I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. —Jack London

Greetings Dear ones!

Grundalina Thunderpants did not want to get up today. She does not love these mornings when The Writer, who is a last-minute crammer, decides we must rise before dawn and think of “something” to write about for a blog that needs to be published by lunchtime, which she interprets loosely as “lunchtime anywhere in the world…” Prudence is shrill—“Do you think Tom Brady hits snooze on his goals?? NO. Get UP.” You find it interesting that Prudence is a fan of Tom Brady. It’s not so much that she loves football as she loves to hold up “Winners Who Work Hard” to make the rest of us feel crummy. We all agree to ignore her and hit snooze; we are ok with hating ourselves (and Tom Brady too for that matter) just a little bit. In this moment, we do not love blogs as much as we love soft pillows. Prudence grabs her rosary beads and begins to mutter. Within moments, the angels have come to her aid in the form of an elderly incontinent dog in the early stages of renal failure. He has left his little nest at the foot of the bed and begun tottering towards the door. I grab him and race to the bottom of the stairs and deposit him at the edge of a snow bank in the nick of time.

The sharp blades of air scraping at cheeks and lung, combined with the soft loveliness of the fog rising up from the distant river, and the slim skewer of light poking through the crystalline trees the way one uses a sliver of wood to check if a cake is done, are enough to make going back to sleep an impossibility. In any case, it’s time to get my ash to the barn. On these morning voyages after fresh snow, I walk backwards, grateful for the gift of cleats on my muck boots, and sprinkle ash as I go. I gaze at the gritty greyness hitting the white ice with revulsion, as if I am soiling a child’s forehead. I am making a dirty mess—ruining something so pristine and lovely, though secretly lethal. I remind myself that the ash is to help me get back up the hill I have to climb to the House. And so it is.

Wood ashes are jolly useful things on a homestead. A complex heterogeneous mixture of all the non-flammable, non-volatile minerals which remain after the wood and charcoal have burned away, I use them to amend compost, sweeten the earth in lettuce and asparagus beds, and to keep the icy path to the barn well-cindered so that I don’t slip. They keep harmful bugs away in the garden and one can even make soap with them, though I have not yet tried this. The wood stove in the kitchen is constantly producing them, though I never seem to have enough.

Similar to how baking soda works, sprinkling wood ash on the coop floor and in the chicken run can help to neutralize odors. The chickens will even use the ashes as a dust bath to smother parasites like fleas or mites. They get in and roll around in the ashes and then shake off the excess. Because the wood ash contains calcium and potassium, it’s not a bad thing if they ingest some. It might even be a good thing… Hmmm, calcium and potassium, you say? I begin to wonder how wood ash might affect menopausal symptoms in middle-aged women. Should I put them in a smoothie? Sprinkle them on salads? Or just roll around in them in my pajamas, like the chickens do?

When I bring the rest of the ashes to the hen house, I find the ladies jubilant but confused. They have killed a mouse and don’t know what to do with him. They don’t seem to want to eat him, which is a relief. (Who wants mouse-flavored eggs?) I take him out and throw him on the roof so that a local scavenger can make a meal of him. The mouse slides down the icy slope of the roof and smacks me in the head. I toss him up again. This time, I dodge the dead mouse. But a small avalanche of snow finds the back of my neck. After several attempts, I finally leave the mouse on a fence post. Of dust he hath been made but to a crow he shall return.

Prudence is excited about the start of Lent. Ash Wednesday this week marked the beginning of the penitential Lenten season that culminates with Easter, roughly ninety months from now. (Thanks to my catholic upbringing, dust and bunnies are inextricably linked.) She thinks we could all do with a good stint of Penance. Forty days might not be enough. Growing up, Ash Wednesday was the day our parish school would process next door to the church and we would have ashes crossed on our foreheads as a solemn reminder of our human mortality and our need for reconciliation with God. We were given many other solemn reminders too—such as not letting our bare thighs under our plaid kilts stick to the pews where they might accidentally scrape and make noises embarrassingly similar to flatulence that would make certain weak-minded children giggle uncontrollably and earn themselves a trip to the principal’s office. Ladies, preserve your virtue and everyone else’s. (Lead them not into temptation!) Sit on your skirts quietly. (I might just be the reason the girls of St. Joe’s are allowed to wear long pants now…)

Secretly, I love Ash Wednesday. It’s time to take stock, ask myself where I am going, and why most days I seem to find myself in a hand-basket. It’s in keeping with my philosophy that “If things are pretty bad already, why not go ahead and make them worse? Some Good may come of it.” It’s this kind of boldness that makes me take a hideous table cloth and transform it into a skirt. (Or vice versa.) As one who seems to be making a career of starting over, it’s yet another chance to trade some vice for the growth of my soul. It takes great ugliness to grow beauty. And frankly, it’s the only way to deal with things like February.

As a child, I was always somewhat confused about the ritual surrounding the ashes. The phrase “remember man that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return”—makes it sound like the dust is the beginning and the end. I get it that we come full circle, by and by, like pumpkins who go to seed and get reduced to our essence only to begin again. We begin with an ending; we end with a beginning—sort of like that poem about Michael Finnegan, “who went out and then went in again.” Ash is the ultimate symbol of Essence. It is all that remains when the heat and light have gone. Completion, yet Potential. A nesting ground for Pheonixes. But the bible has no mention of Ash Wednesday. Instead, it says “In the beginning is the word…” Why do we believe it is ashes to ashes and not words to words? Could it be that words are so much more slippery? Don’t ask me to use words to climb the slope by the barn—even the saltiest are no good.

Receiving ashes on the head as a reminder of mortality and a sign of sorrow for sin was not part of the early church but became a practice of the Anglo-Saxon church in the 10th century. Before the Synod of Benevento in 1091, wearing sackcloth (rough cloth used to transport turnips, grain, or Christian rumps) and smearing oneself with ashes was a mostly private affair for mourners and those who had left a hot iron too long on a silk blouse.

Ash, we are told, is the symbol of repentance. To Repent, as we know, is “to pent again.” Actually, it means to make a complete change of direction. We don’t just keep going in the same way, round and round the circle like a visiting motorist in Massachusetts who has never encountered a round-about. We reform (form again), regret (gret again), and atone. I think this means tone up. (Lenten fasting was, after all, the way medieval Christians prepared for bikini season.) The word regret actually has ancient Germanic roots in the word “greet,” which makes its way into Old French as regreter: “to bewail the dead.” To this day, Scots use the word greet to mean “weep.”

I sprinkle the grief of mighty oaks upon the snow and reflect on all these things. I think of my friend, suffering from Covid, who discovered her house full of smoke. She had been unable to smell her grilled cheese sandwich burning on the stove. When I asked her what she did, she said blew it out like a candle and ate it anyway. She couldn’t taste it either, so why waste it?

Ash comes for us all but the grass will be greener for it in the spring.

One of my favorite folk songs of all time is Walt Aldridge’s “Aint no ash will burn…” For someone born in Alabama, you’d think he was singing about Vermont:

I have seen snow that fell in May (yep, that sounds about right)

And I have seen rain on cloudless days (true again)

Some things are always bound to change (always)

There ain’t no ash will burn.

Love is a precious thing, I’m told

Burns just like West Virginia coal

But when the fire dies down, it’s cold

And there ain’t no ash will burn

Having never played with fire before, some of us got burned down to ashes on the first try. From those ashes rose a hope—a Wishing that the fire would return just so we could prove we would never burn that way again. But fires move on and leave us the ash as a gift. The grass will be greener come Spring…

As a seamstress, I am well associated with the cycles of destruction needed for creation. Certain projects, owned by The Unsatisfiable, return again and again to haunt me—a pair of velour pants, a tweed waistcoat—and bite me in the ash. Anger sparks. One likes to finish things once and for all and move on. But sometimes the cycle goes around and around. Each time, I must destroy the work I did last time and start over. Sometimes I do this gracefully, sometimes I need to curse my lot and bite the heads off chocolate bunnies before I can continue. Either way, my soul is greener for it.

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere spend a lot of time staring at embers on these cold winter nights, reading them like the classics of literature. These nuggets once built by sunlight, return to light and give off heat for days. We, the grim citizens of February, we need the heat, the light, the ash as we stagger towards the fires of our passions like molting pigeons, each hoping we are a phoenix.

Ashes to ashes…we all fall down. Ashes to ashes…we all Rise Up.

Regardless of where you are in this cycle—whether you are crawling towards the bonfires of your own vanity , rising again on shining metal wings, or temporarily all burned out—know that we desperately need the beauty only You can bring to this world. Keep mending. And Amending. Thanks for your Good Work.

With sew much love,

Nancy