A Clear Blue Sky

Greetings Dear Ones!

There is something surreal about a cerulean sky on a September day.  It’s a pure slice of heaven. It’s different from any other sky in any other month, though November can boast of Emily Dickinson’s “certain slant of light” and I also personally adore February winter skies that look like heaps of ecru wool roving waiting to be spun into dreams of Spring.  But September skies are my favorite. Their particular blue goes so well with the trees, which are yet green.  Only a few golden leaves tinkle down, like coins into a collection box for the poor.  

The days are just as warm and sunny, but the nights are made for snuggling into wooly socks, cozy blankets, with good books and warming mugs of cider.  The sap starts to move in the trees, sinking to keep roots warm, just as we don boots after months of bare feet.

The harvest is nearly done.  I have been making pepper jelly and peach preserves, canning them in neat little jars in neat little rows for those blustery months when we want to taste August again.  This year, I had so many beans hanging from my bean trellis, I canned and pickled “dilly beans” with fresh dill and garlic and red pepper flakes.  Yum!

The Blue Sky days are perfect for drying hay as my farmer friends get a second or third cutting out of the fields.  I have been stuffing my barn with 400 (and still counting) forty-pound cubes of fodder for the animals, grateful to inhale the fragrance of dried grass and Security.    There is only a narrow pathway for the barn cats to navigate the floor, but they prefer to climb amongst the jungle, happy to have so many places to creep and hide and stay hidden and warm.  I deliberately build them little forts in the hay where I can sit with them and hide too.

The twine that binds the bales, cuts into my fingers, even with the gloves on, and I notice that my hands are thicker by the end of the day than they used to be.  It happens every year.  A good frost seems to slim them down again. I look at my strong brown hands and thank them for their good work.  I ask so much of them in September—from hauling hay to hand-stitching lace on wedding dresses, and then trying to play a new fiddle tune in b minor just before bed...

The third and final fly season is almost over—and Gus and Otie are so much happier.  We have the dreaded black flies all Spring; the deer flies, horn flies, and house flies all summer.  The boys have developed big callouses on their bum cheeks from swishing at pests with their strong, bony tails.  They roam among the fallen fruits of feral apple trees in their field, smiling and munching.  They don’t mind the clouds of fruit flies.  It’s the green heads, and the giant ones we call the B-52s, showing up in iridescent hues of bite and flight, that they hate.  But on clear blue, breezy days—good hay-drying days—the flies are barely there.

The thistles are everywhere, looking gorgeous and dangerous in their push-up blossoms and glittering spikes.   First their hair was purple, now it’s white, like a lot of people I know.  Their seeds scatter down the hillside in the wind.  They do not grow in the same spot twice.  They send huge roots into the ground and heal it, binding nitrogen, as they march steadily across the field, year after year.  Some people hate them.  I love them.  They are outrageous AND they are Menders. And no one wants to mess with them except the golden finches, who perch on them with dainty spurs and ride them expertly.

What could EVER go wrong on days like this???

Twenty-five years ago, we found out. 

Out of a clear blue sky, hijacked planes came and hit not just our buildings and our people, but our hearts, changing everything forever.  This year, because I have so much quiet working time to listen to podcasts and books on tape in my shop, I spent several days listening to survivor stories on the Tube of You.   I had never done this before.

My family has its own survivor stories.  My brother worked for Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower.   His subway train had stopped before its usual stop and all the passengers were told to disembark, because the North Tower had already been hit.  As he walked towards his building, he had almost made it in to work when he looked up and saw the second plane coming in.  He felt the heat of the fireball, heard the screams, saw the jumpers.  Suddenly, he was in a sea of thousands pouring towards the water, to the bridges, walking silently all the way back to New Jersey.

At the time, I was married to a wonderful Scotsman who had the incredible fortune, as he used to put it, “to drink for a living.” (Don’t worry, our friendship has survived our marriage!)  He worked as a brand ambassador for several whisky distilleries and American importers of prestige versions of “barley sauce.” That morning, at 9:am, he was supposed to be doing staff training in preparation for an evening Scotch tasting event at the Windows on the World restaurant, located on the 106 and 107th floors of the North Tower.   He had done multiple tastings there in the past.   He argued with his colleagues about doing the 9:am staff training.  “September 11th is my daughter’s fourth birthday.  I’m not coming down the night before to do a staff training so early in the morning.  I’ll be there at noon. There’s plenty of time to train the staff.  They’ve done it all before.  It’s really important for me to be there when she wakes up on her birthday.” 

The morning of September 11th, while the sky was only just turning that magnificent blue, we  had presents and songs, and we buttered her nose (a weird family birthday tradition to keep evil spirits away) all before a car arrived to take him to the airport. Hours later, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen, learning a new chord on my guitar when the call came from a pay phone at Logan. All flights were grounded. He was coming back home. “Turn on the news,” he said.

My daughter has grown up feeling that her birthday is both a day of mourning and rejoicing.  Never has it been able to be “just another birthday…”  

This year, the twenty-fifth anniversary, I finally was able to listen to all the stories…so many, many stories of heroism and terror, of tragedy and relief, of guilt and gratitude.  I identify with it all.  It was so cathartic to be patching crotches, hacking into bridesmaids’ bodices, and weeping.  

I’m a professional Mender.  For me, the best stories are the stories about September 12th, the day AFTER the hits, when all the helpers, healers, and huggers understood their assignments and got on with the business of Mending the Mess left by Hate.  I remember it so strongly.  I remember how we all loved each other.  How American Flags sprang up, almost overnight, like red-white-and-blue mushrooms from every conceivable location you could imagine.  I never saw anyone putting them up.  Just suddenly, they were there.   I remember the shock, the pain, and how scared we all were, but I remember the sense of Unity and Identity too.  We suddenly “belonged” to something we had not really considered before—forged by shock, by sharing, by story, by memory—we suddenly Belonged. To each other.  High above the borders of statehood, citizenship, nationality, in that vast cerulean sky, where two towers were lit like giant cigarettes, we belonged to the vast, human family, Grieving.  

I remember how quiet the skies were that day, even after the cigarettes and so many precious lives were stubbed into ash.  All the planes were grounded.  There was no hum of an engine at ten thousand feet signaling that people high above us were patiently awaiting the arrival of the beverage trolley or their turn at a potty the size of a phone booth. (Who even knows what a phone booth is, these days?) There was just a vast Absence of noise. Those who could, went home and stayed there. The streets were quiet.  It was a Silence I had never heard before that wove itself into a certain shade of blue I now recognize as a rare yet familiar friend.  It’s a blue that is impossible to be sad in, despite the horrors we witnessed that day.  It’s a Blue that says, “I am bigger than sorrow, bigger than grief.”  Be HERE. Rejoice.

So now, blue skies (like today) echo that silence and that faith back to me across time. And finally, after listening to hours of people recounting their stories, a little family mystery is solved.  I finally understand why I have a little habit I have developed.

I don’t know when I started doing this, but I am not alone.  Perhaps you do it too?  My entire family does it—my kids, my siblings, my parents. We do it unconsciously, yet it attracts the attention and surprise of those who don’t.  When we hang up the phone, we say, “Bye, I love you.”  It’s so reflexive that I accidentally say it to customers.  I said it when I called the electric company about billing questions. I said it to the car mechanic when I called to make an appointment for an oil change.   I have told it to mere acquaintances and shop assistants, always by mistake.   I notice that my children say it as unconsciously as I do.  It’s become a telephone reflex—kind of like saying “you too!” when someone says, “have a nice day.”  

I don’t mean to release these little emotional grenades on the unsuspecting.  I can only imagine the plumber hanging up from a call from me, “Bye! I love you!” and sitting there in stunned silence as he contemplates our “relationship.”   Love is not love to me anymore; it’s mere punctuation, like ending a radio transmission with “K.”  Do I love the guy who services my septic system? Well, of course I do. In a way… a very non-descript, global sort of way.  But not enough to send him flowers or bake a cake for his birthday. Certainly not enough to tell him!  Thank heavens none of these people ever call me back and demand answers.

“What did you say?”

“I said Goodbye.”

“No, you didn’t. You told me you loved me.”

“’I love you’ is how I say Goodbye.”

“Oh.”

And then, just to confuse him, I might add, “Thank you for calling Vermont Power and Light.”

Apparently, my nervous system has trouble distinguishing between family members and customer service.  I’m so relieved when I accidentally say it to the guy at the feed store when I call to enquire about a grain delivery, and when I go to pick up the grain, neither of us make eye contact.  New Englanders know how to handle intimacy.

The truth is, somewhere along the way, my heart got used to saying “I love you” as a default.  And now, twenty-five years later, I realize why.  Because so many people, when interviewed about their loss of a loved one during the terror attacks on 9/11 said, “I wish I had said I love you just one more time.”  Those who were able to connect by phone, who were able to say “I love you” as the last thing they heard, clung to that.  Somehow, I don’t know exactly who started it, but my family says it now, every time.

Bye! I love you!

Of course it means nothing.  It also means everything.  Especially out of a clear blue sky.

Yours aye,

Nancy

What would Dolly Do?

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s 5:am and there is a pervasive smell drifting in the open windows.  An adolescent skunk has been hanging around the chicken coop for about a week now, trying to get in and eat their food, their eggs, even the chickens themselves.  He’s also feasting on all the peaches that have dropped from the trees in the orchard.  This little crisis-center-masquerading-as-a-homestead is covered with food and all of Nature has been showing up to “share” it with me. I thought I was a happy homesteader “living off the land” but it turns out I am actually the annual event coordinator for a multi-species food festival—a free, all-you-can-eat buffet for the entire taxonomic kingdom of southern Vermont.   I’m competing with every phylum, class, order, genus, and opportunistic little scoundrel within a fifteen-acre radius in our own version of hunger games.  At the bigger end of the spectrum are the bears and deer.  Smaller robbers include squirrels, bunnies, bugs, and the entire order of Rodentia.  It’s a race to fill my baskets and buckets in that narrow window between the time a berry ripens and when the entire hillside has heard the dinner bell.  For someone who has been told she is an apex predator, I am surprised to find myself wrestling elbow to elbow with fruit flies.  And the fruit flies seem to be winning!

It’s also time to fill the barn with Hay.  And there are several bales of wedding gowns in the shop with urgent deadlines dangling from their hangers.  And I am behind on everything else.

So! Life is busy!

And yet… I took the entire Tuesday off last week to attend the funeral of a dear little lady in Westerly Rhode Island.  The church was surprisingly crowded for someone who had spent the last seven years in a nursing home.  She passed away six weeks shy of her hundredth birthday and had outlived all her siblings and most of her peers, but she had done so much good in this world, there was a church full of younger generations to commemorate her loss.  She had only one daughter, and that daughter had no children, so all these people were not bonded by blood, but by Joy.  It was inspiring to say the least.   She had lived a full life fully, contributing time and energy to a breath-taking array of community services and charities.  We all showed up to celebrate her life and express our profound gratitude for the Gift of knowing her.

I always sit at such ceremonies and think, “damn, I need to step up my game!”  It’s humbling to see how much good some people can do by doing “little things” all the time over the course of a life.  I love seeing how others are loved by those they have served.  It’s Right that we should pause in our labors and gather, celebrate, mourn, and most importantly, Learn from those who are ahead of us on the path.

On the way home, I learned that Dolly Parton had died that same day.   I cried just as hard for Dolly as I did for Aunt Whinnie.  As I said to my sister, “I know we are getting older and people pass on, but it never occurred to me that Dolly Parton could die!”  We had grown up listening to her music on the radio, never admitting to our friends how much we secretly loved Country Music, which was not a cool thing to admit back then.  Kenny & Dolly’s “Once Upon a Christmas” album has been the soundtrack of our family Christmas since 1984.  In 2012, my dad bought nine copies and put them in our stockings so that we could have the music for our own children.  I can’t imagine celebrating without singing “I’ll be home with Bells on!”

A lot of the quotes from Dolly could be said of Aunt Whinnie, though two more different creatures never roamed the earth.  Just the thought of Whinnie in high heels, make-up or a push-up bra makes me giggle uncontrollably.  Rhinestones would not have suited her, though I hear she was a pretty good square dancer back in the day. The only thing about her that glittered was her eyes, alive with wit and humor.  She was a stern minister’s daughter who summed up the past as “Oh well,” and the future as “Time will tell,” living carefully in between, in a somewhat bleak New England “Now” that was always more serviceable than fancy.   She drank Schlitz lite beer (just one per night, every night) and liked her hamburgers like herself, small and plain—just a bit of meat on two buns, no ketchup, no relish. 

Internally, she and Dolly had a lot more in common.  They were both relentlessly hard workers who knew exactly who they were and they lived fully as themselves, on purpose.  And they didn’t care much what other people thought of that.  They may have delighted many people, but they did not aim to please them.    

In the week since that day, I have been pondering these two lives—one so large that the guards at Buckingham Palace paid tribute to her, and the other so small that twenty-five  pews could hold all those who remembered her.  Both did a lot of Good in this world.  Both are my heroes and teachers.  

My biggest concern is Balance.  This world just lost two extremely Good people.  Who will bring the light and muscle now?  Who will do the Work? Who’s going to Mend all that needs mending, do all that needs doing, dream all that needs dreaming, and sing all that needs singing?  When a big tree falls, it stops living for itself and gets cut and used to light and warm the Winter for others.  It allows all the little trees to grow up into the space it used to occupy.  There’s a whole lot of sky pointing to the empty space we need to fill. And it might take a lot of us, doing our fierce little “Little” to fill such a gap.

Even though Dolly Parton was an enormously beloved icon for the ages, none of the things she was best at required fame or fortune to do. She was kind; she was hard-working; she was generous; she was honest.  She lived a life laced with self-effacing humor and genuine humility.  She was deeply in love with her own spirit.  I cannot tell you how much I love her for that.  Her assertion that we need to be who we are “deliberately” rings true to me, in all my mess and distraction, as something I can cling to as a North Star—or in her case, a Southern Star.

From what I can tell, Dolly herself would admit that she could not be “Dolly” without her team.  (Let’s pause a minute and spare a thought for her seamstresses—those proportions from the narrow shoulders to generous bosom, back to itty-bitty waist are a nightmare to fit properly!)  She relied on a lot of hidden “little” people, people just like you and me and Aunt Winnie, to work hard in the shadows of her rhinestones to keep the Dreamer in Chief’s dreams coming true. 

The truth is, I struggle with who I am “authentically” because most of the time, I do NOT do it deliberately. For example… I attended Whinnie’s funeral in open-toed sandals.  Just as I was running out the door to begin the journey to the church, I noticed how scandalous my toenails looked.  I needed to hide them but didn’t want to change shoes. Quickly, I slapped a little red polish on the three toenails of each foot I could see.  I did not take the sandals off.  The hidden toes remained unpainted. I rushed out to the car and sped off.   When I arrived at the church, our dear Hermit of Hermit Hollow asked what had happened to my leg.  The back of it had bright red streaks across it like I had been flogged.  I must have rubbed my wet toes across the back of my leg as I got in the car.  No amount of spitting and rubbing could get the varnish off.  I only succeeded in making the whole leg look inflamed.  “Oh well.”  I guess I’m showing up as “Me” again, (sigh) now a me that looks like I am into shades-of-grey kink.

I am authentically a bit of a mess at the best of times.  I care enough to go to an event, just not enough to take the time to clean myself up properly.  May I repeat, I do not wish to do this “deliberately.”  (I cannot imagine I am supposed to carefully paint the backs of my legs with stripes of scarlet on somber occasions.) (Big boobs are not in my repertoire either.) But I can own who I am, stripes and all, and that’s the lesson I take away.  “Blessed are we who can laugh at ourselves; we shall never cease to be amused!”

The day after the funeral, a brand-new customer calls at eight o’clock in the morning.  She does not know when her appointment is. I am picking blueberries and cannot take the call with sticky fingers.  Her appointment is not today so I don’t fret about it—I tell myself, “I open at nine,” thinking I’ll call her then. I continue with my chores.  She calls again at ten, when I am in the shop, and leaves a curt message.  “You did not call me back. I have cancelled my appointment.  You do not seem very professional.” She ends the message by saying “Have a nice day” in a way that indicates she wishes me 24 hours of a hellscape in which I sew continuously without bobbin thread.

I hear her tone and feel a swift hit to my solar plexus.  The Pleaser in me is wringing her hands and wants to cry. This is BAD, very bad.  My ears feel hot. Shame billows.

My inner teenager wants to punch this woman in the throat.  She knows what area code this person is calling from and that no one from OUR area would ever treat anyone like that.  “She can go fry ice,” she says.  Prudence is horrified.  

“We need to grovel,” says the Pleaser, “we need to drop everything and get this woman in here and prove to her we are amazing and loveable, and worthy, and enough.”

“Horse shit,” says the teenager, stamping her foot, “Don’t you dare. She’s not even a customer; she just wants to be.  Leave her.”

“It’s OK to pause, ground yourself, reconnect to your Intentions,” says a kinder voice with a mysteriously southern drawl.  “Unkind people need more kindness, not less.”

I consider my heroes. Bad stuff happened to them all the time.  They weren’t great because stuff like this didn’t happen.  They were great because when it did, they rose above it and still managed to be Kind without abandoning themselves.  I can see Aunt Whinnie shrugging her shoulders and letting it all roll off her back.  “Some people are just like that,” she says.

Dolly says, “Girl, Just Be Honest.”

“I honestly want to punch her in the throat and watch her go into a pop-eyed squiggle,” insists the teenager.

Dad looks directly at the teenager and says, “The world has an abundance of jackasses; it doesn’t need one more.”

“Rage is a Weakness with its own kind of muscle.  Stop strengthening the rage, embrace the weakness. That’s true strength,” says the Kind Voice.

I take a deep breath and text the woman. I say, “You are 100% correct.  I am not very professional, and I am sorry this has affected you so personally. I am a human, working alone, trying to juggle more work than I can handle at times.  I’m a talented seamstress with an artistic temperament, not a skilled executive, hence my reliance on my website to help organize my appointments and send client reminders…I wish you the very best in finding someone to work with who can better serve your needs. Kind regards, etc…”

She returns an equally kind, mollified, response.  She admits that normally she would go on social media and smear my name and business but she has changed her mind. She wishes me the best of luck.  This time, she means it.  I can feel the difference. The insulted and ruffled teenagers in both of us settle down.

Kindness has won the day.   

Owning my weakness feels like new strength.

It’s a start.  (Maybe next I’ll see about those toenails.)

A lot of us think that Grace and Goodness are scarce and temporary commodities, like peaches or blueberries, and that we need to claw and fight all of Nature for what we claim as “Ours.”  The truth is, we can have as much as we want, any time we want, because The Well is within each one of us.  Generosity suits us.

I don’t need to behave like a skunk. I own the Tree.  The tree is Me, bugs and all.  Thank you, Dear Teachers!

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!  We need each other now more than ever! 

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Doing Good Stuff

Greetings Dear Ones!

Whew! It’s been a minute… I have thought of you often, even written to you a few times, always interrupted by the swells and surges of summer chores.  Threads and sentences have been left to dangle, along with an abandoned knitting project whose needle I have misplaced.  I have been called away by golden days, dandy mayhem, and sometimes just the scent of the wind in the garden as I weed. I had fifteen wedding gowns and a pasture to fence in June. The blueberries took charge of me in early August and just as their tyranny was subsiding, the peaches showed up to boss me around. (They are getting canned this weekend.)  Last week, a broken kitchen sink faucet was supreme monarch for a soggy three-day reign that included flooded counters and me learning how to use a basin wrench.  I went to the hardware store, bought the best tool I could, and thought of my dear old dad—the ultimate collector of Good Tools.  Today is the first anniversary of his death.  I have survived an entire year knowing I will never again hear his secret to a good blueberry pie, or “how to cut a pepper,” something he insisted on demonstrating every time he cut a pepper.

My mother, now living alone, had a knee replacement in July and I packed up 35 ski club jackets that needed new zippers and set up a temporary shop in her dining room in Pennsylvania so I could care for her for three weeks while we both mended ragged things that had suffered years of abuse and neglect. (The knee got better faster than the ski jackets!)

I loved being able to care for my mother, who is at heart a hard-boiled New Englander who doesn’t like to need anything.  I loved being a witness to her resilience and her amazing spirit which can switch from crabby to hilarious in a single beat.  It’s a pleasure to spend time around a strong woman who can laugh at herself.

“What’s all this?” she snaps, filling out her paperwork at her two-week checkup with the surgeon. 

“It’s a pop quiz you should know most of the answers to,” I say, “like where you live, your date of birth…”

“Yes, I know,” she says with increasing vexation, “but how am I supposed to know what medications I am on! Shouldn’t the doctor already know this? He prescribed them!”

“Leave it blank,” I say.

“And why does it say here, ‘denies use of alcohol and tobacco?”

I look at my tiny, pious, daily communicant Catholic mother with her miraculous medals and crucifix around her neck, survey the crowded waiting room, and announce in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “Because, Mother, when the intake person interviewed you before the surgery and asked you if you smoked and drank, you LIED TO THEM and said NO.”

She gasps. I begin to giggle like I am in church and cannot stop.

The young woman seated nearest her, a complete stranger, leans over, gives her a hug, and says, “aw…honey, that just makes me love you all the more!”  

From the center of that unsolicited human contact, my mother fixes me in the sights of her ray gun eyes and shoots a fire powerful enough to scorch misbehaving children twenty yards away and get them to sit up straight and eat their vegetables without a fuss.

My mother has abstained from all alcohol except the blood of Christ for more than twenty years.  She has never smoked. After the surgery, we had to get her off the Percocet as quickly as possible because it just made her want to get up and vacuum.  (You know you are from New England when all you need is ice to heal.) 

While I initially worried that my tenure there would eventually require a large amount of tequila and a gun, I cherished the unexpected gift of living in my childhood home without the hoopla of a big family gathering.  It was just me and Mum, though I kept expecting to see my father rounding every corner.  I could feel his presence most strongly in the kitchen, as I pawed through drawers filled with gadgets, and vast quantities of spices, and towers of pots and pans he had hoarded through the years.  “I think the man secretly planned to open a restaurant and not tell you,” I said to my mother. 

I could see him using every pot under the counter until he found the right one. ‘If you’re going to use one pot, hell, why not use them all?’ was his attitude. His version of “Cleaning as he went” involved a grubby rag that just smeared pizza sauce along a previously pristine counter.   He could turn absolutely anything into a meal; he could also turn anything into a mess.

As my brother said at Dad’s memorial, “If you are going to talk about my father, you are going to have to use a lot of F words,” a statement that instantly made my mother’s jaw clench.  She was anxious that our beloved Patriarch be remembered as a pious man, one who would never (EVER) play games such as “pull my finger” with the grandchildren.   My brother looked straight at my mother with a devilish twinkle in his eyes. She was so nervous about what his children had to say about him that none of us was allowed to give a eulogy at the mass—only a proper young priest my dad had mentored as a seminarian was allowed to give a few bland words about “a very good man” who would be missed by the parish.  The man my mother wanted remembered was an alien confection of duty, piety, and restraint—a boring sort of garden in which some of the most outrageous and fabulous blossoms had been torn out along with the weeds.

But then my brother stood up after the meal, rang his glass to get our attention, and began to discuss the F words.  I thought my mother was going to pass out.  He let the pause sink in, enjoying the delay, until she could stand it no more.  “While we never heard my father say them, he lived them large,” he said, “and they were Faith, Friends, Family, and Food…though not necessarily in that order!” 

I wish I had a copy of my brother’s tribute—his words are so much better than mine—but I remember the gist of it.  He talked about how my dad shared his faith with us, which was great because we knew which prayers to say each time he climbed a ladder to fix something.  Nothing puts the fear of God in a body like having the largest member of the tribe ascend a rickety ladder and accidentally drop tools made of metal on your head as you attempt to steady the ladder. My dad could fix just about anything—though he often did it in the way that took the longest, cost the most, and involved a modicum of bloodshed—like the time he dropped a drill on his own foot. He tried to fix as much as possible himself or deny it needed fixing.  Our front door blew open each time the wind blew for at least fifteen years before my mother called a carpenter and got a new one installed.  He approached household and farm repairs with the cagey optimism of an underweight fighter who thinks he can take on an opponent twice his size.  He usually came back bloodied, bruised, and saying words we were not allowed to repeat.

He had a vast number of tools, none of which was precisely the right one for the job at hand, partly because he adored tools and partly because his organizational system did not involve putting things back where he found them but leaving them where he last used them. This is how our family came to own more than nineteen hammers at any given time.  Anyone wishing to hammer something found it more expedient simply to buy a fresh hammer from the local hardware store rather than attempt to find one on Dad’s workbench.

My father was not a neat man but he was fabulously Creative—a generous genius.  He usually left the kitchen looking like a tiny restaurant had just exploded. He saw recipes merely as “suggestions,” kind of the way I see sewing patterns, or a really good musician plays way more than the notes on the page.  I can still see the fanatical gleam in his eyes as he tells me the recipe called for [a sensible ingredient] but he substituted [something ridiculous] and doubled the amount.  He was forever a scientist, creating a strange alchemy of things that were fat-free, or gluten-free, or sugar-free, depending on the culinary era.  Once, he made “keto waffles” out of pulverized pork rinds and eggs.  Whatever he made, he made way too much of it—his recipes, like his spirit, were larger than could be managed in a single container.  He was a loaves and fishes kind of guy, always ready to feed multitudes.

If we could still see the floor in his workshop, apparently, we were doing fine; No need to sweep.   He made beautiful things in his wood-working shop, turning old fence boards into family treasures: spice racks, tables, bookshelves, cutting boards and peg racks to hang on the walls.  He was forever churning out beautiful gifts for his family and friends, though humbly insisting his chief product was sawdust.

He didn’t talk a lot about details or “mushy stuff” like emotions.  He stuck to “the Big Picture.” His dying advice to my son was, “Do Good Stuff; Don’t Do Bad Stuff. You know the difference.”  (This is the same man who taught me to drive with only two instructions: “Keep the car on the road. Dodge the other cars.”)

Dad showed his love by Doing Good Stuff.  He was interested in Everything. Long before Google was invented, you could always ask Dad about any random bit of trivia and get a dissertation on the subject as if he had minored in it in college.  He learned the names of all the cloud formations in fifth grade and never forgot them. He was passionate about history, hobbies, sports, and music. He cooked for us. He fixed things, or tried, until the job was either finished or interrupted by a quick trip to the hospital. His favorite thing in the world was to have his family gathered around a table crowded with his concoctions.  He would hold our hands and invoke the blessing, beaming at each of us as he did, blissfully dismissive of my mother grinding her teeth into stumps over how the kitchen looked like a crime scene. 

He tried.

Once, when I was very young, attempting to console him, I patted him and said “from what I can see, a father has two jobs: fund the bliss and take the blame.  You do both these things with admirable constancy.”  He never stopped repeating that motto.  He funded the bliss, as well as the educations of five grateful children.  He also took a lot of blame.  (And deserved most of it.)   

There was deep love and laughter at the center of everything he did.  My siblings and his grandchildren cherish our memories of being Fed and cared for by a man whose love was Big, Messy, Generous, occasionally covered in sauce or sawdust, yet, like his homemade pizza, simply… The Best.  

I still talk to him all the time—I still hear his voice when I cut a pepper or change a tire or wander around my own farm looking for a hammer—I just don’t need a phone to do it.  365 days later, I’m only just getting used to the ache of him being “everywhere and nowhere,” kind of like a missing hammer.  It’s a pain I hope never goes away.  It reminds me of all the ways I got to be so very loved by such an incredibly flawed and fabulous human.  I could not be more grateful for all he taught me.  Even now, I’m still learning.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!  Keep Doing Good Stuff. Keep cooking and tasting and simmering and Serving The Gift.  It’s all a Gift. Every bit of it.

With Sew Much Love,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

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