Greetings Dear Ones!

Ever realize that you are suddenly wiser than you were before? Do you look back on past decisions, decisions of mere weeks ago, and question your sanity? For instance, right now, I am questioning whether making the interior of my home look like a pine-scented woodland salad was a good one. All my friends were doing it, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. But seriously… A small TREE in the front room? What was I thinking? Haven’t the sheep taught me that large, wild, living things belong OUTSIDE? Present self is looking at Past self with eyebrows that look like caterpillars in a boxing match. And all these fresh pine and cedar garlands draped over doorways and up banisters? Who is going to take care of all this? How many times can we clog this hoover with dead needles before we give up and take to a Netflix binge on the couch with the rest of the cookies? (I’m just kidding; there are no more cookies.) And the way the juice from the decorative clove-studded citrus fruits has baked itself into the hardwoods—only Jack Russell dung has more staying power. I’ll be chiseling this stuff until the cows come home. Oh, wait; they’re home! They are looking in the window at me, wondering when I am going to come out to play. I can’t. There’s too much work to do and someone has trashed my house. It couldn’t look any worse if I had actually hosted ten people for four days, as was originally planned, but then cancelled due to that Virus-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Yep. It’s January… named for the Roman god Janus—that keeper of the gates who was pictured with two heads because he was keeping watch on both the past and future. Present self is pissed. She has some anger to manage; Past Self had a good party and left her to clean up the mess. We just hope our Future Self takes us all in her arms and says, “There, there my darlings. You made it. You survived. Good Girls, You! I wouldn’t be who I am today if it hadn’t been for you. Thank you.”

Things are swiftly business as usual in the shop. A lady comes in to have one small snap sewn on her favorite coat and chats for, well, much longer than it takes to sew on a snap. “So! How was your New Year,” she asks, as if the New Year was a mere night and now we are back to the same old year. It certainly seems that way—given that the last two years have melded into an interminable purgatory for some.

Well, my “New Years” was all about burning up the pile of brush that has accumulated in the past eighteen months of clearing the land of lost plots. In Vermont, it is legal to burn without a permit as long as there is snow on the ground, no wind, perhaps a light mist falling from a Northeasterly direction and the pile is soggier than Cheerios after 2.5 seconds in a bowl of milk. In short, it’s perfectly legal to burn when absolutely nothing is capable of catching fire, including the fire. It took us five hours to get the thing to stay lit. An expert had told me to use a leaf blower and four times I lit a reasonably good blaze, only to completely extinguish it with the leaf blower moments later. It was as if a giant was blowing out birthday candles and I just stood there, getting older and colder. Even Worse, there was NO cake…

I know I tend to be a bit optimistic and silly at the best of times—my imagination goes on the wildest safaris without even a peck of common sense. So it is with those who have made a grand plan without knowing the first thing about what they are doing. Somehow, I had convinced myself that we would simply toss a match into all that tinder and moments later the thing would go “Ka-Boom!” and there’d be nothing left to do but sing carols and serve mulled beverages. Prudence was terrified that we might accidentally reignite California from here. Thankfully, No. Michael, one of the wonderful young men present, happens to be a post-Doc engineer at MIT and an expert in chemistry. He taught us a lot about fire.

One of the things about a soggy brush fire in snowy Vermont is that ignition temperatures are hard to achieve. You have to labor at a brushfire like a new fiddle tune—stick by stick, stump by stump. Basically, you have to light a small fire, use it to dry out the next bit of wood, then use that to make a slightly larger fire. It takes pitchforks and shovels and muscles. (“And a total absence of mulled beverages!” notes Prudence approvingly.) There is a lot of smoke-watching, eye-watering, and steaming of bare necks and branches. The next time someone tells you they have burned a brush pile, reserve some awe for their audacity, carefulness, and persistence. Michael labored over the coals for over eighteen hours in freezing rain, in a soot-stained T-shirt, like he was powering a steam boat on the Missisippi whose captain wanted to water ski. It was humbling indeed to see how much work a fire takes.

I tried to tell the sheep about it when I took a break to do barn chores. “We know all about fires,” they said nonchalantly.

“Oh, really?” I asked. “What could you possibly know about fires?”

“Each of us has a tiny one inside of us. That’s what the hay is for, to keep it lit. Our hay fires in our tummies keep us warm on these nights when it’s fifteen degrees out. You keep feeding us and we keep putting hay on those fires.”

“Come to think of it, we did use quite a bit of hay to light the bonfire,” I admitted.

“Hay makes good fires,” burped one, “because it is small. It’s all about surface area.”

They lay around the pen, burping and cudding, like people at a diner who have paid the check but weren’t ready to leave yet.

“It’s good to chat with you again,” I said. “I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you for the cattle recently. I’m besotted with them. Everything is so new and fresh for them. It’s exciting. It reminds me to be young again and think about things for the first time.”

“Like what a tarp might taste like?” snorted Chip derisively. “I saw the two of them trying to figure that out the other day. Little Gus almost swallowed a big rip of it before you came along and yelled at him.”

“People who think tarps are food are not a good source of wisdom,” sighs Willow. “Fuel is what keeps the fire alive within. Tarps don’t do that.”

“They are actually pretty good at snuffing fires,” says Wally. How he knows this, I have no idea. He’s still just a lamb.

“This reminds me of New Years and all the changes people want to make,” I say in an effort to be philosophical. “The bonfire represents a huge change but it doesn’t happen quickly at all. It takes a very long time to transform those piles from the past. Each branch, each Resentment or Regret that has accumulated, must be separated from the bunch and allowed to dry out, burn, and travel into the navy blur Beyond in a shower of spark.” I meant to say Navy Blue but my lips were cold and in the end we all liked Navy Blur better. It’s a good name for a Vermont night sky in January.

“We sheep don’t have regrets. Those are human things. We live in the Now, whether it’s trying to snuff us or not. But from our view of the woodpile, we can see that a careful fire is a Good Thing. It accelerates the decay and transformation that was happening anyway. A carefully tended fire gets rid of a lot of dead wood that you don’t need.”

“A pile that size can hide some Bad Creatures, like foxes and Fishers and things that go Scratch in the night,” said a nervous someone at the back, “best to take a fearless moral inventory and get rid of it!”

“When you clear it out, the land will be free to grow the best grass ever, which we will use to make the best wool ever!” piped bright-eyed Prim. She is the type of Teacher’s Pet who is always at the head of the class, with her hand, er hoof, up.

“Everything is always in the process of turning into something else,” grunts Blossom, taking a dump that can only be interpreted as the height of sarcasm.

“But why does it have to take so long?” I want to know. “Why do the simplest projects always wind up requiring So Much Effort?”

“Because you want to Hurry,” said Willow, with a tinge of sorrow in her eyes. “Changes take time. Pushing too hard creates Burn-out instead of blaze. Having too much responsibility all at once is exhausting. It’s ok to lose your spark once in a while. Bonfires, like novels and symphonies and snowsuits, are built of many thousands of little things. They require work, not hurry. We aren’t much fond of either. Slow down. Have some hay. Make yourself warm. Just keep feeding that fire within.”

I nod, then return to the fire I am tending… making a fuel of wayward vines and old regrets. There is so much to clear by Spring.

I hope you are warm and cozy and tending your own fire within, wherever you may be. May it light your eyes with promises and sparks that rise into the Navy blur.

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy