Shear Bliss

“All’s Wool that ends Wool…”

Greetings Dear Ones!

Of all the delights of Spring—one that combines everything from the Reverent to the Ridiculous—my favorite festival is Shearing Day.  For centuries, ancient cultures around the globe have been gathering to celebrate major agricultural festivals around the shearing of sheep. These festivals represented a “convivium” involving feasting, hospitality, and traditional celebrations of gathering and sharing of the abundance.  The wool represented vital economic activity, as it was used for both clothing and trade.  It was a time of community bonding and strengthening of social ties.  Generosity was expected and appreciated. 

In ancient times, sheep shearing was also seen as a religious representation of God’s provision and stewardship of His creation.  The quantity of wool represented the abundance of blessings bestowed on the faithful and the shearing itself as the good management of those blessings. Ceremonies around the shearing of the first fleece (given as an offering to the gods) and the last sheep (to celebrate the completion of another cycle of prosperity), even rituals around the blessing of the sheep, reveal the importance of Gratitude and community in the eyes of God.

In my annual experience of the modern version of events, the loftier we try to make it, the more ridiculous it becomes, yet the more Basic it is, the more that something Sacred is revealed.  Such is my loving yet honest tribute to farm life, where beauty and absurdity coexist, and sometimes require the use of rubber gloves and chlorhexidine.

“For heaven’s Sakes,” says Prudence, “You are NOT going to tell them about the pizzle rot, are you???” She is already frantically grasping for her smelling salts.  

“I think the pizzle rot is a very important part of this story,” I say.

“Let’s not mention things they might google after 10pm and regret,” pleads Prudence.  “Stick to the childhood storybook themes—Bah Bah Black sheep, three bags full and whatnot. Absolutely No One needs to know about pizzle rot!”  

Like all these quaint and historic pastimes I get myself involved in, there’s a lot more “under the surface” that I think people ought to know.  It’s not all glamorous “sheep are delightful fluffy clouds” and nineteenth century pastoral poetry, my friends.  There’s a lot about livestock hygiene issues that no one mentions in the fairy tales.   So! When your knitting becomes the gateway drug to spinning and then spinning becomes your gateway drug to owning your own sheep, you have no idea how far down you will sink as a result of your addictions.  

I say this because I just spent the entire weekend as a demonstrator at Historic Deerfield’s “Wooly Wonders” Spring Festival.  I was “the spinner” walking and talking and spinning on my Great wheel, as well as teaching the mechanics of other types of spinning wheels.  (I can do a five-minute speech that illustrates the entire three-thousand-year history of spinning and the technological innovations that have made the bond between humans and sheep so essential, political, and profitable before your toddler drags you back to see the bubble machine at the wash tub station.)

Every year, I speak to tens of starry-eyed people who come to a dignified museum setting, watch a shearing demonstration in which the individual being shorn behaves with exemplary decorum, watch a bit of effortless spinning that took me months of secret cussing to learn how to do, and leave inspired to make their own clothing.  What could be simpler or easier, eh? Especially if you are a young man with a long beard with and exhausted-looking wife whose fourth child is dragging her back to the bubble machine.

The homesteading movement is alive and well in rural New England.  I have subsequently helped some folks purchase their own spinning wheels online and given them lessons at my home.  And while I support these Suburban Optimists one hundred percent in the pursuit of their dreams, I feel obligated to mention that they are not exactly signing up for a life of linen aprons, vintage wooden butter churns, and poetic chores.  Once upon a time, I too thought I would be gently carding wool by candlelight, not someone who could say “pizzle rot” out loud without flinching, as if I was simply discussing the weather.  There’s a whole aesthetic around sheep that does not seem to include “hang on, let me just check something under here…” but should.

Sheep, especially in the bible, are often portrayed as shy, quiet, Innocent, blameless victims.  They are noble, humble, submissive—the very metaphor for Christ.  It comes as a bit of a shock to try to subdue of these Christ figures in what becomes a full-contact wrestling match with 80 pounds of wool, hooves, and lanolin, and realizing that one is not the main character in this interaction.

My sheep will follow me everywhere—trotting behind me with adoring devotion like something out of a Wordsworth poem (a poem who knows I might have corn chips in my pockets)—UNTIL the moment I need them to do anything specific.   These are the moments I realize that I don’t live with or near Nature. I live IN it. And it has some strong opinions.   These are the moments I love and want to share because they don’t mean the Dream is ending—they mean the Dream has a lot more details to it than you first thought.  This is true of most dreams.  Sheep are everything--Noble, ridiculous, occasionally alarming, completely endearing, and sometimes downright gross.  You don’t stop loving them when things get gross. You just adjust your definition of what gross really means. (Kind of like parenting a newborn.)

I think this is true about almost every single version of love and life I have ever experienced at more than a casual glance.

Sheep understand a great many things.  They may or may not understand the ancient wisdom so often attributed to them.  They certainly look as if they do, when bathed in the morning light in a dewy meadow, but up close they are more suspicious and judgmental than advertised.  They do not appreciate a spa treatment they did not ask to receive.  Nothing humbles the homesteader faster than trying to manage an opinionated animal who does not happen to agree with your plans for him. “Especially if those plans include a drizzle on the pizzle on the nether of the wether with the rot that’s hard to spot from a dribble with a sizzle,” observes the Hermit of Hermit Hollow, channeling his inner Danny Kaye.

And yet, even here The Dream is still beautiful: The newly shorn sheep, scrambling to its feet, looking vaguely like it has misplaced something important, startled and suddenly tiny, wandering off in search of his flock. The piles of lustrous wool are real and tangible proof that the dream has arrived and, unlike its original imaginary version, this dream comes with an undeniable, earthy, organic fragrance—in the fleece itself and emanating from the armpits of all involved.  I inhale deeply, look at the piles of wool and the bottle of chlorhexidine antiseptic scrub next to the shearing board, and think “Ah, so this is also part of the Dream we are calling Life.”

And it is.

When I said I wanted to have sheep, my commitment to Pastoral Bliss did not include ulcerated penises that have been trapped in airless, matted, urine-soaked belly wool.  But now it does and I’m ok with that.  Experience is when Beauty becomes entwined with Reality, with mud, with Rot, with smells I have stopped trying to identify fully.

Sheep, it turns out, are NOT the dream.  They are better than any dream because they are Real. Pizzle Rot and all.   I know that where Beauty and the Absurd can graze side by side in the same pasture, I somehow belong there too.  And so do you! Thanks for coming along!  You are welcome here.

Keep Spinning and Weaving those Magnificent Dreams that stink in the best possible ways, Dear Ones! Thank you for doing all your Good Work! Keep Mending!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Yes, You MOO! (May)

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s May!  It’s May!! I am writing to you from the faerie tea table in the garden.  It’s a gloriously sunny day that almost (key word almost) makes me think I won’t have to use a snow shovel again for a minute. Thus begins the Great Vermont Planting Gamble—the rhubarb is up, the peach trees have already begun to blossom, would it hurt to sneak a tomato or two into the soil? Yes.  The answer is yes.  Putting tomatoes in now is like letting the chickens run loose while the coyote family in the hollow behind the barn is nursing a litter of pups. Who wants to live dangerously?  I want to… but I plant lettuce and spinach instead.

I am sitting here in one layer—just a shirt and jeans—and the only wool in sight is on the back of a ewe scheduled to be shorn on Tuesday.    The chickens are pecking through last year’s rotting leaves and feasting on worms.  I have been enjoying their eggs (the chicken’s that is, not the worms’). They make a lovely breakfast mixed with wild ramps foraged in the woods and fresh dandelion greens that are as close as the front doorstep.   The roosters are crowing, birds twittering (the barn swallows arrived on Wednesday!) and everywhere there are glad tidings of bug lust and amphibian honeymoons.  Between all the fresh food and flirting, you’d think I was at a tequila bar in Boston’s back bay instead of here at the Land of Lost Plots.

I need to keep myself very quiet though.  I’m hiding. I don’t want Gus and Otie to know I’m out here.  Once they see me, they moo and complain in obnoxious tones of increasing frustration.  They see no reason for me to be doing anything other than visiting them and scritching and scratching at all of their itchy places.   They are big boys, now five years of age, and their itchy places are the size of chalkboards.  I have taken a small garden rake and used it gently to scratch a wider area than my hands can manage.  This makes their eyes roll back in their heads and their lips twitch as they extend their necks in funny spasms of bliss.  Why should moments like this end without consternatious mooing? Their fur is shedding in big clumps that little birds take away as nesting material.  Sometimes the boys will “scratch me back” with their 80-grit tongues and we will stand in a grooming pod—two of them getting less hairy, one of us getting so coated in dander, dust and hair that I cannot enter the house without stripping off in the mudroom first and shaking my clothes outside.

They make an embarrassing amount of noise when they know I am around but busy with other things that are not them.  They are as imperious as nineteenth-century aristocrats ringing the parlour bell and bellowing for service.  One of my neighbors has actually enquired what the noise is all about.  “Are they dying? Starving? Have a broken leg?” she wants to know.  “At what point should I come down and help or call the vet?  I never do because I can hear you talking to them, so I know you are there.  But it sounds like they are being murdered.  I had no idea cows could be so loud!”

The truth is, they are just REALLY spoiled.  They have an entire round bale of hay to themselves to eat, not to mention fresh green grass.  Their trough of water is filled three times a day and never empties.  They have mineral blocks and salt blocks, and they are in pristine health.  They are just bored.  They want to be brushed and petted and fed long bits of grass they cannot reach.  They want to have their halters on and go for walks—dare I say “work”?  They are smart creatures who are extremely social.  They like to have a sense of purpose. And they have learned they can summon me whenever they want because I don’t want the neighbors disturbed.  I know we live in Vermont and it’s unlikely that anyone is going to call the cops because “the cows are too loud,” like they do about barking dogs, but I am trying to be a good neighbor. 

“No good can come of this,” says Prudence.  “You are going to have to Ferberize these cows or we aren’t going to have a moment’s peace all summer.”  She is referring to Dr. Ferber’s method of letting infants cry for longer and longer periods of time before being scraped lightly with a rake.

“This makes no sense to me.  These Jerseys are stubborn creatures.  The Ferber method is just going to make them persist longer and longer,” I say, “It’s best to just keep hiding from them as best I can.”  

They have learned that I am home when my truck is in the driveway.  They see me drive in and they bounce and gallop along the fenceline as ungainly as middle-aged men trying to contra dance with each other for the first time.  Their bellies swing out to each side as they bump and stumble and grin, screeching to an ungainly halt and sticking their tongues up their noses in joyous anticipation of a cuddle.   They are the most relentless of suitors whose dance moves are genuinely dangerous.

Amidst all the jolly noise is a palpable silence too—a silence I cannot stop hearing—that fills me with a sense of sorrow and the humble echoes of the Passage of Time.  It is the sound of my neighbor’s dog NOT barking.  She “crossed over the rainbow bridge” last week and it hurts my heart every time I realize I will never hear her bark again.

Iris loved to bark.  She barked as if it was her job (It was!) and she put in a lot of overtime.   She was the great Pyrenees I have mentioned in previous blogs.  She was like having a pet polar bear roaming the neighborhood.  She kept the coyotes at bay, literally, by baying at them night and day.    Remember the time she got loose and came to find me hiding naked in the outdoor tub after I accidentally dumped an entire cart of cow manure on myself and decided to rinse off outside? (This was a blog a few years back.)  I heard the teenagers in her house coming over to catch her and I lay flat on my back in the tub, trying to be invisible, but Iris would not leave the tub and a teenager came over to grab her and then he and I were both suddenly screaming face to face in horror.  The poor guy is probably still having nightmares! He was just valiantly dragging her home when two of my own damn Jack Russells came tottering out of the house and decided, despite their age, hearing loss, heart conditions and the fact that one of them was missing a leg, they could take on a hundred-pound mountain dog in her prime.  So instead of slinking into the house to get dressed, I found myself sprinting naked towards the nearest dog fight.  Good times.  Good times. 

All those dogs are gone now.  Probably in a heavenly pub somewhere, having pints of rainbow stew and laughing about all the mischief they caused. 

I miss them. 

I kind of miss Winter too. 

Spring is great, don’t get me wrong, but Winter feels like a grief I am not quite ready to shed.  I like the cold, the isolation, the sense of “going inward” to contemplate, to mourn, release, and rest.  Spring is so “outward, onward, upward,” that it feels a little exhausting too. 

There is an ache that comes with every Transition.  We pause, hung in an awkward balance, unable to plant anything but the smallest and hardiest of seeds right now.  Old leaves need to be raked, the soil prepared.  There is a pain that comes with leaving old Loves that must remain Unfinished, even as new loves keep arriving daily. Our emotions, like our days, begin with sunshine at breakfast, sleet at noon, barefoot optimism by 4:pm and end by a woodstove by nightfall.  Winter needs its closing ceremonies.  But, as Frost says “Ah, when to the heart of man/was it ever less than a treason/To go with the drift of things,/And bow and accept the end/Of a love or a season?”

There are barks we shall hear no more, especially over All THAT MOOING!!!

Keep Mending my Dear Ones!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

A Fool's Gift

“Love isn’t Love until you give it away.”

Greetings Dear Ones!

Happy April Fool’s Day!  With a pinch and a punch for the first of the month, white rabbits, white rabbits and all that tomfoolery!

I am indeed feeling a bit like a fool as I attempt to type on a keyboard full of animal hair.  Everything on the farm is shedding its winter layers like kids on a playground whose grannies bundled them in too many sweaters.  To pet anything from cows to cats is to have your hand in an instant mitt of fluff.  I am vacuuming multiple times a day, but the kitchen still seems like a snow-globe.  Who wants hairy eggs for breakfast?

Having never had cats before I adopted five skittish barn cats from my dear friend who died two years ago, I had no idea they would generate this much fiber.  For the first year, they skulked around the perimeters of the house and barn and cellar.  In December, I was so charmed when two of the cats chose to move indoors to winter by the wood stove.  In the past three months, they have become cuddly pets. I had no idea that I would be able to spin a skein of yarn from all the fur they leave on the couch. It makes me wonder, why do I even need sheep?

Yes, I was a Fool to take all five cats when other homes could not be found.  But it’s worth being a fool now and then for either Love or Learning.

The fools in Shakespear are always my favorite characters.  They are the wise innocents whose wit exposes the foolishness of their “betters” and thus subverts the social order.  Like cats, they supply life-affirming comedy in dark times.  The Fool archetype is often one who is unconventional, naïve, and willing to challenge boundaries.  The fool is the Ignorant who embraces Learning while not having the foggiest idea how much learning will be required by the end. 

I have been a Fool for most of my life.  Occasionally, it is my pleasure and privilege to meet and welcome other fools on this Mending journey.  Sometimes, for brief, heady moments, I get to play the part of a Wise One, though my favorite role, of course, is always The Fool.

And only a Fool would help another Fool make a pair of Vogue slacks—complete with pocket welts—from scratch.  Vogue is not the “starter” pattern.  Simplicity, New Look…these are easier for most beginners.  But Fools and Beginners are not always the same thing, as we shall see.  

This week’s Fool was sitting outside my shop door when I arrived breathless and late for work. I had had to use bolt cutters to free the horns of a sheep who had gotten stuck in the hay feeder and lost time doing chores and lost more time getting stuck in single lane traffic due to road work (Mud Season, y’all).  When I saw him sitting there, I panicked.

“Did we have an appointment?” I ask, frantically searching my brain for a memory.  It was not a day I typically take in new clients but I might have told someone to come in and forgotten I had done so.

“No,” he said. “I just took a chance to stop by and see if you were here.  I called you and left a message about needing help with a pair of pants I am making.”

“Oh, yes!” I remember now.  Something about plackets on pockets.  He holds out several muslin samples and a pattern.
“I think this pattern may be wrong. I keep following the instructions, but it does not make any sense to me.”

“Come on in,” I say. “Let’s have a look.”

I read the instructions many times.  They did not make sense to me either.  I know how to make plackets without a pattern and do it my own way.

“If it’s plackets you want, I can show you what I do,” I offer. “Because this doesn’t look like the easiest way to do it.  My way is easy.”

He very polite but insistent. “I don’t want short cuts.  I’ve watched hours of video on You-tube and it’s not like this pattern.  I’m going to be making a lot of clothing from patterns.  I need to learn how to learn new things from a pattern. This pattern.”

Damn. 

This means that we two fools are going to have to figure out this pattern together. 

“Ok!” I cried. “Challenge Accepted! Let’s do it together step by step from scratch.”

So I get some scrap fabric and read each step aloud and do it as he watches.  I don’t trace any of the actual pattern pieces or markings.  I just cut rough facsimiles and follow the directions.  Sometimes, reading doesn’t make sense; only DOING does.  Following patterns step by step, reading things aloud over and over again is actually how I learned to sew.  Figuring out what the vocabulary means and what the instructions require is the bulk of learning ANY craft.  To do it alone is frustrating but effective.

Just recently, I had made three custom vests, all with welted pockets.  (I know how to make a welted pocket!) For the uninitiated, a welted pocket is a functional, internal pocket that is made by cutting through the outer fabric, then a welt, or separate strip of fabric, covers the opening. Sometimes they have single welts, sometimes double—above and below the pocket opening.  You see them most commonly on jackets, coats, trousers, and vests.  They are not for the average beginner to attempt, though I, perhaps controversially, approve of beginners attempting to do whatever the hell they want to do!  So much Good comes from Challenges only the highly motivated can withstand. People generally are not motivated by the mundane, hence the invention of plackets.

Still, these instructions are a bit of a muddle.  I must return to “Beginner Mind” and, to my surprise, I learn a lot.  Funny how, from fiddle tunes to placketed pockets, a return to basics is always the jump start towards mastery!  I learn so much that I now like the way the Vogue plackets turn out way better than my “easy” version.  The Vogue way adds several steps that make the resulting plackets infallibly precise and beautiful.

“Thank you for teaching me,” I whisper humbly to the pattern on the table.  

Both my student and I are overjoyed by the neat, flat result.  

“Can I keep this?” he wants to know of the sample we have created.  

“Yes, of course!” I say, “But I did most of that work.  If you have time, I think you should tear apart the two disaster samples you brought in and follow the directions on your own so that you know that you can do it yourself before you leave.”

“Are you kidding me?” he asks, astonished and delighted.

“Do you have time?” I ask.  “I can do my own work around you.  I will ignore you.  Talk out loud if you have to—sometimes that is the only way to do it.  There’s something about hearing our own voice out loud that aids in comprehension.  Do two of them on your own and then you will really own this.”

We both get to work.  As a teacher, the hardest thing to do is to watch a student struggle.  I resist the urge to make three plackets in succession for him, knowing that a butterfly’s wings need the heart-pumping struggle against the trapping cocoon to be able to inflate and soar. 

I wait.  I put a new zipper in a ski coat, remembering all my struggles with learning how to do that.  I take a moment to revel in all I know and the joy of being able to share it with one as passionate about making things as I am.

He reads things aloud.  He sews something backwards.  He has to cut it free and try again.  He works on how to orient the right sides and wrong sides of the fabric, which is tricky because he is using muslin to practice and it looks identical on both sides.  He keeps at it until his head begins to cave it. 

“I need a break,” he says.  We have reached the point where the thoughts are like old film, stuck and bubbling into goo over the hot projector bulb.  The brain needs to cool.

He takes a walk down the hall but he is back soon.  This time, it is to triumph.

This is the moment I have spent the last hours living for.  I am not disappointed. He HAS it!  He can do not just one but twenty-one if he has to.  And he will.  He is going to make himself a lot of trousers.  His excited internal designer is already cutting up all kinds of fabulous fabric and fashion combinations.  All he needed was for his fingers to catch up with his dreams and now, watch out! This guy is Empowered!

All of it—the struggle, the many attempts, the failures, the need to take a break, the return, the tenacity that leads to triumph—has been necessary.  I have been the happy doula while he has given birth to the part of himself he longed to become.   We have been Fools and it has been worth it.

As he packs up to leave, he says “What do I owe you for your time?”  

I say slowly, with dead seriousness, thinking of my dad, who always told me my treasure was in my head, “There is no way you can pay me for this.   For one thing, it is a privilege to know what I know.  I understand that as blessing and an obligation, just as I could never hope to repay all those who help me along the way as I learn.  There are teachers and students who come up as we need them.  When it is your turn, please, be a Teacher.  Promise me you’ll share our treasure with someone else. That would be the only payment I ask.”

He nods slowly.  He gets it.  

In less than a week, he is posting a video of himself in the most gorgeous pair of pants.  They look amazing.  He turns to show the back of the trousers.  There they are: PERFECT plackets.  The whole effect is stunning.  He may have begun as a Fool trying a New Thing, a new skill in mid-life, but he is sprinting towards mastery.  

I am filled with gratitude that I got to be part of that story.  I think about that saying “Love isn’t Love until you give it away.”   When we share what we love with others who then go on to share with others, the love ripples back to us in ways we cannot imagine.  It’s never Foolish to share our skills or love. What better way to mend a ragged and magical world?  And think of the Fabulous pants we’ll get to see!

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!  How will you be a Fool today?

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Mud & Syrup

“If the Mud ain’t flyin’, you ain’t tryin’” –seen on a T-shirt

Greetings Dear Ones!

I can tell by this client’s area code and his drawling way of speaking that “he ain’t from ‘round here.”  I very much hesitate to ask people where they are “from” because, as someone who has lived so many places and felt like an outsider in most of them, I know how questions like that can touch deep nerves and wounds around “belonging.”  Something about his broad and cheery smile emboldens me.  I ask. He’s from the deep south, been here since September. “Welcome!” I say. “So… How do you like Winter?”  He grins even more brightly and gushes “I love it!  It’s just like the movies!”

“Well, you got here just in time for one of the most Wintery Winters in a good long while.  It’s been a long, proper winter.”

“I know!” he says gratefully, “I hate to see it end.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “This isn’t the end. This is just the start of Mud Season. They overlap. Sometimes until June.” 

Mud season is not so much a season as a personality disorder that grips the state of Vermont between the first “Thaws of delusion” and the height of Black fly season.

As a seamstress, I have seasons of my own.  I measure time not in months but in zippers, glitter, and the emotional states of people trying on their summer clothes with their winter bodies. Right now, we are all in a mood best described as ebulliently over-heated and frosty.  

From the knees down, everything from seamstresses to pick-up trucks is an earthy, committed brown that refuses to recant. Man is not Dust; he is MUD, and to mud he shall return.  What is mud anyway but humidified dust?  Pilgrims enter the shop like abstract paintings whose feet and paint are still wet.  They scatter the floor with the clay pigments of their journeys.  I sweep and sweep but the floor continues to lie there—unsanctified. It has accepted its fate.  We are all just collaborating with dirt in every form now.

Meanwhile, naked Maples stand stoically—their navels tapped with miles of IV tubing, as if entire forests are on life support.  They empty their arteries for our pancakes.  Emotionally, we are the ones on life support, in need of vast quantities of buttered hotcakes to survive our wanderings in this wasteland, eating like bears who’ve just woken up.  Caffeinated beverages help but not enough.  Syrup soothes. We need the sweetness given by these trees.  I put it in everything from salad dressing to succotash for, just as ‘man cannot live by bread alone,’ neither can woman eat pancakes at every meal.  (I’ve done extensive research on this, personally.) “This explains the Winter Body,” mutters Prudence snidely.

This part of the year, even though it is only three months in, feels like mile 11 of a half marathon.  This is not the glamorous beginning where we are all fresh and looking cute in our spandex running gear and full of energy drinks and optimism, nor the glorious finish where someone hands you a banana and tells you you’re amazing.   No, this is the stretch no one likes to talk about—the loneliest miles where no one is cheering for you, you are questioning your entire life and wardrobe choices and there isn’t a porta-potty in sight.  We are not so much running as plodding desperately to a subtle soundtrack of suction noises. Every step is a question followed by a brisk negotiation with our nervous system.  Will this foot come back up?  Will it still be wearing a boot?  For the first time in 58 years will my legs perform a perfect split? If so, do I have the ambulance on speed dial? Questions like this define the average morning voyage to the barn. 

Inside the shop, a variety of ragged Ski jackets line up like grim soldiers who refuse to believe the war is ending.  Zippers have been blasted by chairlifts and the abusive lateral force of winter bodies trying violently to navigate endless layers as they enter and exit a vehicle.   One by one, I take my scalpel and cut gently along their stitches, remove all their broken teeth, and replace them.  Neither of us can bring ourselves to discuss the horrors they must have seen in the field.  

On Monday, the first prom gown arrived.  It is green (my favorite color) so I forgive it for its sequins and shimmering optimism.  It looks wildly out of place next to the shattered Carhartt jacket and the bombed-out jeans smelling faintly of woodsmoke and grit.

This is “March.”  It is the only month that is also a command. “It needs to be!” says Prudence, “otherwise, you would just wallow over British sit-coms from the seventies and get maple syrup in your knitting. You need to MOVE. Get on with it!”  I hear this in my head each time I fill out a work order for myself and date it: MARCH! 

And so we March—both freezing and thawing, celebrating and enduring.  One customer comes in wearing a T-shirt on a thirty-seven-degree-and-sunny day and hands me two down coats.  “I won’t be needing these for a while,” she says breezily, “Take as long as you like to fix them.”  Another comes in thirty minutes later, all bundled up in mittens and layers of wool.   It is now thirty-seven degrees and cloudy.  These are two completely different climates in Vermont. 

None of us has any idea what to wear.  Not a single one of us.

Closets across the county look like anything from archeological digs to crime scenes as residents rummage through their thrifted bargains and regretted choices, searching for something that might work for a day that will start at 27F degrees, peak at 52F degrees, and finish with a light dusting of snow just in time for the evening commute.  The goal is to look as fashionable as possible while still being able to amble in a gulch.  A bride comes in Muck boots for a fitting saying, “I have not yet bought any shoes.”  From the top down, one belongs in a ballroom—but underneath, she is ready for the bog. I can’t help wondering if she means this literally.  Does she mean ANY shoes? Or just shoes for her wedding dress?  It’s hard to know.  This time of year, the thought of anyone wearing anything other than wellies or mucks seems absurd.  One of my favorite things to do when I am at the grocery store is to count the number of people wearing knee-high waterproof boots.  (It’s most of them.)

As a seamstress, my job is to project confidence in people’s choices and to give them the miracles they require, even when the laws of physics are involved.  Proper footwear is as important as hemlines that skim the earth safely.  True Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder; it’s also in the ability to remain upright while processing from pick-up truck (or Subaru) to the altar.

Constant Temperature swings are a problem—creating a sense of bi-polar mania in the inhabitants.  We shed our layers with reckless joy as soon as it’s a degree or two above freezing.  We shovel a path to the grill and barbeque as if we are at the beach.  “Yes,” tuts Prudence, “as if your idea of a beach includes snowbanks covered with parts of the driveway and a palpable sense of betrayal.   As soon as the sun dips, we “beach people” are hermit crabs stuffing our soft winter arses back into those too-hastily-discarded woolen exoskeletons.  This is why Flannel is the state uniform.  If nothing else, it’s as emotionally supportive as pajamas we can wear in public.   Unless it’s July, you can’t go wrong with flannel.

The mud, of course, is NOT content to remain outside.  It follows us everywhere like a puppy making messes on the floor.  I open the rolled-up cuffs of jeans needing to be hemmed and it is there.  I find it on the elbows of coats, the hems of skirts, and sometimes even in my lunch. “All sinners must eat their peck of dirt before they die,” reminds P.  I notice the way fabrics respond to mud is how so many of us respond to criticism.  Some absorb, some resist, some shed it without a second thought, and some will never be the same, no matter how long they soak in a tub of warm water and listen to self-help gurus discuss “boundaries.”

I know it sounds like I am grumbling here but I absolutely love this season.  From within, I hear Marcus Aurelius cheering us on: “If something external distresses you, the pain arises not from the thing itself but from your judgement of it!” There is no glory in the lack of adversity. There’s something almost heroic about Mud Season in Vermont that folks who only experience ice as “something in a glass” while toasting “here’s mud in your eye” never get to experience.  I’m proud of us.  We squish and slip our way through burlesque days that feel lined with banana peels, yet every well-placed step is itself a triumph.   We keep going.  Even as we mend the coats we dream of not needing and witness the youth trying on prom gowns with wooly underwear, We March.

People who say “I’m SICK of Winter” bug me.  We live in NEW ENGLAND, for heavens sakes! What did you expect? Roses in February? (ha!) Besides, it’s not winter anymore.  It’s Mud Season—this limerent Lenten time of anticipation, preparation, perhaps even contrition, and that earthly, earthy, (downright muddy!) swirl of What Shouldn’t Be mixed with What IS that strengthens us for What’s to Come (which, let’s face it, is Black Fly Season).

To me—this is a time of Poetry and seams.  Seams are about joining things together at their edges.  (“Goodness knows, Girl, you are ON the Edge!” insists Prudence.) We are inhabiting many edges in the fabric of our days.  Sometimes those things go together naturally, sometimes not.  Sometimes the result is plug ugly, sometimes stunning. In March, all kinds of weird things go together—like mud and ice, T-shirts and parkas, maple syrup and knitwear. “Marcus, tell her again how she is just a tiny soul, carrying a corpse!” pleads Prudence.

Corpse or Parka, whatever heaviness you may be carrying with you on your winter body in the mud, if you happen to pass a tiny sewing shop with a floor littered with thread and March madness, come on in.  Just wipe your boots first. Or not.  At this point, it hardly matters.  

Keep slogging, Dear Ones!  Onward MARCH!  You got this!  Thank you for your Good Work muddy boots and all.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

A Wee Bit Cracked

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We must hatch or go bad.” —C.S. Lewis

Greetings Dear Ones,

When I love someone (or several someones) very much, I make them a special batch of pollutants called “homemade scones,” which consists of taking a bowl of several kinds of refined white powders like salt, sugar, glutinous flour, and baking powder and adding heavy cream and currants to it.  I slather the dough in melted butter, bake it at 400F until golden, and serve up warm, mildly toxic, love-from-home in a basket, wrapped in a pristine Scottish tea towel.  Of course, according to any health minister worth her salt (or gluten-free flour) it’s just about the worst thing you can do for someone you love (“it’s so inflammatory!”) but for some reason, a vegan broccoli salad, though infinitely better for one’s colon, does not translate affection in quite the same way.  

So! When I came home from the shop last week and discovered that I was OUT of most of the necessary white powders, and the cream, and had not enough of the requisite currants, I panicked.   I was going to a concert in Boston and wanted to bring the band some homemade goodies (“You mean some homemade crimes against the pancreas,” says Prudence) to show my love and appreciation for their music and also for their particular kindness towards a young flute-player I adore.   The band leader had loaned him a flute of particular value and had been incredibly generous with his time, tutoring, and encouragement.  It wasn’t really my place to do so, but I wanted to transpose my appreciation into baked goods on the lad’s behalf.  I thought this was a Wonderful, Amazing, Unique idea.

Only now, I couldn’t do it.  There wasn’t time to get to the nearest grocery store AND bake AND shower.  What to do?

“NOT showering is out of the question,” said Prudence.  “Don’t even think it.”

“You could just say “thank you,” said the Hermit of Hermit Hollow, who was also attending the concert.  “Words are enough. Gratitude is always welcome.”

WHAT???

I immediately disregarded this information.  Some words have power, it’s true. Words like “No,” and “Whoa,” and “I beg your pardon ma’am but your shopping cart is over there, where you left it; this one’s mine…”  But when you want to show someone you are TRULY appreciative and admiring, you serve them something, right?

“Absolutely!” said the sheep, munching happily as I flung hay into their manger. “Food is what love is all about!  Sharing food is deeply communal and significant.  It means someone is part of your herd, your tribe, worthy of your limited time and resources. Words might mean something, but they are also cheap. Food, especially these days, is not cheap.  Words coming out of someone’s mouth are not as powerful as food going into someone else’s.”

I agreed.  But what to do? 

I fed the cats.  I watered the oxen. I checked the clock. There was barely going to be time to shower at this point. 

I went into the hen house.  The proud little pullets had filled a nesting box with fresh eggs.  They were gorgeous—whites, blues, and browns from all the different breeds of hens.  Ever since February 15th, with the return of the daylight hours, I have been finding ever more eggs.  Outside, the seasonal battle rages. Icy winds howl and roar yet in the silent nests are delicate oval signs of Renewal. Life goes on. Something soft and warm and fluffy will triumph over this brutality in the end.  We just need to wait (and keep stacking firewood by the back door). Old Man Winter and the Spring Maiden are locked in their annual mortal-combat—mud wrestling all up and down the driveway, leaving huge brown ruts that freeze then thaw and try to suck the tires off the truck as I drive. She wins a round and the temperature soars to 50F and we all run around in T-shirts like giddy peasants told that mead is now half price. Then He shakes his beard and the snow covers the cattle again.  We wear our coats like heavy chains as we endure a series of “Springs of Delusion” followed by crisp spankings from an irritable Jack Frost.  

I fill my denim skirt with the booty of Hope and head to the house with pink cheeks.  Inside, I look at the eggs.  What’s more delicious than a boiled egg with a dash of locally made Vermont hot sauce from the co-op?  Who needs scones? I could bring boiled eggs! That’s not crazy, is it?

I call my son to find out.  He is on tour in Vancouver with the band “Socks in the Frying Pan.”  The guys in the car are quick with opinions.  Two out of three say it is a bloody brilliant idea.  The third thinks I am mad.  The Hermit of Hermit Hollow is on his side. “Yep. Totally mad.”

“Please do it!” insists my son. “I would kill for some boiled eggs and hot sauce right now.  I wish our fans would bring us boiled eggs.  We get baked goods every night.  People are so kind!  They are always bringing us cookies and brownies and every kind of sweet.  But it’s too much.”

I had no idea this was even “a thing.”  Other people bring baked goods to shows?  Are these pot-luck house concerts?

“No,” he says.  “People are just really kind.  They think we need goodies for the road. Seriously, bring the eggs if you want to do something nice. I get it that food is your love language.  But it’s a lot of people’s.  Trust me, that band is already getting a lot of baked goods. Be You but with a Vermont twist. That’s even better.”

“She’s MAD!” screams his Irish colleague, cackling with glee.  “Who ever heard of turning up at a concert with a load of boiled eggs?! Only in America…”

“Just do You,” says my son, before hanging up.

“Funny how being ‘YOU’ is just the result of being disorganized and having an ill-stocked pantry,” observes Prudence.

“Yes, but I happen to have a delightful abundance of farm fresh eggs,” I say defiantly out loud to no one. “That is also ME.”

The whole way through the concert, with a carton of boiled eggs between my feet, the Hermit of Hermit Hollow keeps whispering “It’s not too late to turn back.  No one will ever know you brought these eggs if you just keep them in your basket and take them home again. It can be our little secret.”

“But how will I show my appreciation?” I hiss out of the side of my mouth, trying to be discreet.

“Money,” he says. “You bought a ticket.  You could buy a CD, you could buy ALL their Cd’s.  You could clean out the merch table.  I’m pretty sure they prefer to be thanked in purchases made with cash.”

“But… I don’t have cash,” I pointed out. “I just have eggs.  This is my widow’s mite. It’s eggs or nothing.”

After several encores to an incredible performance, the band finishes their show, sells their shirts and merch, says their farewells and prepares to make the short march to the nearest pub. 

It’s now or never.  

I grip the little carton of boiled eggs (one had fallen and cracked so there were now only eleven to the dozen) and make my way to the edge of the stage.   I had tied a little note for the flute player and a bottle of hot sauce to the carton with a scrap of tulle from a wedding gown I had altered.

To my surprise, there were a number of middle-aged women clutching a variety of baked offerings in their hands, all waiting to speak with the flute player.  Any pastor at a church community bake sale would have been delighted to have so many contributions! He grinned at his congregation. “Love” (“and tooth decay!” adds Prudence) was coming at this band in every kind of muffin, cookie, biscuit, or scone one could imagine.

“Haven’t you learned by now? You’re never the only nut job,” says Prudence, “more’s the pity. However, you DO seem to be the only nutter with eggs.”

Well, the band were very gracious about the baked goods in general and the eggs in particular.  The flute player expressed sincere delight, especially given the fact that they all had to be on the road again by seven o’clock the next morning and there wasn’t going to be time for breakfast.  “These’ll give us a wee bit of protein,” he said, smiling at the eggs.

I wound up feeling very glad that I had given what I could. Instead of “chickening out,” the chickens and I “chickened IN.”   I hope it was a Good Thing, though of course sometimes I doubt it.  

“What if you set off a trend of people turning up at concerts with sacks of rutabaga, or spare turnips they happened to have on hand?” Prudence wants to know.  “Since when does an Irish concert mean it’s time to clean out the larder and see what you have at least eleven of?”

Of course, if you are someone who lives with your own version of “Prudence Thimbleton” in your head, you know what it is like to question your every motive—every desire to love, to serve, to bake, to give…and then wonder if you are actually being what the young people call “Extra” i.e. “too much.”

“Giving is a form of asking,” says P.  “It’s never as simple as you think.”

 Are YOU being/doing too much as a result of feeling you are “not enough”?  These are ideas that need Mending just as much as any pair of pants with holes in them.

Are warm smiles and grateful thanks enough? Absolutely.  That’s what I got in return for the eggs. 

And it was Plenty. (Let that be a lesson to me!)

If you’re going to be Weird, go Big. Go with eleven boiled eggs if that’s all you’ve got to offer the world on a given day. Just do YOU.  You know it’s a little mad. Do it anyway.  It works out just fine in the end.   Givers and Receivers are here to teach each other what we need to learn.

I wish I could give each and every one of you a fresh egg and some Vermont hot sauce.  (Unless of course you are vegan, in that case, just the hot sauce!)  But since I cannot, please except my simple and sincere thanks for your Good Work.  I LOVE that there is so much kindness (and low-key musical-muffin-making) in a world I sometimes think is beyond repair. It’s not. Keep Mending, my Darlings!

With Sew Much Love,

A wee bit cracked but Yours aye,

Nancy

Decision Juice

Choices are the hinges of Destiny—Pythagoras

Greetings Dear Ones,

Maple Syrup and Wedding seasons seem to be overlapping a little earlier than usual this year.  Already, the shop is clogged with enormous snowy drifts of tulle, silk, and organza.  Some of the weddings are not until summer but I’ve had a string of refreshingly Big D brides lately who just want things “Done” and out of the way early. 

“Big D,” says Prudence, “are we talking bust size here?”

“No,” I hasten to correct her. “D is for get-‘er-Done!”  

Let’s face it—some people are just “High D.” These brides are Dominant, Decisive and Direct. They know exactly what kind of sleeves they want added to a sleeveless gown with breathtaking immediacy and clarity. They thrive on vanquishing challenges.  No extra Floof for them!   They prefer Action over long-winded discussions of details, frilly-dilly-dallying or excessive deliberation.  They embody the old Nike ad: “Just Do It.”  I’ve started asking brides how many dresses they tried on before they found “the one.” Three this week said they bought the first one they tried on.  “I had an idea in my head, and there it was,” said one. “No need to look further!”  Their consultations are over in twenty minutes or less.

These young women delight and fascinate me. Prudence, my inner critic, wishes with all her heart that this could be me. (Er… decisive, that is, not a bride!)  In fact, I am the furthest thing from it.  Had I been born into a tribe whose naming rituals reflect the characteristics of its members, my middle name would have been “Shall-I-Shan’t-I,” instead of Ann, for my mother.

Some folks make decisions easily; some struggle to make them at all, which leads to decision fatigue.  According to something online called The Decision Lab, “Decision fatigue is a cognitive shortcut that causes irrational trade-offs in decision-making. It emerges when mental resources are depleted after making numerous decisions, leading individuals to favor immediate gratification, oversimplify complex decisions, or default to familiar, less optimal options.”

A mother of someone getting married, who is closer to my age than these brides, brings in a series of dresses.  She cannot decide.  She has ordered one from a website, found another on a shopping spree to a big city and thrifted a third.   Now she seeks advice from me.  Her level of cognitive impairment resulting from decision fatigue has led to irrational optimism about what a woman clothed in jeans, muck boots, and winter-weary woolens can tell her about “fashion.”  Her brain has taken an illogical short-cut that makes her think that because I am surrounded by beauty that I must understand it. I should know what would make her feel and look beautiful.  I don’t have those sorts of magic wands.  I can make things fit people; I cannot make them be Right for people.

Another mother of a betrothed person comes in with a few choices. She needs help deciding whether she should wear the frumpy frock and look like the groom’s elderly grandmother, or the bling-y sleeveless number that makes her look like the bride’s hot aunt—far too young to be her actual mother.  Does this woman want to be Magnificent? Or (small d) drab?  She cannot decide.  I want to hug her.  To me, there is no question, but then I always have enough decision juice in my little vial for other people’s choices.  I button my lip. She must decide for herself who she needs to be on that day.  “All the world’s a stage,” said Shakespeare, and never more so than at a wedding. Does this woman want to show up as Best Supporting Actress in this drama, or the one assumed most likely to mop the floor after the lights go down?

Marianne Williamson is quoted as saying, “Every decision you make reflects your evaluation of who you are” which makes me arch an eyebrow at the brides who say, “I’ve never been a rhinestone kinda gal—but hey!” as they stand there in a gown that resembles a disco ball from the eighties.

Decision-making is easy for those whose values are clear.  I notice that most young people are better at it than most older people.  Why is this? Are our values muddy?  I actually think the opposite is true.  Is it because we had fewer choices when we were their age and our choose-it muscles are flabby as a result? (Remember being told in middle school “you get what you get and you don’t get upset”?) Or is it because our Decision Juice is tanking with our estrogen levels? Is some little stinker of a neurotransmitter up there in our prefrontal cortex refilling the vials with substitute I-just-don’t-give-a-crap elixir?

Decisions exhaust us.

Decision fatigue is no joke.  Studies show that the average person makes over 35,000 decisions daily, which drains our mental capacity and leaves some of us like dribbling idiots by nightfall.  The quality of our choices declines as we make additional decisions, literally wearing out our cognitive abilities.  When we have either too many choices to make or too many options to choose from, we become overwhelmed.  Analysis leads to paralysis.  This is probably why I get home at the end of a long day and decide, rather than backing the truck downhill in the dark, it’s a better idea to unload two hundred pounds of chicken feed onto a sled and ride it through the snow to the barn.  I remember a pod-cast host saying something to the effect that “there are no such things as bad decisions” because we either make the Right decision or we make a decision we can learn from.  The worst thing is actually to make no decision at all.

“With regard to the chicken feed on a sled,” says Prudence, “you make this decision at least once every winter and you never learn!  Why do you persist in doing something that has generated the exact same consequences every year?? Neither memories nor bruises instruct you. You’re just lucky you hit the chicken coop instead of sailing over the cliff on the other side into the manure pile below where no one will find you until mud season.”

Perhaps it is because I always make this particular decision too late in the day.  Experts advise us to save all our important decisions for the early part of the day.  I’m out of the Good Decision juice by 8:am some mornings and left to straggle through the day with the sludge left at the bottom of the glass.  By the time I get home and do my chores, I have no idea what to eat for dinner.  I cannot decide.

“Yesterday you decided to eat three cups of blueberry chia seed pudding that had sprouted mold,” says Prudence, “and that decision wasn’t just bad for you—it affected the entire septic system.”

I blame my bum: I wasted at least four decisions on it before dawn’s first light, trying to decide which pair of jeans made it look smaller and cuter. (It turns out, None.)  There is nothing that drains one of decision juice so fast as a whole lot of “nothing to wear” in the closet.   

“Well, I guess Justice was done.  Who paid in the end?  Your bum,” says Prudence with prim satisfaction.  

“I need to decide what to wear the night before, but according to the experts, I don’t make my best choices at night.  So now what? What if I choose something outrageous? What if I pair Navy blue with Black?”

“Perhaps you should go back to wearing a uniform,” says Prudence.  She is envisioning school-girl plaids, knee socks, and a crisp white blouse.  

“I Do,” I retort huffily, “It’s called that pile on the chair of all the warm things I wore yesterday that are still clean enough.”

There are so many wrinkles in the irony here.  For instance, the cheer-you-up kind of coaches say “Don’t mourn your bad decisions.  Just overcome them in time with better ones.” Ha! Yes!  Doesn’t making more decisions lead us to making poorer ones? And also, how the hell… if our working memory is continually processing new information and the amount of effort we put into processing information is called cognitive load and as our cognitive load increases, so does decision fatigue… What can we learn and when can we learn it?  And is there a way to learn without making a dumb or impulsive choice?

People who are burned out from making too many decisions suffer not only poorer judgement but reduced self-control, as all these things are regulated in the frontal, executive function part of the brain.  Mental energy is finite. Making choices is a burden. When we avoid temptations, it takes mental energy that disables our ability to avoid other temptations.  Willpower is a muscle that eventually becomes fatigued by continual use. “Ah, says P, “can we not strengthen this muscle with extra practice?”

“Right now, I am deciding NOT to bop you,” I say. “Does that count?”

I blame the internet and the endless array of choices available to us.  We don’t even have to leave the comfort of our couch to get utterly exhausted.

It’s 7:am on a Sunday morning. A woman is texting me pictures of dresses she is thinking of purchasing from an online purveyor of ladies’ dresses.  She wants to know if there is something I can do about the sleeves on this one, the hemline on that one…  She is conserving her decision juice by off-loading her decisions onto me. 

“I’m on the hunt!” she texts briskly.  Clearly, thanks to the internet, her hunting times have expanded long beyond the traditional window of 9-5 store hours and rather than confining her search to the local boutique in town, which went out of business ten years ago, she is now “free to” (nay, required) to roam the entire globe.  Around here, all we have are thrift shops and hardware stores.  “Free shipping” says nothing about the actual speed of the shipping, whose vehicles might include container ship, barge, or yak as part of the journey.

In the good old days, we got by with our limited working memories, short attention spans, impulsivity and the need to finish our errands before we needed a restroom, within in the narrow confines of our home communities and villages.  Choices were few but we were happy to make them. But here we are, unmoored in 2026, bobbing in a sea of Choices, with the same amount of Decision Juice that was standard issue for a Neanderthal.  No wonder we find ourselves feet first, slamming into a chicken coop, or in a dressing room, asking a seamstress with poop on her boots what we should wear to the wedding of the beloved child we nurtured, raised, advised, educated, and loved with mind-losing intensity and tenacity through every trial and strife… 

We cannot decide.  

Certain heuristics are as dangerous as grocery shopping while hungry—or just eating whatever we find in the fridge, mold and septic systems be damned.  

I’ve learned a lot this week from my beloved customers.  We can Keep Mending and make life easier for ourselves and others by doing a few things that make life simpler (if not easier):

To make fewer decisions and thus waste less of the precious Elixir of I-ought-to-care-about-this, create and stick to routines. Delegate (some) decisions to others. Managing and maintaining brain glucose levels through out the day can help.  (Yes, Prudence, I DO need a cabinet full of snacks in my shop in order to have the mental fortitude I need to avoid eating between meals!) When you have a choice between Magnificent or (d)rab, always choose Magnificent!  And—here’s a big “D” one—Don’t eat anything with mold on it “just to get rid of it.”

That’s all from my cozy corner of Vermont, my Dear Ones! Keep up your Good Work! You might be exhausted—maybe it’s from feeling helpless and choiceless in the face of all the news, maybe it’s Decision Fatigue from too many choices in your own domestic sphere... in either case, “May your decisions reflect your hopes, not your fears.” (–Nelson Mandela) You can Do It!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Some Things Are Just Too Big...

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

–African Proverb (with love to Liz)

Greetings Dear Ones!

Thank you for all the heartwarming and encouraging comments I got about last week’s entry about cooking in the PDB kitchen. My favorite—the one that made me slap a knee and howl out loud—came from a reader who signed herself as “a retired camp cook and lifeguard, some of the best years of my life.”  She said, “I have to ask one question (I can hear you screaming, my apologies) why would one want to peel carrots and potatoes?”  Ha! (It’s like she knew…) Why indeed?  It would have taken too long to explain in the last blog, but this VERY debate occurred at the kitchen sink where two volunteers were assigned the task of peeling potatoes.  The compromise was “somewhat peeled” potatoes so that those who don’t like lumps in their mashed potatoes would not have too many. (When you can’t please everyone, please no one!)  Since the carrots were to be roasted, in hindsight, we probably should not have peeled them, but we had an enthusiastic team of peelers.  Who were we to deprive them of their peeling joy?  Besides, I did not actually supervise that; I was back at Costco then, trading sixty pounds of coffee beans for ground coffee, since we had burned out the motor on the grinder after one batch.

My dad always said that “a camel is a horse built by a committee.”  We definitely served out our share of camels last week.  I donated all the uneaten camels to a food kitchen that serves hot meals to the homeless and delivers to shut-ins.  The rest were fed to livestock.  Many, many beings were grateful for our gross miscalculations and gross leftovers.

When I was explaining why we had so many “options,” the head chef stared at me in amazement and said, “We have too many hungry people for all these options,” and mixed the leftover vegan mushroom and regular mushroom soups together in one pot.  There was enough to serve a warm soup for their entire lunch crowd the next day.  Sometimes Unity must vanquish diversity.  

Pondering food “camels” makes me think of my favorite wedding dress of all time.  A mutual friend introduced me to a customer attempting to knit her own wedding dress.  A knitted wedding dress?  I was curious and excited and a tad jealous—I wish I had thought of knitting my own wedding dress back in the day, though such an endeavor might have made the betrothal last longer than it took Ulysess to find his way back home after the battle of Troy.

“Knowing you, your “train” would have been unraveling balls of wool following you up the aisle,” says Prudence.

The bride to be comes to the shop with balls of finest wool—she’s been knitting for months the most exquisite lace.  It has the lustre of silk.  Her knitting is perfection.  This is the kind of knitting I rarely do because it requires intense focus, counting skills, strong visual awareness, pattern recognition, and the kind of household that does not include random visitations from incontinent baby farm animals. This kind of knitting is like advanced calculus.  It’s the difference between a delicate souffle and a grilled cheese sandwich.  She has the “skirt” starting at the waist and it is about the length of a mini-skirt by now, reaching mid-thigh.  While she is not especially tall, we both agree that it is a long way to the ground yet and each time she goes around the circle, she must increase by eight to ten stitches per round to keep the circle expanding.  For those who like math, if you double the radius (the number of rows) you must double the circumference (the number of stitches in that row) to keep the circle flat.  The skirt needs to be a circle, not a “tube” so that it has the correct drape and swirl. (A bride is not a tube of toothpaste!)  If math is not your thing, picture this: she is at the top of the mountain going down; her first few laps are quick but every time she goes around it, her trail gets exponentially longer.  Suddenly, there are downed tree limbs, thorns, rocks, snags…ferocious mountain goats…have as much fun with this image as you want.  This dear, ambitious knitter has a vast monadnock to descend on two sticks. Bravely, she has been shoveling yarn from one needle to the other and seeing ever less progress.  She is in the wilderness and needs to make it out by the wedding day which is now only a matter of weeks away.  Even if she parks herself on a port-a-potty and has all her meals lovingly hand fed to her by concerned volunteers so that she can do nothing but knit lace during her waking hours, she is not going to get down this mountain alone before the wedding. She has come to face the fact that if she wants to have what she wants, she cannot do it alone.  

She needs help.  

This is a fear-filled and tragic place to be if one is Creative.  Have we not all been in this same wilderness at one time or another?  The choices become abandoning the dream altogether or bastardizing it—letting other “parents” raise our orphan—allowing the dream to take control of its own destiny on a journey we had not planned for it and become the thing it Must Be instead what we wanted it to be.  (I think there is a Greek term for this.) We must admit those who want lumps in their potatoes to work alongside those who despise lumps.  We, who have spent hours designing and dreaming of creating the sleekest of racehorses, must contemplate creating a camel, as those with grubby mitts wrest the pristine silk from our exhausted fingertips.

Enlisting help, for certain people, myself included, can feel like abandoning the self, instead of including others.  Needing others’ help can feel like weakness or failure, rather than opportunity for collaboration.   We take a break to beat ourselves up a bit—the “Prudence” character within us puts on her boxing gloves and says things like “You should have started sooner! Of course you could not pull this off! What were you thinking?”  Her knockout punch is “You’re a slacker but you’re all we’ve got. You cannot trust these people. If you want it done right, you must do it yourself!”

There is another terrifying possibility: it could turn out better than you ever could have dreamed. You’re NOT invincible nor irreplaceable.  (Camels are actually pretty awesome creatures and infinitely superior mounts when one must traverse a desert of self-doubt.)

All it takes is the courage to be Open.

I’ve read a LOT about relationships over the years, and my own personal experience lends veracity to this concept: They’re Tricky!  Apparently, the most successful relationships contain some basic fundamentals—#1, we need to be emotionally fit, with a low degree of neuroticism.  (As a person who has pulled all-nighters to finish lace shawls on deadline, I’m not sure I qualify.) (“Certainly not!” agrees P.) People need to be Resilient, Resourceful, Open-Minded, Curious, Compassionate, Ambitious, Supportive, and above all, Excellent Communicators.  In short, the best relationships are being had by the Best People.

“This is really not fair,” says Me, pouting. “What about those of us who get Defensive, Hurt, Misunderstood, Disregarded, who feel Overwhelmed, Unworthy, Unchosen, Unseen, Neglected?”

“That’s just step One,” says an inner Literature professor from the 1980’s, whose angelic tones I still hear occasionally. “The Problem is always the Start of a story.  The core predictor of any story or relationship is the ability to resolve Conflict, no matter what that conflict might be.  If you are in Conflict, you just have yet to finish the story.”

My favorite conflicts are always those that can be solved with More Yarn.

The Bride-to-Be has plenty of yarn as well as a gorgeous vintage silk gown.  She had intended to wear it as a sheath beneath the fully knitted lace wedding gown.  Together, we devise a new plan.  After I alter the gown to fit her better, we decide to affix the knitting she has completed directly to the gown.  The gown will be the foundation upon which we display as much knitting as possible.  We even find a use for her swatch—the thing all diligent and serious knitters knit first to establish their gauge of stitches per inch. (Not doing this step is how I once came to make an Aran sweater that could slip-cover a Volkswagen.)

“Do you know anyone else who can help knit?” I ask.

“Oh, yes!” she says. “I have loads of friends and family members who all knit.” (Let’s pause a minute here and reflect on how Lucky is she!! What a blessing!  To be a flower raised in such a garden of clever, patient people!)

“Can they help?”

“I think they would love that!” she says, relief beginning to melt the furrow on her brow.  We notice that her lace pattern has a recurring leaf motif.

“Can they knit just leaves?” I ask. “If we had a bunch of leaves, we could stitch them randomly all over the dress and that would fill up the blank spaces.”

“Yes!  I will give them yarn and a pattern for just the leaf.”

Weeks later, she returns with bags of leaves and the skirt she has extended as much as possible.  The maidens and matriarchs have been hard at it, producing a gorgeous foliage of love made visible.  No two are exactly the same. We have tiny leaves from those who knit tighter; we have loose leaves from those who knitted in a more relaxed way.  Some are neat and smooth; some are as lumpy as half-peeled potatoes. Some folks were able to make many; a few contributed only one. Together, we take these tributes made in kitchens, parlors, waiting rooms, and all the dwelling spaces of many lives and map them out across the bodice, attach them to the skirt and fashion a border for the bottom.  It comes together in a totally gorgeous fantasy of loving collaboration.  It looks nothing like her original vision but it’s breathtaking.  When she stands before them all, to pledge lifelong love and partnership to her Beloved, the blessing of their hands will be upon her—literally—in mute testimony of what Support really means.  All her women-folk are with her, not just in spirit, but in the work of their hands around her waist. Is there a better metaphor for a bride on her wedding day?

This bride inspires me. She allowed her conflict with Time to alter the story she had started—in which everyone oohed and ahhhed about how talented and capable and clever she was en soto—and make it infinitely and Magically better en familia.  She surrendered. She allowed them to see how humbled she was by her limitations, how aware, how resilient, how open she was to invite participation and investment from her community.  And they stepped in to help her Shine.  The result was utterly Magnificent.  

The whole thing moves me to tears. Still.

She allowed herself to be clothed in Love, instead of Ego.  I can’t think of a better camel upon which to ride off into the sunset of Happily Ever After!

Blessings, Dear Ones, on all you do this week to Collaborate, to Share, to Hear, to Heal, to Preserve Hope through Helping.  Keep Mending! Thank you for your Good Work!

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Confessions of a Whisk Taker

We do not do this because it is Easy. We do it because

we THOUGHT it would be easy!

Greetings Dear Ones! `

President’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Ash Wednesday, the start of the new year of the Fire Horse… What shall be our theme for today?  There are so many High and Holy celebrations this February! Oh, yeah…. And among them all, exhilarating and exhausting for a special sub-set of humanity in the Boston area, was a little fiddle camp last weekend called “PDB.”  PDB stands for “Pure Dead Brilliant” which is the Scottish version of “Wicked Awesome” which is Boston slang for “Darn Tootin’” which is also what happens when you feed 180 people beans at every meal for four days straight.  I could not write to you last Wednesday because I was making 25 gallons of homemade soup for my friends.

The mission of the camp is to celebrate, enliven, and nourish a global community of traditional Scottish musicians and to strengthen their communal bonds with each other and the music.  The crowd of advanced players is mostly young, mostly fast, and gifted beyond belief. They come from and light up parts of the world I cannot pronounce. Jam sessions go on night and day at speeds from the sublime to the ridiculous.  Specialized classes are offered and sometimes even attended. Highly esteemed teachers make guacamole in the kitchen.  It is the most joyous chaos ever to occur under a vibrant canopy of lovingly made paper flowers and icicle lights.  They danced so hard this year that the lights fell out of the ceiling in the hall downstairs.

And I (yes!! ADHD-riddled, happy-scattered me!) I get to cook for them all!  It’s the highlight of my year.  This camp began, long ago, in my very own kitchen.  I made soups and stovies out of mashed potatoes.  We peeled the apples together, singing. We took the goat for a walk. (That goat had several memorable tunes written for him.) And each year we “add just a few more…” (people that is, not goats.  The goats are no longer invited.) My children slept in the tiny cupboard under the stairs, like Harry Potter.  My husband slept in the coat closet. I slept in the car with our three dogs.  All the Vermonters slept in the barn.  There were few beds—just bodies in sleeping bags in every room.  They fell asleep from the margins inward, starting at the walls, until those closest to the fireplace slumped where they were.  We’ve outgrown a tavern, a hostel, and now we are pushing the kitchen limits of a nature camp located on a beautiful pond, surrounded by cabins whose pipes crack when frozen.  We’ve gone from twenty-five people to one hundred and eighty.  Every year, it’s the “MOST” I’ve ever cooked for. (Have I mentioned I am NOT a professional cook?) I just keep scaling it up, with varying amounts of success and extraordinary amounts of help.  Always there is drama.

Always, always, always I LOVE IT.

I cannot tell you how much I love it.   I love the organizers. I love the people, the fiddlers, the food, the chaos. I love the idea of us gathering each year to nourish each other in Mind with new tunes and techniques, in Spirit with new friendships, old reunions, and Joyous mischief, and in Body—with not one but THREE kinds of guacamole because some people like cilantro and some don’t and some can’t eat tomatoes and there should be OPTIONS say Those Concerned For Others.

I love the food we make and the love that goes into it. I love the helpers, though their concern for others sometimes creates a lot of extra work I had not planned on doing.  We have those who eat meat but not dairy, those who are dairy free but eat gluten, those who are gluten free but love dairy, those who cannot eat either but somehow are not vegan, and the vegetarians and the vegans, not to mention those with specific life-threatening allergies and salt preferences.  I am trying to run a benevolent oligarchy and my friendly helpers are a bunch of lobbyists for special interests. 

Every year, I spend hours screaming at my computer or printer,  planning and tweaking the menu, trying to anticipate the energy a meal will require to make, making shopping lists and lists of the jobs and the sequences of tasks to prep for each.  I anticipate how many people we will need to chop onions, peel potatoes, peel carrots etc… (We do all of this together on Friday at something called “The Chop.” Some campers decorate the main hall, some chop onions for the kitchen, some inspire us all with exuberant tunes as we work. It’s Magical.)  But then none of us ever look at my lists again for the whole weekend.  Instead, people come up to me a thousand times an hour saying “What can I do? What do you need? How can I help?”  And I cannot remember.  

It’s NOT the work that exhausts me.  It’s the questions. The challenges.

“Are you sure we need this much bacon? This looks like a lot of bacon…” say the Bacon people who haven’t the foggiest idea how much bacon a crowd of 180 will eat or that I actually planned to have too much so that we could have leftover bacon bits available to put on cheesy potatoes Sunday night.  They don’t know “the plan” because there isn’t time to tell every single helper everything there is to know about every single ingredient and no one has read my list.  I just want the bacon that I gave them to be put on trays and cooked.  I don’t want to have a discussion.  I am OUT of Decision juice and Discussion fuel.  These dear, dear helpers. I love them so much. But I want to clobber them.

Kitchen work is fast.  We only have six burners that work and two ovens.  Things have to be washed immediately and reused for the next thing.  The beloved scrubbers in the back keep the dishwasher going round the clock.  They are amazing. We are so grateful.  Keeping this many querulous volunteers going and keeping the trains of food running on time takes a lot of work.  Two scholarship dudes scheduled to put the food away show up just as the line is lurching towards the lunch we just put out.  Less than ten people have food on their plates.

“Do you want us to put the food away now?” they want to know.  

“Have you eaten?” I ask.

“Um… no…”

“How about you go to the end of the line and then put the leftover food away as soon as you are done eating.  If you have to get to a class, just make sure someone else does your job.”

This kind of thing, Innocent as it is, helps me see what a terrible person I am really.  All the work on my soul has been for naught.  I am tempted to go lie down outside in the snow to quell my lust for blood.

Have I mentioned I love REAL work? I love loading hay.  I love mucking out a barn.  I love mowing, weeding, stirring, kneading.  I love feeling my muscles interact with a substrate I am trying to move with as a dance partner.  There is a flow to it all that creates momentum that makes it all easier than it looks to people who do not know how to work.

I find kitchen work exhilarating. Some of the helpers do too.  They tend to be nurses in their “other life.” They are used to high-volume hectic diligence with a side of heavy lifting.  They are cheerful and industrious.  Some people, especially younger ones, have never really (physically) worked a day in their lives.  They get into the kitchen and a certain alchemy overcomes them as they share in the success that comes with hard endeavour and they get hooked.  They return again and again to volunteer. They linger into the next shift, asking what they can do next.  A switch has been flipped. They feel Useful. Necessary. Valued.

One young man had never cooked anything on a flattop griddle before.  We showed him how to cook five gallons of scrambled eggs and damn, if they weren’t the BEST eggs we’ve ever had. He trusted my instructions and took them off the griddle while they were still runny and they finished cooking in the warmer.  By the time they were served, they were fully cooked and lightly fluffy. Perfect. Other campers noticed and commented about how good the eggs were.  When I told him, his face turned to sunlight that melted the ice shards that were forming in my heart towards the Questioners.  One of the other helpers joked that as a professional musician, you never know when you might need to work in a restaurant to supplement your income!  He was back the next day to help. He even cleaned the griddle without having to be told!

The thing about the Questioners is that they are so convincing, they make me question myself.  And I am vulnerable because deep at my core, I’m never sure I can do this thing I am attempting to do.  I’m just a lucky imposter!  I’m receiving help from a lot of people who actually know more than I do about most things.  If I am “stressed out” by this job, it’s NOT because I can’t lift and stir and mix and sort and find and scurry and mash and pepper…it’s because someone’s comment or question makes me feel my smallness and the preposterousness of my pretensions.  It’s because I know people in the dining hall are sitting around having meetings about how I am “doing too much.”

I think anyone attempting something Wonderful feels this. We are ALL imposters in some way.   I find myself near tears, staring for the fourth time in four minutes into a bag that does NOT contain the missing Tofu “…face to face with the marginal mystery, where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test tube, where chaos and old night hold sway, and we hear the laughter in the dream.” (Robert Penn Warren) I’m not exhausted because the potatoes are too heavy, but because I am afraid “people” are not going to let me keep doing this job I love doing the way I’m doing it. Their concern feels like criticism. It’s not Good Enough.  I’m not doing it in a way that looks easy or effortless so “people” are worried.  They love me and they want life to be easy for me.  The don’t understand how I feel about “Serving the Gift.” 

The music, the musicians, the mistakes, the laughter, the food, the fatigue, being together, being courageous, being forgiving, being forgiven, admitting we bought too many mushrooms after all, being able to work and keep on working…

IT’S ALL A GIFT.

Some Gifts are hard.  Just because things are hard does not mean that they should not be done.  Granted, not all the work is necessary—such as me making yet another trip to Costco to retrieve 150 pounds of potatoes we collected and put on a trolley but never actually paid for.

I Love all the volunteers I feel like clobbering in certain moments.  I DO NOT WANT a slim staff of experts.  (I would not belong!)  I would feel like cooking was “just a job,” not Serving The Gift.  Yes, there’s a difference.  I WANT the mess.  Yes, Volunteers are The Worst. And they are also THE BEST.  A kitchen without the campers is unthinkable to me. I love that no less than four people told me this year that when they came to camp for the first time, they felt socially awkward but made a great friend in the kitchen and that changed everything.  

It’s important for those of us who do not know what we are doing to Keep Doing It.  We’re getting better all the time.  It’s Ok if not everything is Ok. It’s Mostly Magnificent with a bit of Cozy Discomfort on the side (available in Gluten Free and Dairy Free and Keto-Friendly options)(Stop asking. Read the damn labels.)

The Young must learn.  How else will The Gift be passed to the next generation?

Let’s Keep Serving.  Stir the Cauldron. Share the ladles.  Thank you for your Good Work.  

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

PS. If someone loving has forwarded this to you and you’d like to be on the mailing list yourself, you can subscribe here www.secretlifeofaseamstress.com or follow me on Substack.  Thanks!

Cold

“The cold never bothered me anyway.”—Elsa, Frozen

Greetings Dear Ones!

I hope this finds you warm and cozy! It’s been “a wee bit brisk” here in Vermont this past week, with day and night temperatures hovering in the single digits and minus numbers.  I must admit, having “negative” temperatures puzzles my puzzler as much as having sizes in the double zeros.  How can 00 be a size?  How can -5 be a temperature?  It all speaks to the placement of “zero” as being somewhat arbitrary and relative.  One thing I can be sure of: It’s Cold!

My inner fifth grader loves sniffing deeply and feeling her nose hairs crystallize, while the crabby middle-aged part of me fusses about how chapped my hands are and how they are rough enough to snag the silk wedding gowns that are beginning to pile up in snowy drifts in the shop.  (We’ve got five and counting at the moment.) 

This week, I’ve fixed two coats while their owners stood and shivered and gave them back to them immediately.  No one can drop off their warmest coat and leave it for a day or two in this weather.  It’s “while you wait” service for those with bonfire-burned cuffs, torn pockets, and broken zipper pulls.  A lot of the customers are grumbling about their meteorological woes but I think they secretly like the Winter drama.  It gives us something to suffer.  We have less guilt when we watch the news and see how many others are suffering so much worse.  We feel tougher knowing we can endure something too.  Lord knows, you do NOT want to mess with people who know how to be cold!

“These people are not REALLY suffering,” says Prudence.  “You’re all just making depressing fashion choices.  There’s a difference.”

 You can tell the native New Englanders immediately.  They are in multiple layers of wool, to the point of androgyny.  I suspect people began announcing their “pronouns” once-upon-a-February because there was no discernable way to tell otherwise. We are all lumps of walking woolly goodness from head to toe.  

To me, wearing wool is like eating mashed potatoes—few things are more comforting.  Some people are all excited about “smart” wool but I find stupid wool just as satisfying.  I have been in mashed potato clothing for weeks.  I am so upholstered, the cats treat me like a couch—a stained couch with crumbs on it.  I can’t wash this Aran sweater properly until spring.

My shop, which was so cold for so long, has had the radiator valve replaced twice.  Now, we are at a dizzyingly balmy 57F most days.  It feels like a heat wave.  My hardy Vermont brides all insist they do not need a supplemental heater in the dressing room.  We have all acclimatized.  On a warmer day recently, I was stacking firewood outside in 20F weather and the wind had gone off to ruffle the trees somewhere else, the sun was out, and it felt almost tropical.  It was a Joy to be alive, getting warm from wood I wasn’t having to light. I took off my hat and unzipped my coat in order to stay warm. (It’s important not to overheat and then get chilled by one’s own sweat icing up.)

As much as I prefer to sit by the wood stove and knit, getting uncomfortable is actually jolly good for me. I am not a city mouse.  I would not survive a winter that did not force me to tend thirsty livestock or grocery shop for chicken feed in knee-high insulated Muck boots. Doing the chores, smashing the ice out of the buckets and carrying the water every twelve hours builds strength, endurance, and (I hate to admit it) Optimism.  The animals are not depressed.  They are happy little stoics, thrilled to see me—mooing, baaing, and la-la-la-ing with glossy bright eyes and excited feet. Their nostrils leave vapor trails as thick as smoke, as if they are going through six packs a day. They have little internal hay-burning wood stoves called rumens that keep them warm as long as the manger is full.  The snow on their backs does not melt. They cheer me on.

“THIS is February,” they say, trotting to the feed troughs. “It’s nothing but a mind game.   It’s a little work out that makes everything seem so much better when it is over. Who can complain when there are no flies?”    Who indeed.

By now, we bald, rumen-less humans are exhausted from the cold, the dark, the lack of Vitamin D.  Real salads do not keep us warm, only imaginary ones do. We want to prepare for spring—to read the seed catalogues and try to get over our grudge against last year’s tomatoes (which were such a bust) and think about string beans and radishes.   We have wedding gowns with acres of lace to hem before May. It feels like time to Get Going and yet we are frozen…

“Don’t even THINK of planting zucchini!” says Prudence. “You still have a freezer full of it and there are only so many fritters and muffins one can deal with in one lifetime.”

Under my mashed potato clothing, I feel stuck.  I look around the woodstove—it’s the scene of “depression nesting.” Unfinished projects litter the margins. Everything from the buckets of ice to the wedding gowns feels heavy.  I don’t want to move. I don’t want to be productive or imaginative.

At dusk, I climb the ladder to the hay loft where three cats are waiting to be fed.
“You do know you can live in the house, right?” I ask. “We could all just stay in there.  I wouldn’t have to come up here twice a day. BB is in there having a whale of a time living on the chair seats under the dining table.  He is always toasty warm. He rests by the stove, snuggles up with the dog, and entertains himself endlessly with little games with my yarn or a tiny ball of tinfoil.”

“We know,” they purr, rubbing themselves against my legs.  “BB is a weeny.”

Raku turns his one-eyed-head away.  “I deeply resent being kidnapped and dragged in to have a hot meal yesterday.  I am perfectly capable of hunting down my own hot meals here in the hay loft.”

“And we don’t have the energy to play,” says Tig. “Winter is serious.  BB is a fool. He can’t survive out here now.  He might as well have moved to Florida with the rest of the snow birds.  Out here, we hunker down and wait it out.  We keep our small routines, conserve our warmth, and keep our expectations low.  This is how we make it to April.”

“March comes next,” says Miss Kitty.

“I don’t feel like marching,” says Tig.

“None of us do,” say I.  One by one, they come to sit on the couch that is my lap.  I inhale their soft fur.  They smell of dried, grassy echoes of summertime. My nose hairs don’t ice up.  We sit there in a vague twilight of peace, caught between numbness and restlessness, between anxiety and the inability to motivate ourselves, disconnected from time and emotions… They are not worried about it. They wait. 

“Power down,” they say. “You’re not lazy, you’re not failing or falling behind.  This is Endurance.   You’re just exhausted.  It’s not you, it’s February.”

“Your biggest breakthroughs are not meant to happen in the month where ambition gels up like diesel fuel in the tractor.  This a darkly silent time where you are building the part of you who Survived so that sometime after mud season you can become the version of yourself who thrives.”

Back in the house, I stare and blank pages.

“Let this blank page remain blank for a minute,” says a kind whisper from under the dining table. “Honor the space between the collapse and the rebirth—when everything is reduced to “Seed” status—waiting, tiny, frozen, small.  Just Wait. What you are waiting for is waiting for you. Just enjoy how warm you are Now.”

When we don’t even want to do what we think we want to do, then we just do what we Must. Small survival routines every day all add up.  When things as big as February happen, we handle them little by little. We get by.   Dress sizes, temperatures, inconveniences and traumas—these are all just spectrums—the sliding scales of the pain we can endure.  We are tougher than some, not nearly as tough as others.  It’s all relative.  Don’t mess with those of us who know how to be Cold. We have fur and claws, wool and hooves, thick hides and strong horns. We know how to dress. We know how to labor steadily.  We know how to hunker. We know how to wait.  We grumble but that’s just for show.  The cold doesn’t bother us anyway.

We know how to rejoice when Spring comes, even if it brings new things to endure like mud and flies. We will endure it all.

Keep enduring, keep Mending Dear Ones!  Thank you for every Little thing you do that is Warm and Kind and Good to yourself or anyone else in your care.  Thank you for your Good Work!

With Love ever so Warm,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Bottoms Up!

“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”—Dolly Parton

Greetings Dear Ones!

Well, with all the shite going on all over the world, I thought some talk of a good old-fashioned purge might be just the thing to cheer us up.

Some people think a colonoscopy is a real bummer but I disagree.  I had my first one in December and, after all the dread and attempts to delay it for more than ten years, it was not actually the ordeal I anticipated.  I wouldn’t say it was the BEST experience, but given how the rest of 2025 treated me, it was up there!  (Go ahead, Prudence, roll your eyes.)

I embraced it like I do the most awful chores—When You Can’t Get Out Of It, Get Into It!”  This mentality works well on things like cleaning out the chicken coop and dealing with mangled zippers on snowpants, so why not an evening of explosive diarrhea? Just sigh deeply, roll up your sleeves, and Get On With It until it is over. You’ll thank yourself later.

So! I went to the pharmacy, collected the gallon of sea water I was assigned to consume, chose a period drama set in the time of cholera to watch on Netflix, cleaned the bathroom, stocked up on electrolytes, and set my timer to go off every eight minutes to remind me to drink another eight ounces of the vile juice that was supposed to make my intestines gleam like a freshly-scoured kitchen sink.  I also got out some knitting.  It turns out that the knitting was not necessary.  I hardly had time to count any stitches and it’s probably best NOT to have two sharp spears on the couch when one is trotting laps to and from the potty and sitting quickly. 

My inner health nut was excited.  “We are going to use this cleanse to jump start a whole new regime!” she announced in perky tones. “We’re going to lose weight, eat great, get fit, and really turn this ship around!”

“This “ship” has been taking on water and listing towards starboard for some time now,” said Prudence, looking sourly at my midsection. 

“No problem!” chirped my inner gym girl, bouncing up to stand with Health Nut. “We got this!  It gonna be great! It’s time to get all the bilge pumped out and take on a new cargo of Ambition stacked on racks of lean muscle. We’ll feel so light and bright! I’ll get a work-out schedule ready!” She started doing yoga poses mid-sentence.

Even Prudence got mildly optimistic, which is rare for her.

“It’s just like going to Confession,” she said brightly. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness. You will get rid of all the clog of past sins and when you emerge, you can go forth and never eat another bad thing again. You could even add a little prayer to your fasting and offer it up for the souls in Purgatory.”

My inner fifth grader ignored them. She was begging me to pick all the “organic” stickers off the bananas and eat as many as I could (stickers that is, not bananas).  Unfortunately, like all my best creative ideas, I should have done it earlier.   Once my body got the message to reverse all the gears, it didn’t want to take on any extra art projects.  We were in “exit only” mode.

“Now we don’t get to be like our friend T,” sobbed the disappointed fifth grader.

T had told me that at his last colonoscopy, he was surprised to find his doctor in the recovery room.  At first, he assumed the worst. One rarely sees doctors in the recovery rooms—usually it’s just a kind nurse offering you ginger ale and crackers.  But there was the doctor, waving a cell phone, and telling my groggy pal that he needed to see the picture he had taken.  It was of a smiley face.  The camera had spotted an “organic” sticker stuck to the wall of my friend’s intestine.  The letter “O” for “organic” was a large smiley face.   The doctor said in all his years of practice, he had never seen that before.

Evidently, my friend eats not just the fruit but peel and stickers also.

“I don’t understand this story at all,” snaps Prudence, shaking her head.  “How did the sticker survive the bowel prep?  How did it survive the digestive enzymes, which were clearly strong enough to destroy the fruit, including the peel? Did he not CHEW the sticker?  Does he even chew the fruit?”

“I wish someone could find a large smile inside of me!” pouts the fifth grader.

“They’ll probably find your whole head up there,” snaps Prudence. “You can smile for the camera then!”

The evening passed in a hurry.  I didn’t have as much time as I thought I would to watch the drama set in the time of cholera, once my own dysentery hit.  I found it safer to just keep the same seat, after a while, rather than attempting precarious voyages to the couch.  I amused myself by tuning in to various news networks on my phone and literally crapping myself as they made their commentaries.  I took savage delight in being able to do (literally) what I usually feel like doing when I hear the news these days.  Apart from a few griping pains early on, the prep was really not too bad and rather quickly over.  After about three hours, I felt safe enough to go to bed on actual sheets, rather than plastic bags. I’ve heard others sometimes have a much rougher time than I did and that’s too bad.  Maybe I was lucky.

“I thought you were going to genuinely suffer,” muttered Prudence.  “This was too easy.  You didn’t save a single soul, if you ask me.” 

I didn’t care.  I saved my own ass and was grateful.

The next morning, I went to the hospital.  No souls were saved there either.  Kind people gave me a soft bed with a heated blanket.  A nurse slipped a needle in my arm so skillfully I didn’t really notice.  A nice young man asked me to count backwards from ten, which became stupendously hard to do after seven.

Then I woke up from an amazing nap to a kind face offering me ginger ale and crackers.

“Did you find any smiles?” I asked.  She looked puzzled.

“Just two polyps.”

“I don’t want to go home,” I slurred. “I want to stay here now.  This was the best nap ever.  This place is like a spa.  I get to lie down and I’m so nice and warm and everyone is so nice to me! Thank you!”

It turns out that recently anesthetized Nancy is a lot like drunk Nancy—she’s a friendly little muppet (who now actually knows how Real muppets feel), who cannot stop talking and gushing about how much she loves everyone and everything. 

“She’s MESSY,” says Prudence with sincere disdain.

I took the rest of the day off.  Furry, somewhat domesticated animals kept me company and together we watched that period drama set in the time of cholera.  I managed to knit entire rows without having to recount stitches or run to the bathroom or come back and sit on the needles.  Life was quiet for a day.  I loved it.  (You know you’ve had quite a year when a Colonoscopy stands out as one of your Best Days.)

“Stay CLEAN!” said all my inner housekeepers and gym trainers and dolphin trainers and Prudence. “Stay Clean!”

But Christmas and the annual Bell family “Festivus” galloped up to the gate soon after and I polluted myself thoroughly with Good Cheer and all the traditional delights of feast days that make Repentance so worthwhile come January.   I managed to lurch towards the finish line of 2025 clogged with plenty of regrets in the end.  “All things in Moderation, including Moderation,” says Ben Franklin smugly to a snarling Prudence.

I hope you are taking Good Care of yourselves, Dear Ones. 

Just think…somewhere in this world full of mayhem…there is a person who’s job it is to look up the back sides of hundreds of patients (and people like my brother who once had to do his prep on Superbowl Sunday for a Monday morning procedure and couldn’t help treating himself to a few hot wings during the prep) and deal with all sorts of horrors  we cannot imagine…and one day, quite unexpectedly, he found a Smile.  

And somewhere, perhaps to this day, there is a man who is so excited about his organic fruit, that he even eats the stickers.  And both people are now forever joined in a story that spreads that smile a little further.  We don’t even have to Create the Good.  We just have to notice it.

May smiles find you, even in the darkest places.  May you keep Mending.  Thank you for your Good Work!

I love you Sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Turks & Chaos

“Everything about this is kind of awful…except that it’s just Perfect.” –Elias Cordosa

Greetings Dear Ones!

Most days this time of year, due to its huge, north-facing windows and fourteen-foot ceilings, my shop struggles to reach 55 degrees Fahrenheit (12.8 C), the minimum temperature at which my fingers can work efficiently.  I am engaged in a bunch of dreadful projects, one of which involves opening a series of Harris Tweed jacket sleeves and letting forty years’ worth of accumulated grit, dust, dirt, and dandruff fall out on the table.  I must vacuum the table after each sleeve before I can continue. I’m pretty sure I will get a version of Black Lung if I don’t.  A row of ski jackets waits for new zippers.  (They are those horrible, waterproof things that have been heat-bonded, not sewn, into the outer shell.)  A mother’s vintage wedding gown is to be cut up (by me, once I gather my nerve) and remade into something her daughter can wear at her wedding reception in June. (The bride’s mother cannot attend because of a medical issue and her father has passed on.  The bride will wear her mother's gown, incorporating fabric from her father's clothing to feel close to both on her special day.)   My serger is broken.  The dog is shivering, even though our sole space heater is aimed directly at him, in his nest under the counter.  The phone will not stop ringing—about fifty percent of the calls are robo-calls from telemarketers, the others are people asking, “do you do pants?” (What does this even mean?)

I look around me, at ‘My Dream Job,’ and sigh.

“You asked for this,” says Prudence.

“Yes,” I admit, smiling. “And everything about it is kind of awful, except that it’s Perfect.”

Luckily, I got the Dream Vacation from this Dream Life. Less than ten weeks ago, I was exploring a coral reef, hot, sandy, blistered at a festival of Irish music and absurdity like no other. My son was one of the invited musicians for a festival called “Tunes on Grand Turks” and insisted I go with him.  He’s been part of it for a few years now and has always insisted I should go along.   Typically, they host this thing in May, right in the midst of Prom season or lambing and garden dramas and it’s easy enough for me to find at least three thousand other reasons not to go, not least of which is that I would prefer to go so many other places first! If I’m going to hang out on an island listening to people with Irish accents playing the music of my heritage, I would rather it be the cool, green actual Erin’s isle.  Watching a bunch of pale blue people from Co. Mayo getting fried to a crisp while roaming about in search of red snapper curry makes about as much sense to me as spray tans at a dance feis.  Everyone knows the Irish do many things spectacularly—tanning isn’t one of them.

This year, they changed the festival to November.  “You MUST come,” he insisted. “You NEVER take a vacation, ever!  Please, let me give this to you.”

So I did.  In the wake of my father’s death, depleted, depressed, and highly aware of the importance of Good Memories, Quality Time with my son on a tropical island in a mosquito-infested cottage with no air-conditioning seemed like the logical, inevitable choice over “doing pants.” There will always be plenty of pants to do. It’s not every day your 25-year-old son buys you a flight out of his own gig money and whisks you away to paradise.

Our beloved Hermit of Hermit Hollow agreed to manage all the critters at home; I sent all the “Do you do pants?” calls straight to voicemail; I boarded a plane alone in Boston (my son was in Baltimore at a banjo festival) and headed south.  I recognized a bunch of his musical buddies at the gate. 

“Stick with them,” he said, via cellphone. “They know where to go.  I told them all to look after you.”

It’s been a while since I have flown so I listened carefully to the flight attendants telling me there is a flotation device beneath my seat.  After what seemed like a week of standing in TSA queues in multiple airports, we arrived at Providenciales, sore in every sinew.  Stacking a winter’s worth of hay in the barn loft is nothing to the work-out one gets shifting a small carry-on bag and a fiddle case through three airport terminals in one day. Finally, we had a two-hour layover before taking a hopper flight to our destination, a tiny scribble of green outlined in beige in the middle of a huge puddle of turquoise.  I had regretted wearing all the wool and flannel since our stop in North Carolina and felt covered in sea water already. While the boys enthusiastically tucked themselves into plates piled with fried conch from the lounge bar, I passed the time observing people making their way to the restrooms.  I decided to be an undercover anthropologist trying to learn all I can about what it means to attend an Irish music festival in the Caribbean.

You can tell a lot about a people’s native music by the way they walk.  The tempos are baked in.  An airport lounge is a veritable jam session of vibes and virtuosity. Tourists from the norther hemisphere walk in shrill staccatos, pushing the beat and the people around them, with surging forward momentum, as if the destination is the only result worth seeking.  The natives are relaxed, with passive, lolling, sideways strolls frequently interrupted by passing Northern soloists who have had too many cups of coffee.

As soon as we reached Grand Turks, his buddies ditched me. I got put in the cab with the luggage, not the people, so I had no idea where to go to check in upon arrival.  I eventually found a pub and there, the beleaguered girlfriend of the cottage’s new owner, who was off island and had no idea they were supposed to have any rooms ready. They had been closed for two months for renovations and were still in the process of throwing away all the vintage moldy furniture. She had a basket of keys, none of which were marked with room numbers. We decided against the first room she showed me, as it seemed to be raining internally, through the ceiling, from a blocked shower stall above.  She then unlocked a freshly painted room that had been so thickly and thoroughly painted none of the electrical outlets could receive plugs. The room contained two brand new beds and several small piles of drywall scraps and plaster on the floor.  She asked the staff to mop the floors and, after a moment, “maybe also the walls.”   With dawdling minuteness and utter indifference, they dutifully removed all the dust piles, along with a rusted-out minifridge, leaving damp walls, two new beds, and a ceiling fan that worked beautifully only if the fluorescent light attached to it was on.  The windows were painted shut; the door painted open. Since I found it difficult to sleep beneath the glare of a light that would have made the most hardened criminal divulge all her secrets, I dragged in some patio furniture and constructed a make-shift ladder that enabled me to take the light apart and get the fan to function in pitch darkness. Then I lay down and thought of Vermont. 

At home, depending on how the wind is blowing, I hear the noise of interstate highway 91 from my bedroom window.  For years, I have been telling myself it is the ocean.  Funny enough, on Grand Turks, the ocean sounds exactly like highway 91!  All night, I could hear the semis rolling by in the waves and the local feral dogs howling just like their northern coyote cousins in that way that bluegrass music is reminiscent of its Celtic origins.  

The next morning, and every morning thereafter for the next four days, a mysterious remote control appeared on the doorstep.  I have no idea what they were for.  Each one was a different size and shape.  Perhaps they were brought by the stray dogs that slept outside the door at night.  There was also a random donkey in the front garden.  A real donkey.  The donkeys roam the island in perfect freedom, descendants of those turned loose from the salt works in the 1960’s. It turns out that there are also quasi-feral, though highly social, horses and cows adrift on the island—totally my idea of Paradise. You would not have imagined southern Vermont and a tropical island could have so very much in common.

I had to wait a full day for my son to arrive. I had no idea where to go or what to do.  People with ADHD often struggle in unstructured situations.  I felt like the Spaniard in “The Princess Bride,” waiting for Vecini to show up and give my life direction.  I had no access to Wi-Fi, so I crawled on the ground for half an hour and tried to photograph a hermit crab going about its daily errands.  It was definitely worth getting permanent gravel dents in my knees.  It was the most satisfying and relaxing thirty minutes I had spent in months. I think I caught him smiling.  I’m sure of it.  Every Free thing wears a soft little smile somewhere, even if that freedom is fraught with marauding gulls and threats of unthinking boots.

By the time my son arrived, I was abuzz with questions, most of which can be sorted into two categories: “where are we supposed to be?” and “what should we be doing?"  He was very patient.  He said, “Look, what time do you wake up?”

“Usually around five am,” I said. He rolled his eyes.

“Good. From five to seven, I think you should read or write. From seven to eight, you should walk or run, at eight, have a cup of tea using the tea bags you brought in your fiddle case. From nine to ten, you could do any of the above again or just panic—your choice.  The Plan is that there is NO plan.  That is what ‘vacation’ means.  You do not have to show up for anything or anyone. Just don’t wake me up before ten.  We’ll go swimming at ten.”

And so it was.  Every morning, I amused myself for five hours using nothing more than a journal, a pen, and a first edition of O.Henry’s Of Cabbages and Kings, then went swimming with him (my son that is, not O.Henry).  And by ‘swim’ I mean ‘floated with languid, occasional use of arms and legs as we bobbed over placid waves.’ Sometimes, we “swam” for four hours at a time, looking through crystal waters at the reef creatures or just floating and talking.  The Flight Attendant was right.  I WAS sitting on a flotation device.  It was me own arse—so buoyant in fact that I could not manage to get myself much below the surface of the highly salinized water, before snapping up like a cork.  The young and bum-less were able to linger in front of a cave containing a puffer fish, while I only caught fleeting glances of a little fishy smirk before being yanked to the surface.  

Every evening, there were jam sessions or concerts at random, tricky to predict locations. The musicians would play until dawn, sleep until noon, then spend whole afternoons just hanging in liquid salinity, gossiping and chatting. One told me about the time the water was suddenly filled with gorgeous women their own age—it turned out a cruise ship had caught fire. He said it wistfully, with one eye on horizon, scanning for smoke.

 One particularly poetic and astute young soul swept his hand across the waves and gestured towards the shoreline.  Some of the places were cheerfully painted, others looked like bombed out wrecks that had never been rebuilt after a series of concurrent hurricanes had struck a few years ago.

“If you think about it—this place is so amazing and so beautiful but it’s kind of tragic too.  The island can’t grow anything worth eating—except by donkeys—and it doesn’t produce much now that it doesn’t make salt.  All it has is this shabby sort of exquisite beauty and clean drinking water to refill the tanks on the cruise ships that stop by daily.  And when too many stop by in a row, the local taps run with mud until the well refills.   Everyone here is poor except for the super rich.  Everything operates in languishing chaos. Nothing is ever efficient on an island—it’s dependent on trade and all the vagaries of weather. Pretty much everything about this is kind of awful…except that it’s just Perfect. It’s Paradise!”

I couldn’t agree more.   I loved every minute of it.

A good vacation, one where your shower comes equipped with its very own mosquito farm, makes you both grateful you went and grateful to be home. That phrase was the best souvenir of my trip and has come to embody everything I love about life on my island homestead here in southern Vermont, where everything is both scrounged and savored, staggeringly impoverished yet richly blessed, abundant but slightly desecrated. From smashing ice out of the sheep’s water buckets, to the state of the tools scattered in the garage, to the way the wood stove adds so much extra dirt to the kitchen…everything about this is kind of awful…except that it’s just Perfect.  It’s Paradise without the palm trees.

I think that is the essence of Gratitude: To appreciate the absurdities of and to hold with humility, horror, and humor what it means to be alive—whether we are hermit crabs or crabby humans.  The whole world is being tugged and torn at its edges by the Greedy, the Cruel, and the Uncaring.  And yet, there still is beauty in the rainbows after the rain, in those who are feral yet gentle, in those who have the true freedom to look around them and smile, despite the dangers.

Thank you, Dear Ones, for all you are doing to stitch things up a little, to keep the Darkness at bay, to keep laughing, and keep others Hoping.   Take breaks when you need them.  Remember your seat can be used as a flotation device. Stay in Amusement if you can.  True power is always with those who can laugh.

I love you SEW much,

Yours aye,

Nancy