Success

Greetings Dear Ones!

I try to keep my hands clean and dry.  Honestly, I do. I wash them every time I start work on one of the twelve wedding gowns frilling and frothing up my shop.  If I could sew in satin gloves, I would.  But these little work-paws do more than pick invisible stitches out of hemlines encrusted with beaded embroidery.  The white satin backdrop shows how insanely dirty the rest of my world is right now.  Winter hands are chapped and clean.  Summer hands are as un-cleanse-able as Lady MacBeth’s—only it is not death but Life I cannot wash off.

Being Alive, nurturing Life, planting, protecting, watering, weeding…these are very dirty hands-on things on a homestead.  My hands are a rainbow of colors—brown from working in the sun, red-raw from thorns and bug bites, blue-bruised from angry beaks, aching colorlessly from hand stitching Carhartts and attempting to take a flat tire off the lawn mower.  The nails are dirty.  These are not the hands of a parlour maid paid to work on wedding frocks.  “They aren’t the hands of a lady at all,” sniffs Prudence critically.

I simply don’t know how to live, or learn, or mend or make anything better without getting my hands dirty. No matter how you touch it, LIFE is Dirty!

There are two broody hens in the chicken coop attempting to become mothers.  One has made a nest in a most unfortunate place—high up in the eaves under the very edge of the roof.  She squeezed herself through a gap in the chicken wire mesh that is supposed to prevent her from getting there.  The other has taken over a clutch of eggs in one of the nesting boxes on the wall.

A few days ago, morning chores were disrupted by the discovery of a frantic mother and two chicks darting around the bottom of the coop.  The chicks had hatched and fallen out of the nesting box and the distraught mother had left the nest to protect them.  I looked at the mother and cheered her, “Success! You did it!” She had managed to hatch two eggs. She was pleased with herself, but “success” now presented her with a whole new batch of problems (this often happens with success), which included the fractured devotion she felt towards continuing her work of hatching the rest of nest and the distressing inability of the hatchlings to return.  All the other chickens were very interested in the new arrivals, and the new mother did not appreciate their interest one bit.  She was taking shots at them by hopping in the air and popping them in the face with her feet like she was in a no-rules cage match, sans cage!   

I immediately get some wire and make a separate pen for them within the pen. The chicks are so tiny, I figure that even though they can slip through the wire, they will stay with their mother.  I don’t want them to drown in the water bucket, to which the rest of the flock needs access, so I don’t fill it very high.  I give the chicks their own tiny watering apparatus designed for chicks, some food, and I make a nice new nest on the floor and move the rest of the eggs down to the fresh circle of clean hay.  I notice the eggs are cool to the touch.  Not a good sign.  The mother must have been off the nest for several hours for them to be that cold.  But she readily climbs aboard and the babies settle under her wings and peace is restored to the coop.  This is the best we can do for now.

Success?

I rush back as soon as I can, after a long day at the shop, anxious to see if any of the other chicks have hatched.  Instead of being greeted by all the charms of infant poultry I’d imagined, the place is a crime scene.  The nest is strewn everywhere.  A drowned chick is in the two inches of water in the big flock’s water bucket; the mother and the other are dashing around in panic, the mother boxing the ears of anyone who dares look at her remaining baby.  I let all the other chickens out to graze and free-range the gardens. I try my best to capture that little chick.  It is like trying to catch a mouse.  The mother comes at me again and again, with feathered rage and everything that is Red in her.  She comes at me with Motherhood itself, clawing and biting, to save the young, even though she has not managed to take any better care of her offspring than I have. We get nowhere in our passionate disagreement about what to do next.  Success eludes us both.

I find a large dog crate with a roof and a door and mesh that a chick cannot escape and start over.  I collect the eggs. I make a new nest.  I decide to catch the mother first, despite her fury, and stuff her in that crate so that I can capture the chick without so much interference.  While the mother caws and screams obscenities at me from the cage, her baby is as elusive as a flea.  It is so tiny, it actually manages to stuff itself into a mouse hole for a second before my filthy hands grab it and make a small cave for it—a flesh and bone geode encircling the black sparkle of mad eyes within.  I opened the clamshell of my hands inside the cage, blocking the entire door with my body, and the chick runs back to its mother. “Success!” I say, spitting out a mouthful of poultry dander and sawdust, and slamming the door.

I figure that while I am covered in chicken dust, I might as well winkle wee Gretchen out of the rafters before that situation becomes the next disaster. I crawl up there with an egg carton down the front of my shirt, take 8 eggs from her, and put them in the carton. Then I grab her. She is actually quite nice about it and I am able to climb carefully through the hole in the wire back to the ground without hurting either of us or the eggs. I make a nest of hay in a cat carrier, give her back her eggs and some food and water, and carry the whole parcel up to the house and put it in the mud room so I can keep an eye on her. She seems very happy. 

By then, it is nearly eight o’clock.  TUB TIME!!  My clawfoot tub is still outside so I use a hose to run the hot water out from the laundry hookup in the cellar.  I revel in bubbles and the poetry of Robert Frost as Gus and Otie graze nearby.  I slip my dusty head under the water and can hear their lip-vicious, smack-munching passing through the ground, as little vibrations.  “They could be voiceover artists for cartoon termites,” said the Career Agent in my head who is always looking for ways for those boys to earn their keep.  Ears underwater, eyes staring up, I see the first stars appear. I hear the music of the tree frogs through my aquatic headphones.  An unusually dirty middle-aged woman is taking a bath outside. “I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;/I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away/ (and wait to watch the water clear, I may):/I shan’t be gone long.—You come too…” says Frost.   It is the usual magical blend of bucolic and ridiculous that makes me so grateful to be alive, bug bites and all… 

The urge To Live is bossy enough to drive dandelion roots through bedrock, yet as fragile as a drop of two degrees in temperature.   The next day, the whole place stinks. In the house, there is a horrible smell.

My GOD... WHAT A SMELL!  It climbs right up in my nose colonizes my brain.  I can’t think straight. 

The dog has gotten into the compost pile again. He ate some and then, not content with making himself sick on the inside, rolled in it and made himself disgusting on the outside. He did a proper, thorough job of it too, so much so that he was able to leave at least three differing colors (orange, green, and brown) of slime on the couch and surrounding pillows and my shirt, which I had tossed over the armrest.  As I enter and take stock of the scene, he arches his back and disgorges the contents of his stomach on the only pillow he has missed. I  eject him from the nearest exit to finish vomiting on the grass and later observe him having diarrhea under the apple tree.  He manages to hold on to enough sick to come back in and make one last retaliatory barf on the rug. 

So! Another night in the tub—this time, with less poetry, more scrubbing, and the addition of a dog full of rot and regret.  All clean and wet, he bolts for my bed to dry himself off.  (Of course he does.) I strip the couch and scrape and scrub the carpet.

Somehow, the house does not smell better… It’s enough to make my eyes water. 

I work all evening at sewing (and the obligatory couch laundry), keeping myself busy and awake until late, until the heavy brocade of new-moon darkness falls.  I need it to be very dark for what I must do.  

I reach into Gretchen’s nest and one by one, sneak the eggs from beneath her.  I place each one on a cardboard tube that I have saved from an empty roll of toilet paper and shine a very bright flashlight into the tube from below.  This is called “candling.” The light enables me to look within the egg.  Her eggs are all infertile and beginning to rot.  The yolks are black.  There are no veins, no heartbeat, no placenta visible.  Some are filled with gas.  Two have exploded. This is what has been STINKING to high heaven (and low heaven and all the heavens in between, including chipmunk heaven, which, as you know, is really low to the ground).  She has spent 28 days cooking duds that are about to become bombs.

“Success is not always about the work we put in,” I tell her sadly. “It requires Collaboration, Divine Timing, Fertility, Chemistry, a Spark…”  There is no collaboration in these eggs—just corruption and good intentions about to explode, spark or no spark!  

Having located my collection of strong flashlights, after I candle her eggs and dispose of them (reminding me NOT to put them in the compost pile until I mend the fence!), I take one with me down to the barn (a flashlight, that is, not a rotten egg) and sneak into the coop, where all the chickens are asleep.  The little missus down in the dog crate has not hatched out any more babies but the lone chick still survives. (Success!) My guess is the others got too cold the night the hen was down, running around chasing the first two. I have to say, the hen house does not smell nearly as bad as my house, so maybe they are ok...?  Did they warm up in time? Usually, a clutch of eggs will all hatch out together within 48 hours and it's been way longer than that.  To no one’s surprise, the candling reveals that all the eggs were fertile. And all the eggs are dead and must be buried.

Such is “Life” on a farm.

Afterwards, I walk the night outside for a bit, the flashlight dark and heavy in my hand. It has shown me Death.  Other lights show Life. The fireflies are glinting in the grass at the edge of the woods. Gus and Otie are camping out under the stars.  (It must be nice to eat until you are tired and then lay down right in the middle of the buffet and just start eating again when you wake up!)  I stand there, filling the cups of my eyes with starlight—just a middle-aged little girl, standing on a planet somewhere in the cosmos, with grubby hands that can hold a wedding gown or Death and shine a light on it, somber, satisfied—feeling SO lucky to be here to witness it ALL—bugs that sparkle, eggs that reek, lace that is only for a day... 

Grateful that, despite our bungling, and all that conspires against it, sometimes Life wins the toss; one chick survives.

Keep Mending, Dear ones!  Thank you for the Good Work you are doing!

I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Ephemera

Greetings Dear Ones,

It’s that time of year when Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday follow me around like three bickering sisters arguing about what needs to get done first.  Their voices are increasingly shrill.

“Sequencing is so important!” says Yesterday. “I keep telling you what happened when you do things in the wrong order!”

“I want everything done NOW,” says Tomorrow impatiently, pinching at Today’s elbow.  “Yesterday was a total slacker. Listen to me, not her!”

“But I don’t know what to do first,” says Today. “There are far too many options.  I cannot decide.”

We stroll through the house looking at all that needs to be cleaned up, washed, moved, cleared out, changed.  We see the pile of work in the sewing room.  I have brought some home from the shop so as to bookend my days with extra productivity.  

Outside, we stroll through the grounds around the house, seeing pile after pile of wood assembled for projects.  Some needs to be cut into firewood, some split and stacked, some made into things… I sigh and begin randomly weeding.  This is not actually part of a plan, it just feels good to do Something. Anything.

The black flies are back.  Vermonters everywhere are emerging joyfully into the long-awaited sunshine like woodland creatures in a Disney film—and immediately begin slapping themselves in the head.  Their bites leave welts on the back of my neck the size of peanut M&Ms as I labor in the garden. (The black flies, that is, not the Vermonters.)  I am doing silly things that I wish I had not started, like removing all the fencing and the rotting raised beds and designing new layouts from scratch.  I have a recycled fence half up and I am rearranging the sheep fencing on the other side of the garden (they will share the fenceline) which is somewhere over a pipe that goes from the holding tank of the septic system out to the leach field, making things a little tricky for digging the necessary fence posts. 

Again, I wander off.  I am like a pinball bumping from task to task, not doing any of them, hearing the mutterings of Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday.  Today knows that so much depends on her and yet she can’t think of what to do first.  She can’t stick to anything because EVERYTHING is so important.

I travel down the hill and come across a little patch of trillium blooming in the carpet of leaves beneath a Maple tree.  There are also Dutchman’s Breeches—looking like someone hung tiny pioneer underwear on a dollhouse clothesline—and several Jacks preaching in their pulpits nearby.  This is an amazing discovery!  I crouch in a tailor’s squat, marveling for moments.  These can’t be in the same pen with the sheep!  They will eat them.  Trillium is especially delicious to deer, who destroy their fragile populations.  Sheep will find them just as yummy.  And Jack in the Pulpit is toxic, which no doubt, the sheep will find even more alluring.

“Our one ambition in life is to die,” nod the sheep.

“You will need to build more fences,” says Tomorrow. “This should be a little garden all to itself, right here.  You need to keep out the sheep.”

“Just what we need!” says Today, vexed. “More work to do.  Stop inventing work for me.  YOU can do this—next season.”

“But I have no hands,” says Tomorrow.  “Everything I will enjoy or despair over is the result of your hands, right now.  You are the only one who can save these flowers.”

Prudence is calculating the costs, the square footage, she is thinking that we should just break down and rent a post hole digger for a day and go nuts, perforating the entire farm.

The day is warming up.  It’s unseasonably hot and sticky, as if sugaring season left some extra maple syrup in the air, which is as debilitating for Today’s ambition as the bugs.

I get Gus & Otie out of their pen, tie them to the hitching post and begin their eye treatments.  They have been so itchy lately, they have been scratching themselves on something (A bush? Brambles? A dead tree?) that poked them each in the right eye, resulting in painful corneal abrasions that require treatment.  I put hot compresses on the swollen eyes, which they love.  As soon as the warm cloth descends on the clenched furry eyelid guarding the blue haze on brown eye, the whole cow melts, as if all the tension he was holding against the pain drizzles out through his hooves. They take turns standing quietly, enjoying the attention and the soothing feel of the hot cloths.  Then it’s time to get a dab of antibiotic ointment in under the eyelid—not as much fun!  None of us relish that part.  There are several thwarted attempts to bang me sideways with their horns.  Afterwards, I brush and rake at their itchy places, which they enjoy to the point of slobbering grunts. Then I slather their faces and horns and inner ears with my homemade concoction of citronella oil, beeswax, and Vaseline.   They smell amazing to me and horrible to biting flies trying to drink from the reflective pools of their weepy eyes.  Our whole routine is alternating unpleasantness with pleasantness.  They are patient patients.

“You could do the same with yourself,” says Tomorrow.  “You might actually finish a task.  Make a list of all the things you want me to enjoy one day and then alternate a horrible job with a pleasurable one.”

“Great idea!” says Yesterday. “Even a little investment in time is going to have compound interest in its value by the time Tomorrow arrives.”

“Tomorrow is never coming.  It’s always ME, just ME, doing everything,” moans Today. “In the words of your eighty-three-year-old mother, ‘Why can’t we all just ride horses and eat chocolate?’”

Why indeed.

Today wanders back to look at the trillium in bloom.  

 In the shop, a beautiful bridesmaid is wearing a strapless dress in my favorite shade of green.  She is heavily tattooed with native flowers, like those old botanical prints from the nineteenth century, such that she looks like a vase, with her narrow waist, and flowers coming out over her back, arms, and shoulders.  The effect is quite pretty.  I ask her about the tattoos. She knows everything about the native woodland flowers of Vermont. She is excited about my discovery of the trillium in my proposed pasture.

I tell her about my fencing ideas for protecting the trees at the edge of the pasture. 
“Oh, I wouldn’t bother with anything permanent,” she says. “They are the Spring Ephemera.  They are so fleeting.  They are kind of like the daffodils in that they bloom and then reabsorb their energy. They try to set their seeds before the deciduous trees leaf out. (They know perfectly well that the forest canopy represents an oppressive management structure.)  By summer, their foliage dies back completely.  You won’t even know they are there.  Put a bit of wire fencing around them until they are gone. It will be very soon.” 

“So…these flowers are just for You,” I say to Today, thoughtfully.  “We must see them as much as we can while they are here.”

“They will not be here tomorrow,” says Tomorrow with emphatic sarcasm.  “Think of them as one who says ‘I’m just going to pop in for one drink’ and then disappears until next May.  They are as transient as a ripe avocado.  What? You had a doctor’s appointment? Sorry!  You missed the entire bloodroot season. Try again next year!”

“To everything there is a Season, and a time for every purpose under heaven,” says Prudence piously, still thinking about the post hole digger.

When Spring Ephemerals are present, they take up the nutrients from rich and rocky soil that would otherwise be leached from melting snows making their way to the lowland waterways.  They absorb calcium and other minerals.  They are among the first to bloom and offer nourishing nectar to ants and other insects.  They are the shy, botanical introverts who bloom when no one is around.  As they complete their growing cycle, they send those nutrients back into the soil, when other plants are ready to take it up.  They are part of a magical and complicated forest network of mycelium, messages, and bacteria behaving like that neighbor who ‘just wants to borrow a cup of sugar’ bringing gossip.  Their small size and shallow roots enable them to take advantage of the top layer of soil as soon as it thaws, before the longer-rooted plants can compete. 

They do quick work that leaves a benefit to all who bloom after them. But some of that “quick work” requires the hidden labor of many years.  Trillium can take several years to produce a first fleeting flower.  Same with Lady’s slippers.  These are fragile and precious, even as they are patient and tenacious. I feel guilty looking directly at them, as if watching a Victorian lady on her fainting couch, recovering from ‘a spell,’ yet I have a strange, greedy delight in discovering the forest is healthy, the soil richly prosperous, as if I have discovered a rich uncle who has bequeathed me a considerable fortune.  

Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday are Nature’s gentle gardeners ensuring that the magic continues—little whispers of color on the forest floor in spring.  I realize, as I gaze at these beauties, that I don’t have to be at war with these three sisters; they are doing their quiet work in my life already.  I put my arms around them.  “Let’s be friends,” I say. Father Time and Mother Nature are the boss of us all.  Help me finish what I started yesterday and build the things I want for tomorrow.  

I look around—this time, not at all the work to do but at what is really Happening:

 Mud season is over. The prom dresses I labored over last week have already been sweated in, spilled on, shucked, and slung over chairs.  Tree frogs sing in the night.  The blue cohosh blooms fade in the woods, silent sentinels of withering ramps. The barn swallows are back and raising their first clutch of eggs. The fiddleheads are already fronds.  Endings chase beginnings like bats and mosquitoes. Sometimes they are the same thing, as any Graduate knows. (Endings and beginnings, that is, not bats and mosquitoes. Anyone without a college education can tell that bats and mosquitoes are not the same things at all.)  Like healing the scratches in our vision, some things are pleasant, some UN. The fabric of Life continues to be woven with tiny shots of color and light, ephemeral and perpetual.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!!!  Stitch by stitch… We each get to bloom in our season.  (I might be that rare and mottled treasure that takes sixty years or more!) The Ephemerals are nature’s reminder that some beings peak in April and refuse to participate the rest of the year.  Apparently, this is fine.  We cannot bloom all the time! It may appear that we have the work ethic of Broadway actors and woodland flowers—eleven months underground to prepare for a three-week performance no one cheers.  (Sometimes an audience of One is enough.) Sometimes, the work we do is unseen for years, while our time in the sun is unfairly brief because Big People with their Big Ideas show up to blot our sun.  And yet…. And yet… Today, Tomorrow, Always… though the work of our blooming is tedious, it might just nourish an entire ecosystem we cannot see.

Do It.

If Today is not the day to bloom, your time is on its way.  (Hopefully, black fly season will be over then.) All that is required is to do the one small thing that NOW requires so you will.

Speaking of which… I’d better get to it!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

You're Still a Mother

Greetings Dear Ones,

It’s 5:28 am on Mother’s Day Sunday.  A customer is texting me to tell me when she is available to pick up a gown I altered for her. I’m up, of course, but I resent the intrusion.  Can’t we at least pretend that I am not always at work, that at 5:28 on a Sunday morning I don’t give a single ragged hoot about when it might fit her schedule to pick up her dress?  I am not that tech savvy (people have tried to help me with this issue before, trust me) and my business line goes to my personal cell when I am not at the shop because, believe it or not, I sometimes leave my shop, even during prom season.  And I never turn off my phone just in case one of my kids might need me.  My kids are grown and gone but I’m a mother, damn it.  You never know when the call might come and I will need to put on my cape and clean boots and swoop down to Boston with Band-Aids or banana bread. They’ve been gone for years but I refuse to shut down the hotline.  It’s all I have left.

Don’t worry, a little early morning resentment is a good teacher. I get curious. WHY, on Mother’s Day of all days, would I even vaguely resent the idea of being available 24/7? What is this triggering? What is beneath this urge to mutter dark mutterings about a person whose first thought of the day is NOT about whether she will annoy a service provider. (What is she doing up so early this morning anyway?) I doubt she has sheep or oxen.  Maybe she has a garden. (It’s raining here.) Then, it hits me.

Maybe….she…has…kids….

That would explain being up early, the need to fit personal care for herself into the thinnest margins of the day, and the utter lack of sense of “normal business hours.”  I spent many years of mothering not knowing what time it was.  I was lucky to know what day it was! 5:28 am might be the only minute she thinks of herself all day. 

I make myself a cup of tea and light the fire while the kettle boils. A small cat jumps on my lap and begins to purr.  I decide, in honor of  Mother’s Day, to call a meeting of all the mothers I have been.  I haven’t seen these gals in a while.  The mist rises above the teacup and their faces come into view. Gosh, they look tired.  There should be twenty-eight of them but a number are missing.  They are still trying to recover from the day we had to have a bead surgically removed from a toddler’s nose.

“Ladies,” I announce, “Remember when you couldn’t go to the bathroom without two crying kids and three barking dogs trying to come in with you and all you wanted was just ONE frozen minute to yourself?  Today is for you.   This whole day is for yourself. No one is coming to visit.  There is no washing crayon graffiti off your walls, no poopy diapers, no one yelling “I’m telling!!!! MOM!” from another room.  You don’t have to eat all the leftover chicken nuggets because you hate to throw them away and they’ve been out too long to serve again tomorrow.

No one smiles.  This does not seem like a good dream anymore. 

We miss the crayon graffiti—especially when it was misspelled and the child tried to blame it on “Daddy.”

“But that’s not my handwriting! And I can spell!” he insisted.

I look around the circle of Mothers. The first are the ones who endured the pregnancy, the labor, the delivery. They look so plump-cheeked and young, bless them.  They can’t wait to get a plaster cast of their baby’s handprint and to fit into jeans again.  These are the only trophies they want. They have blobs of vomit in their hair made from their own breastmilk. They are spattered as if seagulls have been pooping on them all morning but they are happy.  For the first time in their lives, they have boobs and they actually work.

The one who kicked the laundry down the stairs, ran away from home, and took a four-hour nap on a bench in the rain in a graveyard when her husband asked “how the last two weeks had gone” while he was away on a business trip is not sure she is invited to our circle.  

“Yes,” I say. “You are still a Mother, even though you were totally exhausted and fell apart and thought you were losing your mind.  You went back. That’s what counts.”

“I only went back because I had no shoes, no wallet, and no bra on,” she sniffs.

“I forgive you,” I say. “You did your best. Two weeks alone with no help and a colicky infant was no joke. You all lived. That’s what counts.”

A lot of them are weathered, silent, emotionally flat. These are the ones who homeschooled the children, took them to swim team practice daily, tried to feed them three to seventeen times a day, while trying keep a clean house, manage live goats and loose rabbits milling about, and run a small business singing to other people’s children.  These are the ones who took a strong liking to scotch.

“You’re still mothers,” I tell them.

“But we were so checked out.  Our kids hated us,” they say.

“You did your best. You should have asked for help but you couldn’t because you were taught to think you should do it all and be perfect at it.”

As I sip my tea, more of the mothers step forward to confess their crimes. 

“I don’t deserve to be celebrated today. I slammed my own hand in the car door and broke a bone because I was so mad at that boy,” says one. “I was so addled I didn’t even see where my hand was!”

Another says, “I should have baked more cookies and read to them more. I had no idea it would all go so fast.  It felt like a life sentence. I thought it would never end.”

This little party is not turning out quite like I expected.  I clap my hands.

“We’re supposed to celebrate,” I say, “not mourn!  No matter what we have been through, despite all the highs and lows, we love those kids to the moon and back.  They haven’t turned out to be bank robbers. They can use the potty all by themselves, sleep through the night in their own beds, do their own laundry, change a tire, sew on a button, pay their bills, and even Be Responsible for their own Messes. Best of all, they turned out to be the people we love more than anyone else in the world. We genuinely adore their company. That’s a pretty good outcome, right?”

The Best.

“There were times I never thought it was possible—especially the sleeping in their own beds part.  That took YEARS,” says one, shaking her head in wonder.

“How about how we could never get the Jack Russells to poop outside but there was our son, out there shitting on the front lawn for all the neighbors to see?”

“I take a little credit for how they turned out,” says the one who refused to get out of bed to rescue her stranded nineteen-year-old at 1:am.  She left him sitting by the side of the road and made him call AAA instead because he never checked the fuel gauge and had run out of gas.  “If words can’t teach you, experience will,” she told him.  She is a real badass.  “I prayed a lot that night,” she admits. “He wasn’t home until 4 and he was only five miles away.”

“I took them to church,” says one. “I read to them every day,” says another. “I sang to them every night,” says another.

“They didn’t like that as much as the reading,” we all admit. “Even as babies they could tell you were out of tune and just making up words.”

“You’re still a mother,” I insist.

We all are.  

We have shaped two very precious lives but not as much as loving them has shaped our own.

“Ladies,” I say, “We’ve done, become, and been a lot that we could never have experienced without this specialized on-the-job training called Motherhood.  It’s a job whose roles include being promoted to Supreme Court Justice of the Kingdom, then demoted to unpaid consultant.  Our “Job” was to put ourselves out of a job. And we did. Ultimately, this means doing our best to behave normally when they make decisions for themselves.  It means painfully witnessing them ignoring all our practical wisdom yet taking on all our anxieties wholesale.  We’ve had to stand by and observe them becoming versions of ourselves that alternately make us cringe in pain or weep with pride.  We’ve had to look at ourselves, see what is loveable, forgive the rest, and sneak a little chocolate when we could.

What a chance. What a choice. What a Mess. What a Blessing.

To the young mothers out there, slugging it out with the boobs and body fluids—hang in there.  Ask for help as often as you can.  Forgive yourselves now for being tired, tempted, sneaky, or crabby, and wanting a little time on the toilet all by yourself. It’s ok. Your obsolescence is on its way.  Time will deliver it faster than you could ever imagine.

And it won’t be as good as you think.  Trust me, there is no loneliness like having food in the fridge that stays where you put it.

Here are some warning signs to look for: You will know your children are grownups when they say things like “I think I will go to bed early.  I did that last week, and it was incredible.”  They ask for recipes for the things you could not bribe them to eat in childhood.  They start checking the weather.  They call to check on you, instead of the other way around.

These are signs that civilization will continue and you, Dear One, have been a part of it.

For the rest of us, there is still Mending we can do! Mend ON, Mothers and Menders!  Thank you dearly for your Good Work. (And your not so good work too. It was Good Enough.)

With Sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

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

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