not work so he takes the phone from me without asking. As his moist fingers poke at it repeatedly, I make a mental note to sanitize the phone thoroughly when he is done. “Why doesn’t your phone work like normal phones?” he wants to know. “Probably because I spoiled it when it was young,” I say. “I was lax and let it get away with stuff I shouldn’t have. Now I can’t control it. It’s like a nasty pony who has learned to bite.” Learning that my phone is recalcitrant and cheeky is not news to me. Rather than disinfect it, I make another mental note to flush it down the nearest toilet instead. That is, if I can paw my way out the door and find one.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep using my old-fashioned skills and tools and doing what I am doing. To stay sane in a world that increasingly makes no sense, I personally don’t think we need any more “new” tools or techniques. Sometimes, we simply have to keep doing the things that got us this far, the things that will ultimately get us where we want to go. We need to put our hands and hearts to our older, most simple tools and just keep going. Let’s revisit Kindness, Patience, Integrity and Civility while we're at it.

Looking around at the current state of our country and the current state of our world, it’s not even a question of how smart or stupid our tools are—How smart or stupid are we ? Can we use any tools we have to create something better than we’ve got now? Oh, please…

Let the mending continue!

Yours Aye,

Nancy