“I spend the first twenty minutes of my morning walking the garden looking for miracles.” —May Sarton

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, if it’s true that the earth laughs in flowers, then someone told a whopper in the pumpkin patch! Enormous golden blooms are bubbling and frothing over the stone wall, all over the hillside, and what remains of the beans. Joy clogs all paths. Merriment abounds. Wild weeds snicker deliciously in pink and blue and white. Outrageous goldenrod is shrieking with glee all over the meadow. The six surviving sunflowers uneaten by the sheep are now eleven feet into the sky and reaching still. When they finally burst their mirth, no doubt it will come as a bombastic “PAH! HA HA!” that will make us all roll and clutch our ribs. I perch amongst them, happily catching contagious glee. After a summer fraught with rain, (which has been NO joke!), the pumpkin chuckles come to this hillside a little later than usual, making them ever more welcome—like that comic punch line that breaks the tension in a great drama.

Speaking of drama, it is with great relief that I relay the news that wee Festus, Flora, Fern and Fergus (Lambing season has been all about F’s this year…) and the rest of the lambs have pulled through the worst of the Barber Pole infestation. Their signs of anemia are diminishing. The bottle jaw is gone. They are eating well and regaining strength. I no longer have to carry little Festus around because he is too tired to keep up with the rest of the group. Their growth is likely to be stunted, as a result of this trauma, but that’s fine with me, since they are fiber animals anyway and not being raised for meat or breeding. I am calling Festus “the Boy Who Lived” since he has survived two murderous events in his lifetime already—from his own mother and these horrible parasites. My inner Irish person is saying bad luck comes in threes so I am still worried about him. I was supposed to feed them spinach, to try and increase their iron levels but like children of every species, they reject healthy stuff in general and spinach in particular. Perhaps I should feed him four-leaf clovers instead.

Sweet friends have credited me with “saving” these animals but I know my devotion to them is only a tiny part of a complex matrix and that I am minimally responsible at best. Still, my inner show-off is happy to climb the podium and bow for all the applause, which annoys the crap out of Prudence who reminds me that we can do nothing without the Divine Will of Providence, along with some great veterinary care and sage advice from fellow shepherdesses. A lot of the credit goes to the animals themselves—Shetland sheep are notoriously resilient, rugged little animals. And…we’ve had a damn good piece of luck. I’ve learned to appreciate that “all we can do is all we can do” when farm animals are concerned. Sometimes we win; sometimes we find ourselves sobbing into a freshly dug hole in the ground. “Shepherdess” is a game I play with the Fates. When we woolies win a turn, I guffaw like Goldenrod.

It’s still incredibly damp here. The potatoes are flourishing as if this is Ireland. I’ve barely worked the cattle at all this summer due to weather and scheduling conflicts. Instead, I try to get as much “Barbie time” with Gus and Otie as possible.

“What’s Barbie time?” Gus wants to know as I tie his halter to the hitching post.

“It’s when I brush your hair and daydream about how beautiful you are,” I say.

“Oh,” says Otie, snuggling into the scritches and scratches of the curry comb as it circles over his hide.

“We love Barbie time,” they say, closing their eyes dreamily and burping up wads of cud.

Morning time with these boys is precious time indeed. There is something soft and tender within me that is nurtured by the act of nurturing. I oil their horns and clean out their huge, furry ears with a mix of Vaseline, beeswax and citronella to keep the flies from biting them. These big “metro” bullocks love their daily brushings, massages, and beauty treatments and there is something infinitely satisfying to my little girl’s heart in the combing of someone else’s hair. I could do it for hours. I spray their tails with conditioners and comb out the snarls they way I used to comb doll hair long ago.

I called these dudes my “bovine Barbies” long before the Barbie movie came out.

I’ve been intrigued by the intense and conflicting reactions to this movie. I loved playing with Barbies as a child. Maybe such play did me more harm than good and put unreasonable thoughts in my head. But I doubt it. Those hard-boiled beauties represented pure escapism, Romance and Possibility. My sisters and I turned them all into nuns—Sisters of the Immaculate Kleenex with wimples taped to their heads and knotted dental floss for rosaries—so that we could play “The Sound of Music,” by far the most wonderful love story we’d ever seen. We all wanted to sing on mountain tops, wear clothing made of draperies, and fall in love with sea captains.

According to articles I’ve been reading, in the 1960’s the Barbie toy was supposed to teach young girls poise and fashion so that they could choose good husbands. If that’s so, I can assure you that playing with Barbies is perfectly safe: Years of playing with the things apparently had NO effect on me whatsoever. Yesterday, I went to work and worked half the morning—seeing clients, talking to other humans in a completely normal tone of voice—totally unconscious that I had put my dress on inside out. It was not until I was in the fitting room with a customer that I happened to glance in the mirror and spot a tag flapping at the back of my neck. Another day, I worked five hours with the back zipper of my dress only half way up. Apparently I had gotten distracted while dressing, or just quit when I couldn’t reach any further. Who knows? It amazes me that people will ask me for help with their garments when I don’t seem to know how clothing works on myself. “Fashion and Poise indeed!” mutters inner critic Prudence, rolling her eyes beneath her Kleenex wimple.

The thing the Barbies DID give me was a place to design, to dream, to create, to escape. I’m grateful for a childhood that gave me that. My sisters and I made our doll’s clothes and homes from things we had available. Shoe boxes were sports cars. A baby food jar glued upside down over a bit of wood made a great “lamp.” Blocks of wood slip-covered with socks made couches and chairs. We invented. We imagined. Playfully, we co-created. We learned to “see” the worlds we described to each other with our minds’ eyes—“here’s her couch; this is the parlor…” We had to explain these things to each other because sometimes our workmanship was so shoddy no one but the creator could understand what she was looking at. “Hey! That’s my window! That’s not the door—the door is over here…”

I love any toy that can do that for a child.

I still draw heavily on that “play-full” part of my soul in my daily work. My customers are my full-size Barbies—whom I adore and work hard to clothe in their own fitting and proper choices. (Thankfully, I’ve moved on from Kleenex as my fabric of choice.) Though sometimes I am tempted to pop their heads off to make a tight neck line easier to manage, I never view their bodies—no matter what size or shape or gender they are—with any judgment. This is how they came from the Manufacturer. I deal with what is there, without question. Neither do I look at their bodies and judge my own.

As a child, I had no idea that Barbie’s exaggerated proportions might cause dysmorphia in girls. It never occurred to me to compare myself to six inches of plastic. If anything, I was doing my best to make her world as realistic (i.e. like mine) as possible—not the other way around. I never aspired to walking on tip toes, wearing high heels, or riding side-saddle. I felt sorry for her that she could not actually bite into a cheerio covered in nail polish and experience the taste of a real donut. But I learned how to sew, to knit, and most importantly, to daydream and envision. I learned how to make whatever the game of the day needed or required. Sometimes all I wanted to do was create a beautiful little space and stare at it for hours. I still do this—just with larger hunks of wood, linen, wool, or Kleenex.

I’m pretty sure this is what the little girl in Mother Nature is doing as she’s plumping up the pumpkins, bejeweling the jewel weed, poking the pokeberries… Until everything Wild, including my soul, is awash with revelry, ingenuity, and Beauty. I could stare at it for hours.

Perhaps this is what is at the heart of all us “Menders.” We aren’t fixing anything that is “broken!” We are participating in a game that calls forth and celebrates the sacred interweaving of what is Possible and what is Fanciful (fancy-full!) from the available beauty around us—inviting us to smile in the form of neatly stitched buttonholes, grin in visions of voile or toile, and co-create in ever-expanding experiences of community and fellowship. We want things to fit if not Magnificently, perhaps just a wee bit better, whether it’s made of old curtains, duct tape, cotton, or silk. Most especially, we seek to help our fellow playmates create the visions we all know could be Real-ized with just a little more love and skill. “That’s not a wall, sister, it’s a window! The doorway is right here…” Please, come in. Laugh like a pumpkin blossom. It’s time to play!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy