“What we plan for ourselves isn’t always what Life has planned for us.”

Greetings Dear Ones!

October seems to have left without me; I have been hanging on one-handedly like one dangling from the last rail of the caboose on a speeding train. Dare I admit I may have taken on “too much”? No… I would never admit such a thing. But it has been a scramble to do all the usual things AND cook for four days at a wonderful fiddle camp, AND have house guests for a week, AND have concurrent major deadlines on multiple projects, one of which included sewing 187 cloth pennants for the aforementioned fiddle camp. My regular customers seem to be taking it all in stride—unless they happen to be the one (or three) I forgot to tell I would not be available for a week. (oops!) I can tell that one of my recurrent life lessons is about to hit me with a pop quiz, the main question of which is always: “Are You In Balance?” I pass or fail depending on the crash. The next question is “Can you embrace a New Plan?”

I admit I do NOT feel in balance. Things seem hasty, rushed, devoid of Breath. I eat without tasting, sleep without dreaming, and arrive at places hardly knowing if there was traffic on the road or not. I get wet but I do not feel the rain. Autumn in the North East does this to a lot of us. It’s a hectic time. The closer one lives to the Roots, the more one must gather before winter clamps its jaws. For weeks now, I’ve been gathering hay, wood, and stones. You would think I am building homes for all three of the little pigs.

Thanks to Hurricane Ian, my beloved sister and her family, instead of taking a dream Carribean vacation, decided to forgo hot sun, trashy novels, and fancy beverages with tiny umbrellas in them to come to Vermont for a week to help with Fall chores. (These people really know how to choose a party!) Instead of lounging around getting sand in their bum cracks, they moved a huge wood pile, put six tons of hay in the loft, and helped dig an irrigation ditch out the back side of the house to convince water that wanted to live in the cellar that it would be happier running down the hill outside. They cleared a new pasture for the sheep and fenced it!! We worked hard and laughed a lot, two of my favorite things to do. A wise person once said, “A good vacation makes you grateful to get back to your normal life.” For them, this certainly qualified!

There were a few glitches (of course there were) that required me to say “Ok, NEW PLAN!” Every time something went askew, we took to announcing “Ok, this must be part of the Plan…” like when my niece Rabbit fell through a rotten board on the hay trailer and skinned her shins from ankle to thigh, or when I fell off the top of the hay truck and felt my brain, like a speeding ball of jello, collide with the inside of my skull. Or when the hay delivery truck couldn’t manage the hill and had to be towed the last two miles. And the sheep got into the chicken feed and needed to be dosed for bloat because I had decided to remove all the hardware from the coop door but had gotten distracted before I could fix and replace it. (When I did replace it, I put it on so thoroughly it is now impossible to open the door!)

New Plans… New Plans… The Land of Lost Plots is now the Land of New Plans.

I like the idea that there isn’t a “Fail,” merely a New Plan.

I get asked a lot, “Can you sew something without a pattern?” The answer is a carefully worded... “no…” Everything needs some sort of pattern. If you give me your beloved skirt and ask me to copy it for you, that skirt then becomes the pattern: I’ll trace it, measure things, put a bunch of marks on paper, maybe scream at it a few times because I neglect to mark things like “left” and “right” and nap of fabric. (Fabric “nap” is that small rest the exhausted seamstress needs has when she cannot remember which “direction” the fabric is supposed to run.) Having a pattern vs. not having a pattern is like having a map and a declared destination rather than simply going out for “a wander.” (Very few people drop off a bunch of fabric and invite me to wander around in it, creating what gives me joy. Not that I want that, mind you! Don’t get any ideas!) Without marks on paper, I can take a yard or two of fabric, pin it all over your body, make darts, make seams, and custom make a garment for you but you still have to tell me---are we making a vest? An 18th century mantua ? A Victorian smoking jacket? Or something in case the circus comes to town and needs an extra clown… (cue a 1980’s silk blouse with linebacker shoulder-pads and enlarged bow tie at throat).

Custom items rarely turn out with the perfection of one of Plato’s Forms but they still have to participate, at some minimal level, in the idea of that form, the way one loosely follows a recipe and decides to add extra garlic, or leave out the meat, or, in the case of my father, substitute sawdust for shredded cheese. (Just kidding, it was vintage parmesan.)

So! As reluctantly as I admit this… I am fairly dedicated to plans. Planning is important to me, if only to know what it is I am NOT currently doing. It significantly aids my continually simmering Guilt Process to know I am vehemently, perhaps even gleefully, astray.

Now, can you imagine setting off to cook for ninety fiddle campers and their valiant teachers with no plan??? Nada. Nunca. Nyet. As usual, I left it to the last minute to print out the menu and shopping list and all the notes I have gleaned from previous cooking-at-camp experiences—but instead of contented purring and burping from the printer, there was silence. The computer refused to produce the files.

“Are you KIDDING ME???” I said in a sentence that was at least one very naughty word longer. I tried restarting everything—a reboot that took ten minutes I passed by pulling out some of my hair, which was actually a good thing, since it reminded me to find my kitchen hat.

Meanwhile, from the computer… Still nothing.

After two futile hours begging the gods for a different fate, I had to go on with my life. Utterly refusing to believe There Was No Plan, I shouted up at the ceiling, “OK! THIS must be the new plan.” I’d read a book on “Surrender” once upon a time and decided it was the only available superpower at the moment, so I took it. With a pit in my stomach that signified my bowels were turning to liquid, I hopped in the car and set off for Boston. I picked up my son. “What’s the plan?” he asked after stashing his stuff in the car.

“There isn’t one,” I admitted.

“WHAT???”

“Yep. The new plan is that there is no plan. I couldn’t get the [another naughty word] computer to print. So we have NO plan. That’s the plan.”

“Oh my God…”

“Yep.”

“So what are you going to cook?”

“What do you want to eat?”

We made a list of comforting foods we thought most people might like.

We went to Costco, where torrential rains hosed the parking lot. Great. Loading a trailer load of food in the rain. Must be part of the new plan.

Oh? What’s that you say? I don’t have my Costco card and need to stand in line for a new one? This New Plan is really amazing. It’s a gym membership, and psychological stress test requiring aqua-lungs and flippers all in one convenient bundle.

Over and over, I got to flex my flabby Surrender muscles and embrace A New Plan. All week, every time something went wrong, I just continued to shout “Wahoo! THIS must be part of the plan!” as if plans are treasure maps we discover, rather than create. When we cooked all the potatoes three hours too early and they turned to rocks, when the girl chopping peppers cut her hand, when the porridge turned to cement, when I flew out the back door gripping a smokey pot of (literally) flaming soup, when I had to run back to the store for everything we needed, every… single… blessed… meal…. only to discover now we have way too many leftovers... These were all just part of The Plan I couldn’t see. And thank Heavens too—it was a mercy I couldn’t see what was in front of me or I might have been tempted to put my head in the giant oven (that incidentally was broken “on.” We were warned never to turn it off, lest we not be able to turn it on again. Yep! You guessed it… Someone turned it off. )

As I told the forty pounds of unused carrots I discovered on the last day, “I’m sorry little orange ones…I guess you just were not part of the plan” (though they will have to be soon!).

So many New Plans. So many choices to sing or scream. So many opportunities to adapt or perish. I discovered that “Plans” represent our best hopes of making things better than they are. In actuality, it is humor, resilience, and a new friend willing to chop thirty pounds of onions without gritching about it that really gets us through the tough times. Humor is that gap between “what Is” and “What should be” and it is Here, in that gap, outside the reach of the best-laid plans of mice or men, that we find ourselves and our community of fellow Menders. Here is where we find the work we know how to do, where Love and Laughter and some clever patchwork are the best substitutes for Other Plans.

Finally, I am home again. I’m not sure what to do next. Anybody got a plan???

With sew Much love and gratitude for all your Good Work,

Yours aye,

Nancy