“I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed
monster. A most scurvy monster!” Trinculo, Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Greetings Dear Ones,

Happy April Fool’s Day! Having been a Fool in January, in February, and straight through all the Madness of March, it only makes sense to close out the first quarter of the year and begin the next in a state of utter Fool-ishness. The Fool, in tarot, is the most powerful card. It signals Faith in the Journey and a reliance on Trust. The Fool, in Shakespeare, is the wisest of characters. It is an act of powerful innocence to begin again, begin anew. And so here I am. Showing up once more, with no explanation, no apology, just a willingness to start again to live (and write) as a sheer crime of passion, nothing else, nothing less. With the curiosity of a Fool, I will do it as fully as I can, for as long as I can, without assumptions, expectations, or insistences about what the outcome might be. Having tried this for five years now, it’s damn hard to do. The mud is deep. Wish me luck.

As I type, two of my fingers will not stop bleeding. The cuticles have been savaged by the ripping edges of teeth from six frantic mouths trying to gobble corn chips from my gloveless hands. I have spent the morning in the pen with the sheep. One of them is not doing well. I separate her from the rest of the flock and set her up in her own pen, adjacent to theirs, where she can eat at leisure and not be bashed about by the greedy ones. She does not seem to be “ill,” but ewes, like some housewives I have known, hide this really well until they are about to die. I can feel the ridge of her backbone too prominently through her wool. She is putting every calorie she gets into the two bowling balls filled with lambs that hang from her sides. The hay this year is of poor quality and though she has been eating enthusiastically, she is not getting enough calories for what might be triplets and herself. While I’ve been supplementing everyone with grain, she is still losing ground.

Instead of bleating, or exhibiting loneliness, she seems relieved to have her own apartment. She puts her head in my lap for scratches and cuddles. She sniffs politely at the $17-dollar-a-bale alfalfa I have bought just for her. She nibbles daintily, like a girl who wanted pasta but ordered a salad to save her date money. (Back in the day, when salads actually cost less than law degrees from Harvard.) Calmly, she lets me drench her mouth with minerals and electrolytes. Then we sit together in that gorgeous Contentment that hovers in a barn during a steady morning drizzle—the residents munching in time to the beat of raindrops on a tin roof. From the doorway, the sepia forest is blurred. Snow piles mark the edges. We are living in a vintage photograph of long ago: A Vermont Homestead, a forgotten Christmas card that now doubles as a grocery list in a kitchen somewhere, behind an empty soup can filled with pens. A blanket of mist and the smell of hay covers us in coziness. The giant Great Pyrenees snores lightly on her bed in the corner by the feed room.

The dog has been up most of the night barking courageously at the coyotes who have the nerve to sing to her from the orchard on the other side of the barn wall. Again and again, she lunges and snarls, sending peals of thunder rolling from the depths of her bowels out through the bellows of an open throat. Her teeth flash like lightening. In the shadows of skeletal peach trees, the Wild Things sing of fear and hunger, of Lack and wanting, of sneaking and thieving, and she answers resoundingly, unflinchingly, with Death. There is no fear when you know you hold Death within your own jaws. I, who have spent the wide-eyed night listening to the song of my own internal coyotes, wonder ‘why I am not like that dog?’ Is Life for the Confident and well-equipped? Or the Brave and Stupid? Only a Fool would try to find out.

Sitting in the sheep fold, a weary ewe’s head in my lap, ever so slowly I dissolve. I melt like snow into deep ruts of mud. I am that snow, that mud, this ewe. Water trickles towards the vernal pools and streams on the hillside below, coming from the roof, the sky, the snow, my eyes. On the water rushes, eventually to the sea, turning ever so many wheels and woolen mills on its way.

The Christmas Card becomes a fifth-grade science diagram about the cycles of water around the earth—rain to river to ocean to rain. We huddle under a roof in the middle of the page. The trees slurp up the water with their toes as it oozes beneath them. The sap has been running for weeks now. Up and down it goes, like a stubborn milkshake through wooden straws. The tips of the branches are budding red. A pink mist in the glen signals the tiny swelling bellies of leaves about to be born. Earth Science is everywhere, including the tree frog screaming his Tinder profile out to potential mates.

The wind picks up and Winter growls deep in its throat for a moment, signaling it is not to be messed with yet. Spring Equinox or no, it’s not safe to plant the peas for at least another fortnight, perhaps at the next new moon. It’s exciting to think about the garden and all the work that has to be done. We all want our muscles to stretch and the grass to green. For now, the world is all the colors of brown. I caress the little brown head in my lap.

Work will wait. We are still tired. We are hungry. We are swollen with possibilities that are not yet ready to arrive. It is a struggle to carry them. I am still looking outside of myself for the food I need to keep going—for encouragement, for anything that says “keep going, Fool, this is valuable and Good.” I am surprised and dismayed to be here again, at the bottom of this all-too-familiar rut.

“Spring is not a time of beginnings—it is an Ending, the ending of the gestation that has been silently occurring for a long deep winter. It must be born soon or kill us,” whispers Blossom. “In the cycles of Creativity, Transitions are imperative. One cannot remain pregnant forever.”

“What is it you are giving Life to?” Miss Prim asks me through the gate between us.

I look at her quizzically, startled.

“You look heavy,” she says, “like someone who is carrying a thing that wants to live outside her.”

“I’m the thing that wants to live,” I say. “My heaviness comes from emptiness. I can’t wait to have time to do the things that make me feel lighter, like write and play music. I also need to get in shape. I’ve had too many projects, so much work, too much time with too many people…not to mention way too many cookies. Such things weigh on me. I don’t even like myself anymore.”

“Cookies???” Every head in the barn snaps towards my direction.

Prim laughs. She knows I have no cookies. (My pockets are damp from her checking.)

“No,” she says, disagreeing sweetly. “Your emptiness comes from Fullness. Giving is not what is depleting you. It’s the NOT-giving that hurts you and makes you heavy.”

She’s got me there. All the creative projects, the mending, the sewing, the knitting, the quilting, the tailoring—none of it fills the Void of not creating the thing one must make of one’s heart—the song, the poem, the tune, the novel, the building, the dress, the dream garden or clothesline or cheery slip-cover… These energies come as thoughts, the thoughts become words, when the words do NOT become deeds, the resulting guilt of Gifts-un-given leads to nights of wild coyotes in the brain.

“It’s the stuck energy that makes you ponderous when you refuse to ponder it,” says Prim, wisely. “So get Pondering!”

“Actually, I ponder a LOT,” I insist lamely. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I could be a professional Ponderer. I could ponder for prizes. As long as I don’t actually have to DO anything about it!”

We laugh. What gets done without muscles?

“You know, when you eat your toast before you come down here to feed us, your chores get done better,” says Wally. “The water buckets get scrubbed, not just refilled. You linger longer. When you are hungry, you race back to the house. Selfishly, we like it better when you take care of yourself first.”

“I thought it was terrible that I started doing that. All my life I always fed my animals before myself. That’s how it should be,” I say, “that’s what a Good Farmer does.”

“Well, a Good Farmer doesn’t take such good care of us as you do when you aren’t rushing. Remember, we don’t want to talk to you until we have eaten either. It’s all just yelling and bawling until the grub goes down.”

“Are there other ways you could be taking care of yourself that would make you better at other things too?” asks Prim, hopefully.

I stare at my feet, thinking of suggestions or insinuations others have made, some of which have really hurt my feelings.

“By the way, do you know how much we hate your horrid little dog?” interrupts Wally. “He’s awful. NO ONE likes him. He’s adorable and horrible. How come you only see the adorable?”

We can all hear him up in the house, shrill yaps edged with temper.

“No, I see the horrible, too. I do,” I admit, giggling. “I just Don’t Care. I love him with all my heart.”

“Well, he’s a pest! He demands to be served. He bosses you night and day with his little ‘dinner dance’ that starts any time after 3 in the afternoon and continues until you relent and feed him. He’s AWFUL. What does he do but pester you and leave hair everywhere?”

“And fulfill my longing to be loveable and loved…” I add. There is nothing anyone can say about this dog that is not simultaneously totally True and totally of no consequence whatsoever to my love of him. I am devoted to him with no conditions.

“Maybe you could love yourself that way,” says Blossom, the clear-eyed metaphor lying in my lap, smacking her lips for the last of the corn chips.

“Yeah!” pipes up Chip with a wink, “Think about how easy that would be! You don’t shed nearly as much as he does and you’ve never been known to lift your leg and piss on the furniture. If you can love him so unconditionally, surely you could love yourself, or prom girls rolled in Glitter just the same way!”

“Prom girls rolled in Glitter are just as hard on carpets as any Jack Russell,” snaps Prudence, “Worse, maybe.”

“More importantly,” says Prim, rolling her eyes at Chip, “If you felt the same way about that Thing that wants to live outside of you, then think how happy you would be. Even if it came out totally awful and everybody hated it, you wouldn’t even care. It would still make you happy. You would still feed it and pamper it. You could keep it on a leash around certain people and apologize if it bit anyone by accident, but you would still want it to be Free. To be Here. To be the Thing you Love that once was your heart.”

What a wonderful, magical, Magnificently FOOL-ish thing to try.

So! The blood has dried on my fingers. It’s time to get back to sewing and, of course, Mending! (And writing like my life depends on it, because it does.)

A squeeze and a ‘squunch’ for the first of the Month. Rabbit, rabbit and all that. May April showers bring you flowers. Blessings, Dear Ones, on your own Mending, your own dogs, demons, and dreams. What part of your heart is calling from within, begging to be Completed, begging to be Born? Let’s feed them all together.

Your Fool,

Nancy