I need a six month vacation twice a year. --unknown

Greetings Dear Ones!

Greetings from soggy Vermont! This blog might be a bit more rambly than usual. Let’s just say that it’s been a wee bit, um… DAMP here this week. By that, I mean Monday brought the kind of epic, biblical downpours that had Prudence pondering the sinfulness of mankind and researching the length of a cubit. The lambs had on their life jackets and snorkels and were marching around, two by two, wondering when I was going to fashion an Ark from some old wooden pallets. (I fashion everything we need around here out of old wooden pallets.) Thankfully, we live on a steep hill. The water didn’t get over their hooves.

Others were not so lucky. The torrents may have closed roads, neighborhoods, and businesses but they also opened hearts. I am awed and humbled by the sense of Community here and the willingness Vermonters have to help each other. So many folks have checked in with me to make sure I am ok. It’s lovely and instructive. THIS is how we live Together. “Vermont Strong,” is not just a saying. “We take care of our own, mend what’s broken, and extend our hands in aid to those in need,” says an email from a local corporation urging us local business owners to help our communities rise from this challenge. All fourteen counties of Vermont qualify for disaster relief and Mending. With yet more rain expected Thursday, it’s Flood season.

There are so many “seasons” in a tailoring shop. Prom season and Wedding Season are the most famous, but there is also “Vacation season” which is also happening now. This is when people give you three days or less to get everything done for them because they are going away somewhere that requires a whole new uniform without which they cannot survive the duration of their adventure. None of their regularly scheduled clothing will do. For some it is sundresses and formal evening wear, for others it is rock climbing gear.

“Did you have a nice vacation?” asks a customer recently.

“Vacation?” I mumble, scratching my head.

“Yeah, you were gone for three months. I couldn’t get an appointment online. I figured you must be traveling. Did you go to Ireland?”

I stare at her in disbelief.

“No, ma’am. I certainly wasn’t on a vacation. It was prom season, lambing season, wedding season, and graduation season. You couldn’t get an appointment because all of the time slots were filled by other customers. I was bringing work home with me nights and weekends to try to keep up.”

I said it as nicely as I could but still she curled her lower lip downward.

“Don’t you have a helper? I needed things done,” she said. “I assumed you were away.”

I may have been ‘round the bend’ as they say, but I was NOT away.

To be honest, I don’t want to go away. Though it’s lovely to go to fun places and do cool things, my dream is to stay Home, piling aged sheep dung on the “poo-tatoes,” pottering in the garden, and hanging out with the animals (animals who are NOT in the garden, just to be clear.) I have not created a life for myself that I am trying to flee. I relish the urgent turbulence of each season. Just when I get tired of hauling and stacking firewood, it’s time to relearn how to start the weed trimmer without flooding the engine. Just when I finish vacuuming the last of the prom glitter, it’s time for people to haul in their crop tops and swimwear. That’s just how it is here in the land of 36 seasons. And SWEET CORN Season is coming up soon! Wah-HOO!!!! Who’d want to miss that? I’m stock piling butter and salt.

For those who are taking vacations in Vermont, well… the test of a place is how beautiful it looks in the rain. As in Scotland, we can tell it’s summer because the rain is warmer than usual. There was one day when the “sunny” and the “warm” actually coincided, which caused some locals to part with their long johns for an afternoon. But the joy was short-lived. Had the ancient Greeks lived here, there would be a myth about some immortal toddler randomly spraying us with Demeter’s garden hose, laughing violently, then getting spanked by his mother as Phaethon goes galloping by in the Sun chariot momentarily ablaze. Thunderstorms, flash flooding, and damp lambs have been the norm lately.

The interstate is populated with SUVs with out of state plates loaded with camping gear. I see them and sigh. Those families are heading off to create the kind of memories that will only become funny years from now, after intensive therapy, when everyone who has to spend a week eating cold beans out of a tin and taking turns to poop in a bucket under a tarp has healed.

I’m telling everyone to keep an eye on their friends with naturally curly hair. It might be hard to tell the back of them from the front. Check to make sure their airways are clear, that they haven’t accidentally Velcro-ed themselves to the inner ceiling of their cars, or gotten snagged in some brambles during a hike in the woods, never to return. It’s a treacherous time for those of us with corkscrews for follicles. We struggle to get adequate nourishment and hydration under all that unruly wool. I look like a dandelion gone to seed. Years ago, in barometric conditions such as this, I once had a tufted tit-mouse dive bombing my head, ripping out nesting materials. (True story! We have it on video.)

This level of humidity is tragic for both hair and hay. A local at the feed store said to me recently, “Welp…gonna be a BAD year for hay this year…”

“I beg your pardon, Sir, just exactly when have we had a GOOD year?” I inquire. Every year there is hay drama. We grump if it’s too dry; we grump if it’s too wet. This year, apparently, it’s been too Much of everything. We’ll see. First cut, “out of the field” (that means you go get it yourself, right where the baler dropped it; there’s no delivery) is already averaging seven dollars a bale. Out of the barn is a dollar more. Delivered is yet more. As ever, I am hastily constructing and extending fence lines as quickly as I can so that my animals can eat grass instead of money.

“Nothing is more conducive to enhancing tranquility in a bucolic setting than setting two young steers loose to graze upon a lawn without fences,” said NO farmer, EVER. My bright idea was that (read the next part in a sing-songy tone) ‘they would stay right in the middle of that green, lush buffet and behave themselves like grateful gentlemen until I called to them in dulcet, domesticated tones that would prod them to proceed politely back to the barn.’ HA!.It turns out that their bright idea, once free, was to buck and plunge around the house—looking in the windows, tromping on the septic tank, messing up flower beds, and eating giant pots of cherry tomato vines right off the deck, then take off and cruise the neighborhood looking for something more interesting to do. Instead of dulcet tones, the neighbors heard a middle-aged banshee hanging out the open window of a Ford Explorer, screeching for her cattle, as she drove around clanging a feed scoop against the side of the car.

The steers have decided, rain or no rain, that there’s no point in living in a barn again when there is too much fun to be had outside the gate. This is probably how some people feel about vacations and freedom in general, though the two are vastly different.

Freedom, as I am fond of saying, requires Fences. In an effort to get my flock to eat as much free greenery as possible, I spent three hours bush-whacking a trail around Gus & Otie’s pasture to extend their current fence line into the woodlands behind the barn. They stood on their side of the wire, watching me intently the whole time. Apparently, Gus had no idea what I was doing. Otie knew.

As soon as I had the new wires hooked up and disconnected the old, Otie crashed right into the underbrush and began to munch. Gus paced the old familiar path and looked anxious. Where was Otie? Otie had just disappeared beyond the magic force field! Gus mourned. He went to his stall and lay down and moo-ed in a forlorn manner, grieving. Just a few yards away, unconcerned Otie was happily stuffing himself. To Gus’s utter relief, Otie returned an hour later with a full belly, plopped himself down in his usual place to cud and doze. He had great stories to tell. He had gone somewhere new to refuel and returned safe, happy, and replete. Gus, stuck behind strong mental barriers, could not do that. To his horror, Otie lurched to his feet and wandered off again. For two days, Otie got fatter and Gus grew nervous, lean, and gaunt, before he worked up the courage to follow Otie into the Great Unknown. “The vacation we often need is freedom from our own mind,” says Jack Adam Weber. When I went to check on them this morning, Gus peeked out from behind a mountain of multiflora rose brambles and smiled a guilty smile. He still doesn’t feel quite right about leaving his usual groove, though he’s filling out some.

Leaving our usual groove is harder for some of us. Sometimes it takes the violence of a natural disaster, or the gentle, persistent persuasion of a friend. Having said all that…the dream is happening again… the dream that I will do two things this summer—I want to hike one of the smallish mountains nearby and spend one whole day at a beach, basting myself with sun sauce and reading the kind of novel that requires one to go to confession. Too many summers have passed since I have managed to do either of these things. Both will probably involve picnics with a bit of sand in the sandwiches, friends, and a temporary absence of cattle. I’m ready for Something, if not a true vacation, at least a New Season for a day. Bring on Deep Summer: when laziness becomes respectable and we can disgrace ourselves with heaping piles of sweet corn and Gluttony. (I hope all this rain is making the corn grow!)

Maybe we’ll dry out by then…

Thanks for your Good Work, my loves! Send some of your good Mending energy to Vermont! The folks here could use it.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy