“Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”—C. Fields

Greetings Dear Ones!

Rabbit, Rabbit! A pinch and a hug for the first of the month! I hope this finds you snug and cozy, wherever you may be. Here, Dawn is just a thin crack in the grey bowl over the trees but morning logs of preserved sunlight are bursting back into a self-contained inferno in the wood stove, which is cackling merrily, as if it has just heard a good joke or a good fart, not sure which—the dog is doing both. I’m getting another delivery of hay today, and I have a cup of tea right now—Bliss is running high. I know the first thing on the shop docket is to put not one but two new zippers in a down ski coat but even that cannot diminish the deep serenity of this moment as I pause to be with You. It’s that time of year when the BTUs of a cup of tea or a small dog on one’s lap can become life sustaining.

Everything is an hourglass on a farm—the wood going down in the woodpile, the hay mow going down in the barn. The hot things born on the earth, nourished by the sun, feel prickly, splintery yet slippery, as they pour through our hands into hungry mouths of stoves and cattle. The cool water under the ground can be summoned with a pull on the pump handle. It feels like pure magic to pull what is cold and mysterious from the unseen depths beneath our feet. There is no “gathering” as much as there is flow and containment of that flow. Both are needed to keep the animals alive.

Today, I want to share with you the story of the Water:

Once upon a time, a young, ambitious, silly, middle-aged woman moved to a farm. There was a dilapidated but cute little barn, which she quickly repaired and filled with cute, thirsty little animals. Unfortunately, the water hydrant was broken so the only way to get water to her animals, was to drag buckets of water from a spigot on the house down to the barn, a distance of about 50 yards. In the frigid winter temperatures, the water in their buckets froze twice a day and twice a day she had to bash the ice out and replace it with liquid water they lapped or slurped and filled their beaks with gratefully. (Actually, they filled their beaks with water.) She read about how women “of a certain age” need to do weight-bearing activity to maintain their bone density so she was never unhappy about all the weight lifting she was doing on a daily basis. Even when the young steers began sucking up as much as twenty gallons a day, she maintained a rugged optimism about her personal “gym.” This went on for more than a year, in scorching sun, cool moonlight, every day, in every weather. She always meant to get that pump sorted out but somehow she never did and bolstered her inertia with the idea that the extra work was “good for her.” Something that started out as temporary became Habit. (All habits, whether wretched or wonderful, get their hold when we say to ourselves, “ok, I’m only going to do this ONE more time!”)

It wasn’t until she contemplated leaving the farm for more than a day that she realized she would need to do something about the water situation. A Habit had to change.

We have no idea how weird we really are until we have to leave instructions for a house-sitter who is going to take the reins of our lives for a mere weekend. That’s when all the unconscious quirks suddenly make themselves visible. One might find oneself writing to fellow adults statements like “feed the wounded chicken blueberries while you spray her gently with saline from the plastic bottle marked ketchup” or “please inspect all dehydrating scrotums daily for infectious discharge…” or, in the case of the mother of a toddler, “if [the person you are watching] poops in the potty, she is allowed a yellow treat.” Such statements give us pause and make us consider that our lives are not as conventional as we think, or perhaps we are going through a little phase that simply should not be explained to outsiders.

She found herself stymied by an inability to convey, in words, her system of watering the animals and decided it was just going to be easier to dig a six- foot hole in the ground and try her hand at replacing the water hydrant in the barn. It’s one thing to ask another person to handle your nuttiness for a weekend; it’s another thing entirely to ask her to give herself a hernia lifting thirty gallons of water downhill on a daily basis.

Naturally, she did tried to hire a plumber to do the work, but apparently they are all busy for the next three years so Youtube videos, consultations with her beloved housemates and the staff of the local hardware store were the next best bet. She would have to do this herself (mostly). Fine. Bring it. As Glennon Doyle says, “We can do hard things.” She tried to listen carefully as the sales clerk at Brown and Roberts explained how, underground, she was going to need to patch some pieces of pipe together to create the elbow joint connecting two different sizes of pipe. The joint needed to be heated, glued, etc… but all she could hear was “the thing with the thing needs to connect to the thing but don’t let stuff get in the thing or you’re, well….” She must have looked a little panic-stricken over the top of her mask because an interested bystander said, “Don’t look so worried. Soon you’ll be teaching other people how to do this.”

On a Friday night, after sewing all day, she came home, grabbed a spade and some rage and went to work. (It always makes one stronger, when doing manual labor, to think of vintage silk getting jammed in a sewing machine and chewed into a greasy mess by the underworkings of the bobbin… or irons that spit rust on wedding gowns…. or customers who think they might have paid you when they dropped off their clothing, when they didn’t and you know they didn’t but somehow they make you feel like a robber when they grudgingly pay you again… and there’s always that damn GLITTER for those truly weak moments when you need an extra push!)

Down she went, grunt by grunt, pants filling with accumulating grit, until she was shoulder deep into the ground, getting in touch with her internal Welsh pit pony, digging until she found the source of the Nile, or the pipe which brought water to the barn, whichever came first. Inevitably, she got distracted and started kind of hoping to strike gold, but then figured if she didn’t have to haul water all winter, that would be pretty much the same thing. After two days and one rain storm, in which the hole caved in and had to be entirely re-dug (summoning More Rage), an exhausted, exhultant, now-thoroughly-rageless woman celebrated having running water to the barn.

She lifted the spigot handle and water flowed as if by magic. There was much rejoicing. Again and again, checking for leaks, incredulous that IT WORKED, she tried the water. Then, she attached a hose and tried that. MAGIC. All the animals were as Astonished as she was. The calves saw the hose come over the top of their wall and spray water into their bucket and panicked. They ran backwards, crapping as they went. They were utterly traumatized by the idea that it could spontaneously rain directly into their bucket. They had never seen anything like this. The woman felt like an Empress for a whole day. It’s quite an intoxicating thing to be able to make it rain on a whim and have everyone around you poop themselves.

She went away and returned home and the House-sitter survived and so did all the creatures, including “Blueberry Girl” and the dangling dingle brothers. Things went back to whatever passes for “Normal” (ha!! Yeah…ok…). Yet the magic of the water hasn’t faded for that dear, mad, silly, courageous woman. She goes down on frosty mornings and flips the pump handle up and holds her steamy breath. There is a moment of silence that always seems to last a fraction too long before there is a hidden burble, a burp, then a gush as the clear stick of water strikes the bottom of the bucket and then morphs into a puddle that rises… She is amazed and grateful every time. Things look like dusty chaos up above, but in the dark Silence below, the water is always there, waiting to be summoned. Her Joy would not be the same at all if she had not carried the water for a year, then dug deep (TWICE!!!), or made a change because she tried to treat someone else better than she treats herself.

Some of you will think this story is about water. Of course it isn’t. (Yes, Dear Katie and Nora, I just deleted “that” paragraph where Prudence is desperate to cram a bunch of morals down your craw.) Draw your own conclusions. And your own water! The work is worth it. I know you are doing it. Keep going!

I love you sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy