Greetings Dear Ones!

Last week I celebrated the very first anniversary of owning my own business! Woo hoo! Yay me! What a powerful, self-reliant, feminist capitalist I am—preying on those with busted zippers to earn a crust. Though, to be fair, it’s been a year of more crumbs than crusts. Due to the Covid-19 (by which I mean the 19 pounds I have gained during captivity) I decided against partying with a sheet cake to celebrate. Instead, I just bought a sheet. If nothing else, I can wear it until my clothing fits again. (Don’t say it!)

A party was out of the question; I can barely have customers, never mind a party in a shop this size. Since it’s Lent, I decided to “offer it up” on behalf of some poor schmuck waiting patiently in Purgatory for a middle-aged-woman who cannot get in and out of her own jeans to repent her life choices and embrace the abstinence of sugar and booze. There you go, poor schmuck! You’re welcome! There’s probably lots of cake in heaven, if I ever get there… save me a piece.

Instead, I vacuumed and finished knitting another shawl. Shawls are my favorite item of clothing right now—they fit no matter what. I cannot believe the heat that comes off this thing! My own body warmth echoes back and forth against it like summer lightening at midnight. I wonder if I piled a bunch in the center of a room if we could warm our hands over them, or use them to dry out socks or melt buckets of ice… That’s the magic of pure wool. If only we could have slip-covered our suffering Texans in the stuff during the recent ice storm.

This shawl was years in the making. Literally. It came to be as a result of dreams I did not even know I was dreaming at the time. Several years ago, I was invited to be a featured artist, telling stories and spinning yarn at a “Spring Festival of Baby Farm Animals” being hosted by the Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. The director asked me if I knew where he could get two bottle-fed Shetland lambs for the exhibit. I said I would ask my vet. She directed me to a local Shetland breeder who was grateful to give me two orphaned lambs. They had been rejected by their mothers and, with eighty sheep on her property, bottle-feeding was a lot of extra work for her to take on. As it turned out—the exhibit refused to take the lambs in the end because one had a patent uracus and the other lamb was having epileptic fits. The director wanted “normal” lambs, not one that was peeing out of his umbilicus while the other was flopping and twitching in an alarming way. So guess who got stuck with these lambs…

Little “Flip” and “Drip” took up residence in my bathtub until I could build a pen for them. I got up through the nights to feed them. I smuggled them to work with me in my car so that they would not have to skip feedings. With full tummies, they slept in the careful circle of my arms like the babies they were. Despite heroic efforts on the part of my vet, they only lived a summer, due to their significant health issues. I grieved hard as one by one they died and my tears made mud on their graves. Meanwhile, the shepherdess who had given them to me had become a dear friend. She gave me two more bummer lambs the next year. These have thrived. The little wether makes eye contact with my soul like an old man scanning the sky for clouds. “Maaa! Maaa!” he yells in a happy voice, rushing to me for cuddles and scratches as soon as he sees me. (He’s still very insulted at having to live in a barn, instead of in the house with me.) He turned one last spring and I sheared him for the first time on a golden day—both of us dripping with honeyed sweat and lanolin. His wool came off in long, damp, crimpy waves of black and silver—slick and silky. Since then, I have been processing, carding, spinning and preparing his fleece and those of the rest of the flock. By January, I had a beautiful two-ply yarn that I could knit into something special. Secretly, I suffer from the separation anxiety as much as he does—now I can take part of him with me wherever I go.

I am learning that there is a big difference between envisioning and visualizing—though most dictionaries would have you believe these words are interchangeable. To visualize is to form a mental picture, make something “visible” to the mind’s eye, to imagine even the tiny details, like chalk and thread rippers and those doo-dads one needs to stop a zipper from running off the track at the end. To visualize is to count the stitches. To make a shop or a shawl, one must visualize with at least a decent amount of accuracy.

To Envision is to create future possibilities—to create in Spirit, what can never be seen by any eye. To envision is to say Yes to a journey, a process, a Becoming that might not turn out anything like you planned because you cannot really plan this stuff. You show up. You do the work. Most days you remember your keys. And then the magic starts—the people come. You find your tribe—your fellows and sisters on the Spiral Path, your audience, your customers, your fans and Spirit Family. You also find a few odd ducks, an epileptic sheep or two and some, um… Characters, some of whom reside within you. Envisioning helps us open our hearts to the things we cannot see and helps us to witness, to marvel and to wonder. Somewhere along the way, we even find ourselves in the things we were meant to do. To Envision is to allow a mysterious connection to your own spirit to guide your path. To visualize is to make a living; to Envision is to create a Life.

Someday, if I live to be a venerated Eldress, I hope to look back on a life of Dignified Service to my community and wear my woolen toga and laurels with pride. No doubt I shall wish to forget about how many times I arrived at the shop without the keys, or bumbled home without the knitting, or went to deliver a customer’s sewing and forgot to bring the sewing. I might still regret not being able to figure out how to retrieve my phone messages using another phone. I shall regret not putting things in my calendar and then looking at an empty block and assuming I must have “the day off.” I especially will regret the time I called a nice young man on shop business and, while I waited through a series of ringtones for him to pick up, the Unthinkable happened. To my panic, the rumblings of a rogue bean burrito were about to make themselves known to the outside world. Efforts to hasten the eruption before he answered only made the ensuing blast, which occurred the moment he said “…hello” so much worse. I thought about hanging up immediately but then remembered that everyone has caller ID these days. What could be worse for my business? We both paused. For a second, I prayed he hadn’t noticed. Alas, his stunned first words were “what the hell was that??” in a voice that conveyed he knew exactly what it was.

As I write myself my annual performance review, I know I have some things to work on… a pay raise looks doubtful…

Owning my own business has been an amazing adventure. It’s more like parenthood than I would have thought initially, though with only slightly less frequent poop in the pants. I sit with this shawl around my shoulders and feel emotions rising with the heat. I finished three other things yesterday: a vest, some work for customers, and aprons I made out of repurposing a pair of jeans I had harvested for their zipper. I separated the front from the back, cut off the legs, attached them to the waistbands of each and added a pocket to the middle of each leg (which is now the middle of the chest). A few ties and some trim, and they make great aprons for working in the garden or going to the barn with a lot of things in the pockets. Lambing season is coming up—pockets are great for syringes, medicines, iodine, etc…

I also did six hand-sewn buttonholes on a woolen vest, which is making my hands ache a bit today. I got a happy text from a thrilled woman whose work had been coming through a revolving door lately. Finally, everything is just to her liking. There is much to celebrate.

I celebrate by cleaning and setting the place to rights. As a dear soul reminded me just today, “Preparation is Power.” As I wipe things down, dust and Hoover out all the inner fiber collections in the crevices of the machines, I remember the struggles to get the table in the door, painting all the cupboards, hanging thread racks, and creating the dressing room. It was all so much effort. Everything had to be brought up through the old loading elevator at the back of the building—the kind with a cage that comes down around you and, as the platform rises, you see the bare bricks passing by. Because the lift is at the opposite end of the building, everything had to be dragged on carts and wagons through a maze of hallways redolent of history and mill girl sweat. I love this building. It talks to me the way a tree or sheep does.

There is so much to celebrate in realization of a dream. There is the surprise element—“wow, this turned out better than expected”—blending with a tiny bit of remorse at completion of a phase that will never come again, like innocence or childhood. Dream endings leave small hollows where new dreams must be seeded. Starting my own business has been Real-ized—made real. Now the new dream is growing it, maintaining it, giving good service so that friends will take pride in recommending it to other friends.

Opening a service-based business in a new town, twenty-two days before anyone realized a global pandemic was looming, was seriously bad luck. My little shop has had a rough start, I’ll admit. It’s like it had a crappy childhood so far but is going to turn out fabulous in the end, just like a lot of amazing people I know. No matter how things start out, they are bound to transform. Creativity is that dance we do between what Is and What Could Be. Sometimes, what we are here to do finds us—it calls us into being. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Things don’t always go the way we planned or stick to the schedule we wanted. Either way, we are part of a Magnificent Mystery as co-creators and it is a privilege to be a midwife to Beauty, whatever our craft.

Wrap a blanket (or shawl, or toga) of Kindness around all you do today and keep doing it! Let the Mending continue!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy