Greetings Dear Ones!

For those of you rushing to embrace my new personal fashion line of Hermit Granny Woolens—“Handmade in Vermont for grizzled women of indeterminate age who wish to look simultaneously feral and frumpy in irresistibly alluring ways…” I have some terrible news. Summer is coming. You can tell by the way the local Agway is hauling out the weed whackers and seed potatoes. We are simply going to have to face facts that, perhaps a few months from now, bikini season will be upon us. It might only last half an hour up here in the North East of the northeast, but we are going to have to take off those anoraks and possibly the long undies. There might even be something called “Sun.” It’s worth rummaging through the closet for something linen, batik, or calico and a big ass hat. (Just to be clear, the hat is for your head.) Alas, perhaps, you will find that gremlins have gotten into your closet and shrunk all the summer wear. You are not alone. The bastards got mine too.

So! It’s time to buff up. On the way to work, I hear adverts for the local gym, trying to drum up business. A muscle-bound voice urges us to come in and “get the body you deserve.” “Tut! No thank you,” says Prudence primly adjusting her petticoats. “I fully deserve the body I am in right now. People who make their bodies look too good tend to think they have a right to other people's bodies too.”

This spring, I have embarked on a brisk and energetic fitness regime that is helping me to lose quite a bit, mostly in the form of money and sanity. Those of you wishing to join me in toning up a little might consider trying some of my new daily workout routines. (Seriously, I mean actually come join me! I could use the help!) The first is called bulking up with “Steer-oids.” This is when you attempt to put two yearling steers out in the same pasture together so that they can caper about, nibble grass, and most importantly, find the ONE LONE SHRED of tarp (where the hell did that come from?) and try to eat it before you can sprint up to them and grab it before it disappears into one of their gullets (along with, potentially, a vet bill amounting to all of the money you were saving to get a brake job done on your car.) (You know you have been hanging out with cattle too often when you tell the mechanic that “the left hind wheel is ‘off’—er, going badly.”)

Now then, this is like one of those logic problems involving foxes and boats that freshmen (fresh-people?) are given in their first year of college. In this case, there is only one of you and two lively young animals, each weighing about 450 pounds with horns, and a five gallon bucket of water to transfer across a small field of grass and subsequently through a latched gate. The task is to get them all to the other side of the gate and close it securely. All goes well for the first little guy. But once you return with his friend, and now have a steer on each side of the gate and you have to get one in while not letting the other one out, that’s when the workout begins. You can only lead one at a time, so the one you have in hand goes through the gate while the one inside the gate, who is now loose, runs back out the gate and waits for you to catch him again. Do as many reps as it takes. Style your hair like Richard Simmons and use positive self-talk. Do NOT scream at the cattle. It just makes them giggle and gallop faster. Remember to take breaks for water. When they step in (and spill) the five gallons of water you just dragged out for them, pause for deep cleansing breaths of country air and cow manure. Feel the release. You’ve earned this.

For upper body strengthening, nothing beats mucking.

This is why farms are so much better than gyms. At a gym, you might do a few reps on a sleek machine that monitors your heart rate and calorie burn, toning yourself equally, precisely, bilaterally, while sipping occasionally on a trendy little protein drink of “muscle slush.” You simultaneously check your emails and dab away the perspiration from your brow by adjusting your cute, terry-cloth headband, while you listen to a podcast and serenely walk up stairs. You wipe down the fastidiously clean machine and move on politely when someone named Brittany in a cuter leotard than yours signals that she needs your machine. The whole ordeal lasts about forty-five minutes and though you don’t yet see results, you feel amazing. A fabulous mixture of smug satisfaction says you are now entitled to a latte on your way home.

Things are different in a chicken coop. All winter, the birds have been piling layers of excrement on fresh shavings that have frozen in sedimentary layers until they are now walking approximately a foot off the cement floor on their own violently composting dung. As soon as it thaws out, it must go. Shoveling it takes several hours, firm footing, and a strong stomach. One cannot pause halfway through. The whole job must be done at once because the smell is so vile it is inhumane to the birds to leave it half way. To start this project is to learn the value of Committing. Twenty nine wheelbarrows later, even your eyelids seem coated with bird dander and ammonia. You taste nothing but feathers and despair. There is no one in a cute leotard impatiently awaiting her turn at this task. There are no lattes on the way as you stumble blindly, fully monochromatic from head to toe, towards the nearest tub.

Side note: The day after I cleaned out the chicken coop, I woke up and could not move. All my muscles were sore. I had a dry throat and a cough. My head ached. I had recently been exposed to someone testing positive for Covid so naturally, I assumed the worst. I took a rapid test and it was negative. I was puzzled. How could I be so sick and not have Covid? Then it dawned on me! I realized I had a different sort of “bird flu.” Ha! No one in her right might would go to a “real” gym and work out like that for four hours straight their very first day back! However, the results were immediate, obvious, and in direct proportion to how wrecked I felt. I have heaps of grateful satisfaction that the birds have a delightful place to live again. As Charlotte Lucas, from Pride & Prejudice, might attest, the joys of poultry are endless. With a very real and tragic bird flu raging in many parts of this country, it is especially comforting to know these girls are kept in a well-aired space with plenty of free ranging outside. They are healthy and happy. And so am I now—especially after at least three shampoos!

Back to Fitness. On the weekends, you might consider a more challenging workout. Take any small, home-owner type project (in this case, rewiring a light switch to make it a dimmer switch because your dining room chandelier currently provides all the romantic ambience of an interrogation chamber) and make sure that all of the required tools for the job are located as far apart as possible. Whatever you do, do NOT assemble them all at the job site before you begin. (That’s cheating.) Make sure that some are in the cellar, some in the garage, and some in the barn; perhaps even someone else’s barn. (Some of the items you will need most might actually be located in a hardware store two towns away.) The most crucial items should be up or down a flight of stairs that you will be forced to run ten times. No two screwdrivers should ever be in any box together. God Forbid.

The workout goes something like this: Turn off the electricity to a section of the house. Find that breaker also works the lights in the cellar right where you just flipped the breaker. Stumble upstairs in the dark. Realize that you cannot work in the dining room because it too is now too dark. Nor can you simultaneously hold your phone, used as a flashlight, and unscrew the switch plate—a procedure which seems to need two hands. Run! Quickly! Knees up! Knees up! Rig a lighting system using a series of extension cords, a floor lamp, duct tape, an actual flash light (actual batteries stored separately) —all of which are located about the property via an exhausting game of hide and seek. Take pulse. Start again. Discover that the switch plate (which has been thoroughly lacquered over with paint) comes off with a flat-head screwdriver, while the actual metal box beneath it (also lacquered over with heavy paint) is anchored with a Phillips head. (See starting rules above.) Give up search for flat-head and use butter knife instead.

Now, discard the instructions that came with the new dimmer switch you are trying to install. The print is too tiny to read. Instead, short cut to a YouTube video to see what needs to be done. Scan hundreds of YouTube videos searching for one that is less than nineteen minutes in length because you “haven’t got all day” for this nonsense. (You forgot this was Endurance Training!) Watch about 6 minutes of three different videos of well-meaning males in baseball caps reporting the dangers of not calling a qualified professional, such as themselves. Get bored with that an open up the nearest light switch. Get confused because there are FIVE wires in that one and only four on the gizmo you are trying to connect. Call your dear friend Bob, who is a superbly over-qualified electrical engineer and ask him to solve the problem over the phone without you knowing any of the wiring terminology. (It’s like asking a friend to play chess blindfolded, with a novice who has no idea what any of the pieces are called.) The first thing he asks is “how many switches are connected to the fixture?” Without waiting for an answer, he insists there are three but you can only find two. Run laps until he has to hang up and attend a luncheon with his girlfriend’s family.

Give yourself a pep talk. Call on your inner Vision to succor yourself through the hardest miles. Do you want your beloved guests to continue wearing sunglasses and parasols at dinner? No? Well get your bum moving again. Come on, Lassie! You got this. You are a Creatrix. You know that any problem is just an opportunity to Get Curious. For example, what do you suppose the instructions that came with the thing might suggest a novice such as yourself might try? Are you the least bit curious about that? Take a photo of them with your phone and use the scroll out feature until the print can be read from space. Follow the diagram. Find the ground; figure out which one is the hot, which one is the return, which one is the spare return from the other thing with the thing that does the thing… (“STOP muttering Thing!” says Prudence.) When you follow the (very Simple) directions and then turn the power back on and the lights GO DIMMER, as suggested by the packaging, you can end today’s workout with a Victory Dance to ABBA’s greatest hits while you clean up the mess you made. (Vacuuming is optional but encouraged.)

Any system of self-improvement is like this: Get Dissatisfied. Get Grounded. Source the Power. Make the connections. Stick with it. Make it happen. And Bonus, just think about the blessings of all that time you just spent NOT thinking of food, or adult beverages, or all the tragedy in the world while you were running after butter knives and duct tape, chasing cattle, shoveling guano, and striving to make your home a little dimmer.

You’ve tested all your muscles and just made the Whole World a little bit Dimmer. That is your gift. Now, go have a latte!

Keep up the Mending me Dearies! I love you SEW much!

Yours aye,

Nancy