Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, it’s been a busy couple a weeks in Vermont! Since I last wrote, we’ve had another Nor’ Easter dump a foot of snow, New England had a 4.8 earth quake, and there was this Thing happening with the moon… (Perhaps you have heard about it?) Oh, and Prom Season has started! With five encrusted gowns on the rack, that slow choking death Death By Glitter—for sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, and seamstresses alike—has begun.

Everyone I know has been having Company. For a region with a strong streak of Hermit in it, it’s been an exciting and exhausting challenge. I’ve gotten a pretty good view of the wider implications of the recent solar eclipse from inside my shop windows, from the few people who could make time to come in and pick up their completed garments.

“I’d love to come in, but I have company arriving any minute,” said one customer after another in the days preceding April 8th.

“Traffic is going to be ridiculous,” advised a State Trooper whose uniform I mended. “Leave the highways for the tourists. Locals should stick to back roads.” The back roads in Vermont are like the secret passageways in grand manor houses that allow the servants to be discreetly mobile without interfering with the gentry they serve.

“They’ve closed a lot of trails to keep both the people and the wildlife safe,” said the game warden, who is having me sew an enormous bug net for a research project.

The eclipse was a Really Big Deal here. The last time Vermont was in the path of totality was 1932. Nearly 160,000 people traveled to the state to view this 2024 Eclipse. An estimated 50,000 people went to “The People’s Republic of Burlington,” which normally has a population of 44,595. Though accustomed to welcoming over 13 million tourists a year, we aren’t used to having 160,000 in a day! Friends were staying “with friends,” every bed and breakfast and air B&B was totally booked. Even ski lodges that normally close for the season were open and filled. Vermont suddenly felt like that hostess (me) who doesn’t want to turn anyone away and yet panics about where everyone is going to sleep, what they are going to eat, and most importantly, where they are going to relieve themselves of the byproducts of the digestion of all that locally brewed craft beer and artisanal cheese. “Please feel welcome to pee outside,” I tell my guests. Vermont tops the national chart as the state with the most septic systems—more than 55 percent of households. They don’t call it The Brave Little State for nothing!

As expected, Traffic was the biggest issue, which is inevitable in a tiny state with only two major highways and where more than 50 percent of the smaller roads are unpaved. (Have I mentioned it’s mud season and there is still snow on the ground?) Needless to say, the thousands of incoming people clogging the roadways deeply resented the other incoming thousands with whom they had chosen to “share” this momentous event. The troopers who came in to have their trousers hemmed told me that the traffic was bumper to bumper down Rt 91 until well past two in the morning. Folks ran out of gas. Gas stations ran out of gas. People used the road shoulders as a restroom.

I had eight people staying with me for the Eclipse. Since I live in southern Vermont and the path of totality was further north, they were on the road before dawn to get to a good viewing site. It took them three hours to get there and more than five hours to get back. They drove a total of eight hours for an experience that took less than four minutes.

“Was it worth it?” mutters Prudence in a way that indicates she doesn’t think so. She decided that we should stay home, on the farm, to make sure that the chores got done and animals taken care of on time. “A 97 percent eclipse is plenty,” she persuaded, “Someone needs to make dinner—for all Creatures great and small.” She thinks an awful lot about food for one who thinks we all should be fasting more.

Some of my returning guests said that four minutes was the best four minutes of their lives. Others thought differently. Rating life in four-minute chunks is not something I have done before so it is taking me a while to decide what my best four minutes have been. (I’ll get back to you on this.)

Last Monday afternoon, I spent a lot of minutes sitting quietly in the center of a golden moment, in shirt sleeves for the first time, enjoying the warmth of a day without glitter, peering occasionally through the cardboard safety glasses directly at the light bulb overhead. My beloved fellow hermit was the only other human with me at the stone fairy tea table in the garden. The sheep lay flopped around the pasture, cudding and snoozing. On the other side of the driveway, the ox-lings lay in the sun. My friend’s dog was locked in the barn, per her orders. “Please keep her confined for the entire eclipse,” she said. “I don’t want her to look at the sun and hurt her eyes.”

I asked the sheep if they wanted to share my eclipse glasses.

“No way,” they said. “Yours is the only species dumb enough to stare directly at the sun. We’re just going to keep our heads down and gobble green stuff like we always do.”

Not one of the animals looked up the entire time. They just lazed around, chewing. Had I not had the special glasses to help me see the black circle slowly crossing the sun, I would have had no idea something was happening. Meaning is something we find and assign through use of specialized vision.

The sky was blue and bright—only random wooly wisps of white here and there—as if someone up there were spinning and discarding sneds of fiber as she went. After a while, the light changed. It wasn’t dramatic—more like the way one changes the filter on a photo taken with a cell phone. The world went from “Lark” to “Gingham” then “Reyes.” It felt exactly like a storm coming on, with darkness, a chill, a breeze and the hush of all the birds and insects. And then, after a bit, it was warm and chirp-buzzing again.

My guests and friends were sending me photos of the scenes where they were—in crowds of people up mountain tops, some by water, some in fields… and I felt that initial rush of JOMO I usually feel when everyone else is doing something and I am not. (If FOMO is the “fear of missing out,” JOMO is the JOY of missing out!) Being around the energy of a crowd feels exhausting to me. But then niggling thoughts of missing out on Totality creep in. Should I have gone? A “Once in a lifetime” experience was only a few hours away. Why hadn’t I bothered? Why do I consistently settle for less than 100 percent of anything?

“You’ve experienced crowds of people before,” reminds Prudence. “And you will never know what you missed so it won’t matter.”

“Think of the animals,” says my inner Farmer, gazing fondly at her flock.

“But we aren’t getting something we might have really wanted,” pouts the inner child, feeling left out. “Everyone else is getting it. Why aren’t we?”

“Come on, how can you truly miss something you have never experienced?” says someone logical.

“People do it all the time, every day, with True Love,” murmurs the Angel within. “They don’t know what they are missing but they know they are missing it, bless them.”

“You are Disconnected,” whispers the inner demon. “You don’t Belong and you never will. You are Alone and ever more shall be so.”

“Rubbish!” I say, stroking the tiny, aged dog on my lap.

“Everyone looking at the sun right now is Together!” I announce. “Whether we climbed a mountain to see it or sat in our own front yard, or see it on a news screen from another part of the world. Some of them know it, some of them don’t. That doesn’t change a thing. We are all experiencing it Together.”

“Honey, EVERYONE is together, whether they see the sun or not,” says the Angel. “Nothing is the Same and yet it is all One, whether you stayed home to tend the pot roast or climbed the hill in wet sneakers to get a better look at your nearest star.”

So it is with Faith and Life and Mending. The Eclipse is just another Prom or Blog entry. We gather for “an Experience” and we each have one individually together. We try to tell each other what we saw, what we felt, how we tore our pants and why there is still some toilet paper stuck to our shoe. For some, our sense of isolation becomes heightened; for some our sense of connection is strengthened. Presence is the gift of being able to see ourselves seeing. Humans, like any other herd or pack animal, have a deep longing for connection—in our intimate relationships, in our communities, with strangers, and with some Deeper Truth about our existence. Both the Faithful and the Cynical yearn for Meaning. Every one of us is lonely and trying to put that loneliness into perspective.

Speaking of uniquely lonely yet communal…Today is the SIX year anniversary of this Blog! I gave myself a deadline of “seven years” weekly apprenticeship to this craft. I’m proving to myself I can stick with things (mostly). It’s not going well. I have one more year to get my act together. Writing is the hardest thing I have ever done—mainly because it’s impossible to notice improvement. (“You got that right,” yips Prudence.) Even the act of plowing the driveway with a tractor is less frustrating. Success is measurable when one plows a driveway.

All I really have learned is that this hellish little discipline is part of the best four minutes of my life each week and I cherish the connections it forges with all you dear, Dear Ones. For me, there is a deep comfort in being able to share, to prove to myself that I am not looking at the sun or that prom gown alone. We’re on this amazing, ridiculous celestial Ferris wheel together. Thanks for keeping me company!

True Mending does not happen without the touch of the hands—whether by needle and thread, a gentle caress, the stirring of a spoon, or calloused fingertips dancing on a keyboard. Percentages be damned: Whatever you are doing to remind yourself that Everything Matters—especially YOU, keep doing it! We aren’t alone. We ARE capable of making things Better. Let the Mending Continue!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy