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

we THOUGHT it would be easy!

Greetings Dear Ones! `

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

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

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

Always, always, always I LOVE IT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you eaten?” I ask.

“Um… no…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT’S ALL A GIFT.

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

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

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

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

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

With Sew Much Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

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