That's the Spirit!

"Maybe Christmas,” the Grinch thought, “doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more." –Dr. Seuss

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s that frantic week before Christmas when every customer through the door asks the same question, (just before they ask if they can have their items fixed the same day): “So! Are you Ready?”

“For the Holly-daze?” I say, “Oh, yes. I am ready!”

“Got your tree up?”  Well, no… No, I don’t.

“Got your shopping and baking and cards done?” Um… no. Not those either.

“So, what are you Ready for?”

Well… let’s say I’m just Ready.

“Ready for What?”

Ready to get Ready.  Ready NOT to be ready too.   Isn’t that what this whole charade is about? Getting Ready?  Let’s face it; we’ve all done this before.  Has anything ever, in the history of plans, gone precisely According to Plan?  (Not in Nancyland!) Since nothing turns out quite like we expect it to anyway, why not detach early from Outcomes and just persevere until there’s a sense of Delight, then call it a day?  My inner Slacker is overjoyed at the thought of Doing Less and Appreciating  More.  She calls for more eggnog and Hallmark movies as we sit by the fire and spin.

Getting Ready is both the best and worst part of any project.  (Just ask anyone who has ever prepped a room for painting, or removed forty-two yards of beaded lace from the hem of a wedding gown.) You don’t need a front room full of lit-up shrubbery or a smoking oven to be ready.  I can celebrate the Spirit without doing a darn thing.  I’m turning down the static fuzz of hectic hustle-hassles and mentally turning up the volume on everything which feels like Happiness to me.   I’ve lived in Vermont for less than three months now and I’m already more mellow, grounded, and less inclined to go bludgeoning a fellow shopper for the last Blume Doll on the shelf.  (It must be all that vegan Granola I’m eating.)  This year, I’m going to Relax, which I’m pretty sure means “be lax again,” and unhook from all the Senseless Commercialism.  Can you tell I have been doing quite a bit of “Procrasti-knitting?”  Since I am happiest when I am Rationalizing, I’ve already decided that this is going to be my Happiest Winter ever.  I’m Ready.  Now. To hell with the details…  That’s the Spirit!

Unfortunately, Prudence has teamed up with my inner Grinch to remind me why I really should be doing of all the Things I have Decided Not To Do and why I hated doing them in the first place.  My attitude can plummet without warning when I hit a traffic snag by a mall, or see an exhausted looking parent dragging weeping children through the toy aisle.  I have decided to embrace and celebrate this spirit of Darkness too—though it might get me in a wee bit of trouble.

So, I confess I have been actively encouraging people’s bad temper by shouting “That’s the Spirit!” when frustrations mount in the shop.  I know this is very naughty of me, especially at this time of year when we are supposed to be filled with “Holiday Cheer” and “Christmas Spirit” but I cannot help it.  I like a tiny bit of Hum-bug in the mix.  A touch of disaster can be delightful if all turns out well in the end.

By now, you are well aware, in the Secret Life of this Seamstress, that…um… “things Sometimes go Awry.”  Tragedies occur.  People get confused.  Wrong legs get shortened too much on trousers. Needles break; bobbins shatter; and human excrement hits, well, not just fans.  All this you know.  As you might suspect, we don’t always handle this with the dainty grace and full-throated songs of Disney heroines.   (My inner child wishes we did!) Well, we don’t. Behind the scenes, we have been known to Growl and to Grumble and defensively say viciously hilarious things that will never be printed because we cannot afford the legal fees.  To all of them, to each and every grumble, I now shout “That’s the Spirit!”

“My daughter-in-law says I have to wear pink. I HATE pink,” a lady says flatly, with a look that could curdle cream. To which I reply, “That’s the Spirit!”

 A co-worker says “I just got this [expletive] zipper in this [expletive] down jacket—I had to do it three [expletive] times and now the [expletive] pulley has snapped off! Just SHOOT me now!”  To which I reply, “That’s the Spirit!”  

A guy whose eyes say he’s done more learning than winning wants us to cover a leather jacket with motorcycle patches from his club.   We tell him to leave the jacket and return later but he refuses to go.  He cannot let the jacket out of his sight.  These are club regulations.  He must be present with the jacket at all times. (“Does he sleep in the damn thing?” Prudence wants to know.) He takes up residence on the couch while we mutter and growl under our breaths.  We have to behave nicely in front of customers but secretly, we are pissed.  “That’s the Spirit!” I whisper.

My friend says, “The cleaners have sent over ten panels of curtains that are all different lengths and we’re to hem them all ‘eleven inches.’  Are we to assume that the windows all differ by a range of three quarters of an inch? Or are we to take an average and make them all the same length? Grrr… I want to call them back and say we don’t do curtains anymore.”  “That’s the Spirit!” I cry.

My inner Grinch is having a very good time with this.

My inner Sinner starts thinking about things like Redemption, Readiness, and what the Spirit of Christmas is all about, if not for over-eating cookies  then blaming our families?  What is this colossal Hysteria we all buy into that sends us spiraling into bad emotional, spiritual, and financial hang-overs every year?  I think that it is all about Happiness.   Yes, friends. HAPPINESS is what causes us to lose our minds and behave like monsters this time of year.  

We want so much to be able to make someone Happy—to Give each other, and all those we hold so dear, HAPPINESS.  This is a Big Mistake; bless our tiny, human hearts.   We try to buy it, box it, make it, wrap it, cook it, and send it so that we can inflict it on those we love best. Well, guess what?  Happiness is not something we can give away.  It is something we can each only Receive for ourselves.  It is what Hermann Hesse called “the little joys” at the heart of a rich life lived with Presence, not presents.  It is hidden in the simple delights celebrated in a Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver poem.

But try telling that to the woman in the dressing room who is angrily mashing her boobs around like they are made of soft clay she can mold into any shape.  She is treating them like they are small dogs she is trying to make behave, as she muzzles them with a different bra and tries to force them into the front of a gown.  They are unwilling and recalcitrant and keep trying to escape out the back door, under her armpits.   She thinks that if she can make them stay out front, where they belong, she will be Happy.  Right now, her happiness depends on nothing else.  Her satisfaction is Conditional and, sadly, the present conditions are against her.

Too many people are coming into the shop thinking “If I was a size (x) I would be happier.” If I won the Lotto, I would be happier.  A lot of us think if only we were richer, thinner, taller, or could get our hands on a Baby Yoda, we’d be happier. Well, guess what? We wouldn’t be.

According to Harvard’s landmark 75-year study of what makes a Good Life, most “numbers”—such as your cholesterol numbers or your bank account figures—don’t matter as much as the number of warm, genuinely loving hugs you get a week.  They discovered that loneliness can be lethal, that secure and tender relationships are protective.  People who are well-connected socially are happier, physically healthier, and live longer than those who are not.   People who go to Revels or Scottish Fish concerts or Nowell Sing We Clear events are certain to find in shared songs and blended voices a Happiness that cannot be bought in a store.  And though we may buy each other the tickets, we cannot control what our companions may Receive. “The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us,” says Ashley Montagu.  We need to be Ready to be seized. That’s the Spirit!

I’m of the current opinion (since I am still frantically knitting) that gifts, even homemade ones, are some of the Worst things we can give each other.   For one thing, they ask too much of us and our recipients, since gifting is often a subtle form of Asking, or manipulating, and the temptation to be equational, or keep score, is destructive.  A gift is also something that is Complete—fully formed, ready to go.  Most people don’t give away something that is partially complete, that is in a growing phase, or still needs work.  (Although, I did once give my brother-in-law one solitary hand-knit sock, with the promise of another, which he received later in the year as a birthday gift!)  True Happiness is curated over time.  Relationships, which are the secret to Happiness, are sticky and complicated things and require as much effort as a loaf of good French bread or getting all those damn lights on the tree to light up at the same time.  Gifts are just quick fixes—the “once and done” approach.   How much more rewarding to spend Time, rather than money—to replace screen time with people time!  Drag out the playing cards and board games. Get out the photo albums and look at them by the glow of candlelight—trust me, your wrinkles will thank you.  Tell your stories to the little ones; teach them your songs and traditions.  Forget shopping.  That’s the Spirit! 

As existential credibility seems garnered on the basis of how loudly we proclaim our disadvantages, the savouring of Happiness seems countercultural—it is an act of courage and resistance to seek Delight in Little Things, especially if they are free and don’t boost our economy.  So now is the time to go Rebel! Let’s get Feral in our attempts to return to organic forms of Comfort and Joy--Happiness might leap at us from the color purple, red, or green (Probably green!) or from the taste of snowflakes on our tongues; from the sounds of sheep bleating or sweet children singing slightly out of tune; or that satisfying feeling of cutting a strip of fabric with one long swooooosh of the scissors blades in a perfect line.   Listen for those faint chimes the angels ring when True Love is shown.  That’s the Spirit!

Lucille Ball said, “It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.” I stop for a coffee at a friend’s coffee bar and notice a man with a tiny patch on the sleeve of his shirt. The stitches around its edge are so careful and so tidy, done by his darling, caring wife.  They would not think of discarding this shirt. Instead, they repair, reuse, recycle.  The patch makes the shirt look even better than it did when it was new.   I say nothing but smile and feel a tingle of joy at being a silent witness to such lovely handiwork.  And just like that, I hear the Chimes.  I hear them again in the local co-op when I see a grandfather loading his cart with items for the impending visit of his daughter and her family.  He is glowing as he puts three jars of apple sauce and an extra box of Cheerios in his trolley.  The more I look and listen, the more I am able to hear these Chimes. I am getting Ready.

Why wait for Presents when you can have Presence? Receive Now. Happiness is not getting something you don’t have; it’s realizing how much is already here. Happy people plan actions, not results. Are you Ready? Christmas isn’t “coming,” dear ones; it’s Here. This can be an awfully lonely, dark, and troubled time for some. Do something lovely with someone you love, even if it’s just You. That’s the Spirit!

With so much love and warm, spiced cider,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Book Jackets

Greetings Dear Ones!

Ever since I started writing this blog, I have looked at Trouble in a whole new way. What is a story without a central trouble? To this end, every character that enters the shop who provides me with a trouble, also provides me with a story.  I LOVE stories! So, I am starting to appreciate Trouble.  When something “bad” happens to me, I now think “Oh, Goody!  Something to write about.  Something for this Glamorously Heroic Heroine of mine to do battle with, or to feed Prudence as a snack that will upset her stomach…” Sometimes I actually say (if only for a moment) “This [problem] isn’t good enough. How can we make it Worse?” The results are sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, as I set about my days dealing with unforeseen plot twists, seam-rippers, bobbins, menopausal sheep or mis-placed car keys.  I particularly enjoy watching as each character in the shop comes forward to share the back-story of the chapter I will be working on for the next few hours. Unlike some of my colleagues, I love getting the “history” lesson.  I enjoy the long, detailed rambles about how they came to have this or that garment and its challenges.  We are, all of us, story-tellers by nature.  We are Dreamers, Wishers, and Explainers. Some among us explain rather too much. It’s the curse of the novice. It’s Ok.

A Sci-Fi Murder Mystery confused about his plot direction but assuming that most females between the ages of 18-45 want to get between his covers, shows up to have his jacket mended.  He has been lifting weights and burst the center seam between his shoulders in the back.  He flexes his bulging muscles to demonstrate the hulk-like grandeur that overcame the tweed but I demure.  Prudence rolls her eyes heavenward and reaches for her rosary.  We write up the slip as he departs, leering awkwardly at a group of Chick-Lit-Lite that is walking in the door.  They are talking already, asking us if we have heard the news about so-and-so. There is a considerable amount of gossip in a small-town tailoring shop where most of the clients have known each other for generations.   Most of it is what anyone but the Topic of the Conversation herself would insist is “harmless.” It occurs to me that Listening to Gossip is like going with a Critic’s review before we have even read the book ourselves. (Prudence hates the idea of gossip but she cannot help listening!)

In the dressing room, a woman is staring at herself in the mirror.  She is middle-aged but something about the awkwardness of her fawn-like elegance reminds me more of someone very young.  She is alternately frowning and then smiling, playing with her facial expression the way a toddler might to amuse herself.

“A Horrible Thing is happening,” she announces. “I look in the mirror and see my mother.  I am turning into my mother!” Instantly, I think of the Oscar Wilde quote, “Every woman becomes her mother. That's their tragedy. And no man becomes his. That's his tragedy.  I laugh. She smiles at the quote then turns serious again.

“I look in the mirror and I see my mother so much that it is like she is squinting at me from the other side, telling me I am no good. I see the face from my childhood that was never happy when it looked at me.  So!  I remind myself to smile. See?” She smiles with exaggerated force. Through gritted, absurdly grinning teeth she explains, “When I smile, I look nothing like my mother.  My mother never smiled. But as soon as I smile, See? I look like someone completely different. I look like ME.”

After she leaves, I ponder the burdens that we each are carrying in the stories we tell ourselves and the editing we must help each other do.  Some of the strongest characters I know are not people who openly display their strength for all the world and unfortunate tweed jackets to see.  They just smile. Through practice and gritted teeth, they smile. They have won battles we know nothing about.

By all means, we say, “Please don’t judge this book by its cover until I change it out of its pajamas! Or do it Very Kindly. Have you read it yet? It’s a tragic-comedy—don’t the plaid and polka-dots say so? It’s sometimes slapstick, sometimes just plain sticky... Please, please enjoy it.  Tell me it was worth it,” we beg our Fellow Authors who are so busy scribbling they ignore us.

Some books, we cannot wait to read—their covers are so enticing. Some, we come to find out are just part of a series, written by multiple authors under the same Pen name. Some books make us think “ooooh, if I could spend an hour, a weekend or a lifetime reading that book, I would finally understand all the secrets of the Universe, or at least of Love and what it means to truly Cherish. I would really KNOW something after reading that book.”

A Sappy Romance Novel marketing himself as a Thriller comes in to the shop to have his suit tailored.  “I want the jacket to say a few things about the Author,” he tells me. “It should say, ‘this Guy is a Classic, but with a modern twist.  He could be more trendy if he wanted to but he doesn’t need to be.” We agree to shorten the length of the coat and sleeves a little but not take it in too much. Thankfully, the trousers are not pleated so we can update them by simply re-hemming them without cuffs.

Next in is a cheery little Cookbook—the old-fashioned kind with pictures of lattice-work pies, Sugar, Humility, and Gluten—not the Arrogantly Clean & Vegan.  Her shoes, slacks, and coat say “I am a fearless Adventuress--Bargain Shopping Where Others Fear To Tread” but the spaghetti stains on her blouse say “just kidding. We never get out of the kitchen.” Inside her tattered pages, there is much to be discovered, Savoured.  She does not have a very complicated plot but she knows the ancient secrets of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme—of True Love and having the Sunday Roast turn out perfectly every time for forty years in a row until everyone around the table either dies or moves away.  The holidays are coming up and she wants us to make aprons for all of her grandchildren.

A retired couple entitled “War and Not Much Peace Because HE Doesn’t Load the Dishwasher Properly” come in to collect their dry-cleaning and drop off some mending.  It’s clear that theirs is a long and bitter saga, punctuated by fiercely tender paragraphs and glimmers of hopes that were dashed.  They aren’t about to quit co-dependently co-authoring now, since Death and the Final Edit are looming, though both of them kinda, sorta, wish they’d crumpled up the first page years ago and started over then.  But they didn’t want to waste the paper.

Who ever said we were NOT to judge the books by their covers?  Isn’t that what covers are for?  Who DIDN’T look at the cover of their fifth-grade math textbook and see some good-looking multi-ethnic students frolicking happily and think, “hmm… maybe this year math will be fun?”

But we all do it.  Recently, I attended a village contra-dance and overheard a much younger friend of mine telling a novice dancer how to choose his partners.  “While you are learning, you want to dance with people better than you. Look at their feet,” she instructed. “See those shoes?  Those are called ‘character shoes.’ I’m not sure why… But if a woman is wearing those, it’s a pretty good chance that she knows how to dance.  At least she has invested in the right foot gear.  Stay away from anyone in Keds—it’s a crap shoot.  They are either amazing or awful, especially if they are under 25.  Don’t gamble on this. Avoid Wellies like the plague.  No one can dance in Wellington Boots; I don’t care who you are. Stick to middle-aged women in Character Shoes!”

I love that. Stick to middle-aged women in character shoes. Apparently, we are the training wheels of the dance floor! Remind me to put that slogan on a T-shirt and wear it to the next dance.

We judge, we peruse, we collect…Many people don’t even read at all. “Books are awfully decorative,” says the bimbo character “Gloria,” in the film “Auntie Mame.”  It puts me in mind of a dear man I used to know who purchased a bookshelf for his new home.  He wanted to fill it with impressive-looking books.  He went to a used book store and asked them what they had in “Brown Leather.” The shop attendant was confused.  “We have lots of books with leather bindings, Sir,” he said. “What subjects interest you? India? Literature? An anthology concerning the Native Bees of New England?”

“Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” said this dear man, spreading his hands apart to indicate a space of about two feet, “I just need about this much in brown leather!”

Some people are so much of a “series” that to read one is to have read them all.  We meet, we chat…we think, “hmmm, I’ve read this one before.  It had rather a nasty plot twist after the third date.”

Recently, I had coffee with a fabulous new Novel—a “novel” Novel, as it were.  

“There’s a really great book coming out at the moment,” I told her. “It’s fantastic.  You really need to read it.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. Well, so I’ve heard.”

“What?! You haven’t actually read it?”

“Well, no, not really.  I know I am supposed to—trust me, it’s on my list. I wrote the first part myself but then other people took over.”

“Well, that’s not really good enough.”

“I suppose not… But YOU, darling, you must read it! You will love it. I know you will. In fact, you MUST.” At this, she wrinkled her nose and flashed me a look of vexation and sighed.     

“I think I will wait for the Movie version. Or maybe the Spark Notes or Readers’ Digest version.  It looks like rather a BIG book—sort of heavy to carry around.  I am always wary of books in flashy Red covers.  I really wish you would just read it and tell me the basic plot up to the present moment.  I wonder if there is an audio version I could just listen to while I’m doing something else. Maybe I could get someone to read it for me?”

“No, dear, that won’t do.  You need to read the whole thing yourself, cover to cover, correcting or making note of everything you would like to see changed. Haven’t you heard?  The project isn’t finished. You get to be Editor in Charge!” (I once worked at a publishing house where the Editor-in-chief insisted she be called the Editor-in-Charge, and I’ve preferred that title ever since.) “Only you can make it You-nique.” She groaned.

Don’t let your stories tell you who you are, Dear Ones. The stories are not writing you. You are writing them.  Revise as necessary. There is no such thing as a story that has no trouble. What kind of BORING story would that be??  So take it that the troubles you have are a pre-requisite for your eventual triumph or disaster. Embrace them as the literary tools they are. Your story is not about your trouble. The story is about how you RESOLVE or reconcile or forgive or grow or learn or teach by your trials. And don’t think you could never be a best seller.  You already are. You just need to market yourself differently—perhaps a new book jacket?

Let me know if it needs tailoring.  I am at your service. With so much love and gratitude for your Good Work,

Yours aye,

Nancy (a middle-aged woman in character shoes)

Make America Make Again

We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!

Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

Greetings Dear Ones!

Forgive me but Prudence has been on a total Rip lately… and for once, I am having trouble disagreeing with her.  She is incensed by some of the comments she has been hearing about “immigrants” making a living as seamstresses. I told her she could have some space in this week’s blog to vent her spleen. (She also wants to have a go at Fashion designers, teenagers with no work ethic, and people who eat too much garlic before entering the fitting room but I insisted that this entry has to have a smaller word count than War and Peace…)  I remind her that it is always best to “teach through delight” but she would rather give Certain People lines of Beatitudes to write in cursive until their hands ache.

Basically, a customer came into the shop, heard one of the other seamstresses mention that she was going to retire soon, and protested “But you CAN’T retire!  This is the only place I can go and deal with people who, you know,” she winked conspiratorially, “Speak English.”  That’s nonsense.  All the local seamstresses—not that there are many—speak English.  What she means is “are White.”

“We’re getting on in years…it’s hard to thread the needles, I want to enjoy my Silver years sitting in front election debates while I still can see the screen,” said my friend, laughing.

“Nonsense,” retorted the customer. “Lady So-and-so in the town nearby was still going well into her eighties. My mother went to her until she died. Only death or blindness should cause you to retire.”

“Don’t tempt me!” cried my friend, “I’ll take a seam-ripper to my eyeballs right now!” We all laughed, but the facts are sobering.

It’s true that Americans are not doing as much of their own sewing any more.  It’s true that “foreigners” are taking over the trade. And whose fault is this? Who got rid of Home Ec. in the 1980’s? Was it a Communist plot? No, my darlings, we did this to ourselves.

The Irony (you know, as opposed to the Wrinkly) of the feminist movement which pushed to eradicate Home Economics classes because it objected to the notion of dead-end High School classes “for girls,” where future wife-lings sat hand-stitching little aprons in a home-made-pudding-from-scratch stupor, deprived both genders of valuable skills.  Instead of saying this was “not for girls,” they should have made it mandatory for boys as well.  No doubt, ‘the Powers that Was’ decided that children could learn these things at home from their mothers, like previous generations, while failing realizing that their now-liberated mothers would be running the Company Boardrooms  instead of teaching them to make bone broth or cross-stitch. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m ALL FOR women in Boardrooms! I’m just not for people buying disposable clothing or depending on Drive-thru windows for nourishment.) Home Ec. was “redundant” and competed with the growing need for new technology in Computer science. During the Cold War, schools and universities began defunding Home Ec., in favor of increasing budgets for Math, Science and Technology departments. Additionally, the explosion of convenience foods on the market made cooking from scratch seem irrelevant.  Students could learn the numbers side of “economics” in other classes not necessarily devoted to a concept of “home.”  Had they only known…

As it turns out, Sewing is more Math and Engineering than anything else. (God help me!) Data on the critical and distinctive skills necessary for Tailors, dressmakers, & sewers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that tailors, dressmakers, & sewers need many skills, but most especially: Active Listening, Time Management, and Critical Thinking. The revealed comparative advantage (RCA) shows that Tailors, dressmakers, & sewers need more than the average amount of Operations Analysis, Management of Material Resources, and Operation and Control.  That sounds about right. It also sounds like the basis of a S.T.E.M. class to me! (STEM= Science Technology Engineering Math)

 The purpose of school is purportedly “to provide children with skills and knowledge that will benefit them and the community,” yes, and to give their mothers (and fathers) free babysitting while they are busy running the Boardrooms.  Children often perform better when their tasks have perceived Relevance—when they can appreciate how the skills and knowledge they learn in their academic courses have real life value. We all eat. We all wear clothing. Neither of these shows any signs of stopping.  Why not teach our children how to cook and sew?

We all invest heavily in making our children smarter—there is no end to the number of products, gimmicks, books, and computer games designed to make them excel.  Why not bring back Home Ec. classes? The Waldorfians have the right idea—all children should learn to knit!  Not because we want more mismatched socks in the world, although that would be lovely, but because it turns out knitting and handwork provide a host of neurological and wellbeing benefits to people of all ages. Handwork, like sewing and knitting, provides an essential learning medium—not to mention the irresistible temptation for classmates to poke each other with sharpened sticks. Sewing requires creativity, which improves the brain's ability to grow new brain cells (though not necessarily those that remember where you put the car keys). As mental deterioration is a result of lost connection between neurons, sewing actually promotes mental growth. (Never mind the Ginko and Ginseng! Fetch your thimble and thread!)

Virtually nothing in the commercial world is trying to make children Kinder, despite all the trendy anti-bullying campaigns in schools.  Yet there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that the people who are most successful in this world are those that work well with others.  The charming, the gracious, the generous, the hard working—these, with their higher EQs and the emotional maturity that creates compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, acceptance—these are the ones living lives of Contentment, Productivity, and Prosperity.  Teaching virtues for their own sakes is laudable (Ok, Prudence, easy does it), but they are also profitable! Why are we not teaching these virtues?  Where are Patience, Resilience, and self-sacrifice being taught?  Who gives a damn what a person’s test scores are if she cannot have or be a friend? If he cannot understand and solve problems through collaboration and communication? I am convinced we learn these things first and best by Making and Failing. This is an important aspect of learning any trade or craft.  This is why apprenticeships last seven years.  That’s a lot of mistakes! What happens to people who want to Make Things but they are given messages that “No, it’s not safe to try that. You might not be good at it. It’s not safe to make a mistake. Follow the herd, little one, that’s it, right in the chute towards your local big-box.”  Our capitalism prompts us to Buy rather than Make what we want. What if What We Truly Want is only available through our own imaginations? At what point in our lives do we make that decision to consciously abstain from being Ourselves by denying the intersection of our skills and Desires for the sake of Convenience? It’s one thing to lack the desire. But to lack the skills? Shame on us. Our children need these skills.

The truth is we are facing a trades crisis in this country in everything from finish carpentry to iron work and stone-masonry.  Nowadays, when we say “artisan crafted” we think Beer. According to 2017 estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the number of tailors, dressmakers and custom sewers, excluding self-employed workers, in the United States declined 35% to 20,440 between 2007 and 2017. While our national workforce is projected to grow 7.4% in the next ten years, tailors, dressmakers, and seamstresses face a decline of 10.9% over the same period.  Most Tailors and seamstresses who retire are not being replaced at an equal rate. Many learned their skills from older generations in their families, or like me—“by guess and by golly,” not formal schooling.  If we do not teach ourselves how to sew our own buttons on, and pay ourselves well for doing it, then we inevitably leave a niche market open to enterprising and skilled people willing to labor for the crumbs at the bottom tier of our service industries. And trust me, it’s Crumbs: Those who tailor for clothing stores earn an average hourly wage of $14.38.  Seamstresses who work in the motion picture and video industry are the most highly compensated for their occupation at $19.76 per hour. Those who work at a dry cleaner or for laundry services earn average wages of $11.85 per hour.  (By contrast, hourly pay at McDonald's Restaurants Ltd. ranges from an average of $9.76 to $13.78 an hour.) We are paying menial wages for highly skilled and technical work.  In America, we demand this work, yet we do not Value it.  We would never want our children to do it.  We let other people’s children around the globe do it, while we groom ours for perpetual “education” and therapists’ couches because their creative spirits are thwarted. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey, India, El Salvador, Italy, Syria, Portugal and Argentina are teaching their children better than we are how to do work with their hands. There, the art of tailoring is learned at a very young age, as it should be, to become highly skilled.  We should Welcome these people from other lands and be immensely grateful for their knowledge and efforts until we get our act together and Make America Make again.

And we Must make America make again, or face a grim future: Have you not seen the Science Fiction movies or T.V. shows where technologically advanced People Of The Future parade about in geometric leotards, as if they are all on their way to gravity-free ballet class? It’s because our seamstresses will all be Dead by then and we will have to rely on computer-generated Xerox copies of spandex to clothe our nakedness. God knows what we will eat.  No wonder they are all slim.

The facts are plain. The Average age of a seamstress today is 50. Eighty percent of them are women. The average female salary is $26 an hour, the average male salary is $40, especially if they have beards and Italian accents—you know, the “Rag-a-toui Mafia.” Far from honoring and elevating and empowering “Women” and work, the past four decades of our educational system has churned out a gender-neutral spectrum of increasingly helpless consumers at the mercy of their own fly-buttons and whole generations of children are growing up without realizing the Utter Joy of installing bust pads in a gown and finding out they point the right way! (There is nothing sweeter!)  I love looking at people as if each one is his/her own work of Art.  It grieves me to see that by limiting Domestic Arts in schools, we are giving them fewer options and fewer colors with which to create their own magical and dynamic lives.

Making two-dimensional cloth fit three dimensional bodies can be savage work indeed.  It’s undeniable. Some days we are dehydrated from the sheer amount of Glitter in the shop. Some days we are tempted to name vexing customers after animals, vegetables, or exotic cheeses. Some days are enough to tempt me to run with scissors. But for all its crotch crud, chub rub, and the hot shit we accidentally ironed before we realized someone had crapped his pants, it’s not a bad way to earn a crust. I’m happy to share my crumbs.

I know if you read this blog regularly, you are a Maker, a Doer, and a Believer—or are drawn to such things.  So this rant is not for you personally. The season of gift-giving is coming up.  Please consider giving a gift you make yourself—whatever that might be.  If not, support a local artist. And don’t cough up a hairball at the cost of a hand-woven Alpaca scarf that took a local weaver 30 hours of her one precious life to make. It’s worth it! If you know a craft—share it with someone else! Teach! Give of your Spirit rather than bank account. Help grow those brains around you! And goodness knows, as a nation, we need to grow our brains quite a lot before we must endure yet another election cycle—if for nothing else than to be able to determine when those we admire are talking Rot.

 Be Well, my Darlings! Make Up!  Make Over! Make Out and Make On! Thank you for your Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Grateful for Gratitude

To Speak Gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven. –Johannes A. Gaertner

Greetings Dear Ones!

Just before closing time, the back doorbell starts to clang with an incessant, irritating jangle that penetrates every nerve of my spine, all the way to my feet, which are now running to make it stop.  I open the door and see the set face and pursed lips of one of our more familiar customers.  She is lithe and spry and perfectly capable of walking to the front door but she insists on leaning against the back buzzer until we come running every time.  She brushes past me, down the corridor, into the work space and announces that “Someone,” her eyes narrow and scan the shop for culprits, has hemmed her jacket sleeves a fraction too much and now she cannot wear the jacket.  She slips it on to show us.  It looks perfect. We all chime in and agree.  What is wrong? We wonder.  She extends her arms forward. “I can see just a little too much wrist when I do this,” she explains. “Hanging by my sides, yes, it looks fine, but out in front, it doesn’t.”

“Yes,” we explain, “but we take the measurement while the arm is hanging at your side.  This is perfect.”

“Well WHO goes around with their arms hanging by their sides all day long? No One!  I drive, I type, I eat… I need my arms out in front to do these things.”

“Fine,” we say. “Of course, we want you to be Happy. Of course we will fix this.  How much lower would you like these?”

“About an eighth of an inch would be perfect,” she says stiffly and turns to leave. This work, naturally, will be at no cost to her, since we “got it wrong” the first time. When she has marched out the back door again and slammed it, I look at the jacket more closely. Shit. Cut buttonholes!  This means the buttons at the wrist are not merely decorative.  They actually work.  This means that redoing this jacket to change it an eighth of an inch means we have to take both sleeves off at the shoulder again and adjust it there; we cannot simply let down a hem at the sleeve’s edge.  What a total pain in the arse… This will be hours of work, rather than minutes. It occurs to me as I hang the jacket on the hanger and put it on the rack of things to do, that I have never once heard this customer say “Thank you.” She has told us we are “The Best.” She has said she “would never consider going anywhere else” (oh, please!!!Why not???) and all sorts of “Compliments” like that over the years.  But I cannot ever once recall being Thanked.  I suppose she thinks we don’t need to be thanked when we are being paid.

I cannot tell you, in a service industry like ours, how Grateful I am for Gratitude.  It’s as good as a tip, to be honest.  Sometimes better.  We have been tipped with such disdain as to make us feel crummy for accepting the money—as if we are colluding in our own degradation.  And we have been thanked so kindly as to feel like we just earned a million bucks.  To see a customer’s eyes warmly alight with pleasure and recognition of a job well-done is one of the things that keeps me doing this sort of work.  Thanking really matters.  

This Thanksgiving week, we pause our hectic lives to take seriously our twin Patriotic Duties: Gluttony and Bargain Hunting. Thursday, we give thanks for all we have.  Friday, we go out and clobber each other in the malls for MORE.  The season of Spending Hysteria commences before the last bite of turkey can be digested.  It makes me wonder, if you aren’t thankful for what you have already, how can you hope to be thankful for what you get?  “It’s not about Getting,” says Prudence. “It’s about Giving!  This begins the Season of Giving.  Giving is what really counts.  You must give and not think of yourself.”   I call BS. The older I get, the more I feel Giving is overdone and overrated. 

Don’t get me wrong. I love it that we as a nation have a holiday just for Giving Thanks.  But Giving is only half of the equation. The circle of Giving requires Receivers.  Too many gifts are wasted because they are not received. What does Thanking mean? To me, it means Receiving. We open our eyes and fully Receive what people are doing for us, with us, because of us.  We taste the Love in the home baking, in the sweet potato casserole, and in your cousin’s willingness to sit at the kid’s table.   We also Receive the beauty of the environment—the frosty dawns and sunsets, the shimmer of fog on the lake, the way trees hold each others’ toes and hands, dancing silently along each side of the road as we drive… Meister Eckhart is quoted as saying “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”  I think this is true.

It’s important to count our blessings.  It’s the first step towards making our blessings count.  Because if you are truly grateful, what do you do? You share! When Giving come from our Gratitude, not in search of it, then we are making our gifts count.

These days, I am Grateful for quite a lot. I’ve been keeping a list, daily, for a long time now.  The list is way too long to post in its entirety, so I will only share a few of the things that stand out as relevant to my secret life as a seamstress. Some of these things, you will note, are rather tiny; others are huge.  I am Grateful for them all:

·        Good lighting

·        Bobbins that last for a whole seam

·        Finding the perfect match of thread color for a chartreuse bridesmaid’s gown

·        Threading a needle on the first try, without magnifying glasses, tweezers, bleeding, or cursing.

·        Discovering that someone ahead of me put all the right colors for my project on the Serger (which has four needles and four threads to change) Ya Beauty!!!

·        People who, when they poop their pants, wash them BEFORE bringing them in for us to fix.

·        People who call ahead and ask us if it is ok to bring in forty-three items on their next visit (it’s really NOT but if you call ahead, we don’t resent you as much as when you just show up and spontaneously announce that we will be spending the rest of the day watching you parade your by-gone-glad-rags…)

·        Anyone who brings us cookies!

·        Prudence is thankful for well-behaved children who honor their mothers and fathers and who don’t stick all the pins from the pin cushions into the waiting area furniture.

·        People who do not use the unventilated dressing room as the location to relieve themselves of the effects of last night’s chili cook-off. (Have I mentioned this room is UN-ventilated! Look at the ceiling, people, before you let go!)

·        When the cutting table has no glitter on it (this is a RARE gift indeed!)

·        Realizing that the whole zipper is not broken, only the pulley is, so I won’t have to be cutting into a down jacket and releasing forty-five pounds of fluff and feathers into the shop afterall!

·        Sober, well-grounded customers who talk neither too little nor too much about how they came to have this particular garment and its problems.

·        People who address (A-dress?) honestly their needs and limitations and agree to work willingly within the parameters of what is Possible.

·        My dearly beloved co-workers who so generously share their tools, skills, and knowledge with me on a daily basis.  They are amazing and inspiring.  I “receive” with respect and admiration all that they have given me of themselves in the past five years.  I could not be luckier to work with such creative and talented ladies!

·        Easy customers with easy problems.

·        Tough customers with tough problems.

Yes, seriously.  I am grateful for the lady with the cut buttonholes and her lack of gratitude.  She is responsible for the expansion of my soul far more than she could ever possibly guess, and far more so than the easily beloved creatures who smile and make every transaction so simple.   I am reminded of the quote that says something like “The people most in need of love are showing it in the most UN-loveable ways…” or something to that effect. I love her crabby attitude because it teaches me something about how loveable each one of us could be if we stopped thinking that the length of our sleeves is what is repellant to others, rather than the sour expression on our faces.  I ponder what would happen if this woman loved Herself—was fully grateful for the Gift of Herself—if all her fussing over her sleeves would matter so much?  If she had an ‘Attitude of Gratitude,’ how could her life transform?  How could mine? How could any of ours?

It sounds odd to say—in the midst of a national conversation about “Narsicism”—that I am profoundly grateful for Myself. I’m glad I’m here.  Having lost dear friends over the years, I know that Tomorrow is not promised.  I’m Lucky. I may not be here for a long time so I have decided to have a Good time, rather than a “perfect” time.  The more I love myself, the less I care what shape or size my bum is, or whether or not my hair looks like an uprooted tree on fire.  I’m beginning to be delighted with All of me—even the bit that totally forgets everything but half the chorus to a song or where I put the wallet and car keys.  Loving others is making it easy to forgive myself for being Me and loving Me is making it way easier for me to forgive others—including those I may have given birth to who have wracked up so many parking fines in Boston that I have had to confiscate the car.  I’m excited to wake up each day and say to myself, “well, my Dear, what are you going to get into today?”  It’s fun to spend a whole day with myself, laughing at my own nonsense.

Loving myself also makes me Most Grateful for you, dear readers, who are willing to go with me on this Journey—to the fellow travelers who listen, read, laugh—who write back to me or share these posts with others who may enjoy them.  About 64% of you actually open your emails each week, to spend a few moments with my nonsense, and I am both surprised and profoundly touched and grateful for that.  I’m grateful that the work of my hands can hang in your closets and that the work of my Spirit can hang in your thoughts.  With great humility, I appreciate so much your willingness to Receive.

Enjoy your feasting,  Dear Ones, wherever you may be.  Know the prayer of my heart is “Thank YOU.” Yes, YOU. Receive that as best you can and remember Oscar Wilde’s wisdom: “After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”

With Hearty Thanks and Much, much joyous Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy

Stretching the Truth

There's nothing wrong with stretching the truth. We stretch taffy, and that just makes it more delicious.-Stephen Colbert

 Greetings my Dear Ones!

The sky is the color of a blank projector screen above Hermit Hollow these days—all the fire and glory of the Fall has been replaced by shades of ash. People who enter the shop, people who have lived IN NEW ENGLAND…Continuously…For fifty years or more, are looking at me with wide eyes and saying “I can’t believe how cold it is. Can you believe how cold it is? Do you know they are already calling for snow?”

“Better get your bread and milk on your way home,” I remind them as they shuffle away, shaking their heads.

At work, thanks to Daylight Savings, we finish our shifts in the dark.  The windows are already black when the phone rings and a person asks me a familiar question.  I can always tell if I am dealing with a pessimist or an optimist by the way they ask: The optimist says “How long are you open ‘til?” The pessimist says “How soon do you close?”  In this case, I am dealing with an optimist.  “Can I get there by 5?” she asks, upon hearing that we are “open” until then.

“I don’t know, Dear,” I respond. “It’s about a quarter to five now, how long will it take you to get in here?”

“Oh, only about fifteen to twenty minutes,” she assures me confidently.

“So, just to be clear, we are open until five o’clock, but you are planning to get here right when we close or a little after, right?” I am asking both to clarify and to indicate that this might be the teensiest bit annoying as hell.

“Is that a problem?” she asks.

“No…” I say hesitantly, still hoping she feels a little guilty, “I can wait for you but not very long—I’m driving back to Vermont tonight. Is this a major emergency?”

“Not really but it could be,” she says. “My cousin and I just need some dresses hemmed sooner rather than later.”  Oh, great.  DressES…as in plural, with a cousin in tow no less.  Prudence and I agree that it is Ok to judge these people.  (It’s really Not—but I’m tired, crabby, and I have a bit of a drive ahead of me in the dark rain.)  Just to be peevish, I turn the sign on the door to “Closed” at five o’clock, even though I don’t actually lock the door.  I have to have a brief chat with the part of me that is pouting, a reminder about our need to behave like a gracious Professional, when a car finally turns into the drive ten minutes later.  

I am deceitfully sweet, as they sweep in with the rain and drip on the floor I have just swept.  I attempt to get one into the dressing room and one into the bathroom to change simultaneously and save time.

“No thanks,” says one, utterly missing the point, “I can wait. She can go first.” The other nods and saunters into the fitting room with THREE dresses.  The other cousin, likewise, is holding three dresses.  My Inner Pouter is tempted to put on an English Accent and act like a snooty, affronted butler—of Service, yes, but with an Attitude.  At the last minute, she decides against it.  We carry on with the Sweet charade.

The first woman emerges from the dressing room in her first dress and twirls.  “What do you think?” she asks, knowing she is Adorable.   I cannot see anything “wrong” with it in the least, not even the hem.  It is a simple, black, dress made of stretchy material that I might say “fits her like a glove” if I actually believed that gloves ever fit anybody. (They don’t—not really.)  This fits her better than any glove ever dreamed of fitting. 

“What exactly do you wish to have me do to it?” I ask, sweetly, adding “It fits you beautifully.”

“Oh! Well, I just wanted your professional opinion,” she says, grinning and talking at herself in the mirror. “I wasn’t sure if it looked good or not. I left the tags on it in case you told me to take it back to the store.”  Prudence’s eyes nearly pop out of her head.  It is her Professional Opinion, AFTER HOURS, that these two should march right out the back door and keep going.  “Did you not try it on AT the store?” I ask.  Could she not see for herself that she looked fabulous? Does the cousin she dragged in here with her not have eyes and a mouth she could have used to speak up on the dress’s behalf? Does she not trust her cousin? She tries on the next two dresses.  Only one needs a tiny bit of a hem.  She looks amazing in all three dresses.  

“My new diet is so great,” she announces, smoothing the fabric over her hips.  “I just listen to my body. My body is always trying to heal itself in miraculous ways.  All summer, she wanted eggs for breakfast, now, it’s oatmeal.  Makes sense, right? The weather is colder so I need more carbs. Some days I just might forget to eat altogether but she reminds me that I need some nutrition. It’s so clever!” She is considerably smaller than her cousin, who suddenly emerges from the bathroom in her undergarments.  The cousin has on all three: tights, Spanx, and underwear—none of which line up with the same margins. Both the spanx and the tights have rolled down a bit, creating cruel bands that cut deeply into her flesh.  She now has the side profile of a many-segmented worm.  She looks in the mirror and sighs heavily.

“Yeah, well, that’s just great for you then.  Your body isn’t telling you to eat grandpa’s food tray at the hospital while no one else is looking.”

“Honey, um…” the slimmer cousin says, pointing to the Spanx and tights.

“Yeah, I get it. You’re supposed to put these things on in a different sequence.  How is it supposed to smooth things out if I wear my panties and tights over it?  I know…  It’s just for a quick fitting. I’ll get it right when I actually wear the dress.”

“Wait, You’re eating Grandpa’s food tray?!”

“I can’t stand to see it go to waste.”

“But he’s been comatose for a week! Have you been eating ALL those meals?”

“Wha-at? Don’t look at me like that! I’m doing what you do. I’m ‘listening to my body.’”

“You’re not supposed to listen, where purloined hospital food is concerned! Hospital food? Yuck!” The smaller cousin stares at her as if she has never seen her properly before.

Suddenly, I can “hear” my body telling me it is time to wallop the smaller cousin. She is considerably younger than I but I could probably take her. I have intense compassion for the bigger cousin and a sudden desire to protect her.  Many’s the time my body has told me to eat or drink things it really wasn’t supposed to...Swiss cake rolls, Margueritas, an ENTIRE stalk of roasted brussel sprouts…(oh, SO yummy!)  It happens to everyone.

The second cousin slips on her dress and considers herself in the mirror.  The dress, though tight, looks mostly ok. 

“What size is that?” asks the first cousin. The second cousin gives her a number.  The first cousin’s eyebrows shoot towards her scalp.

“Hey! That’s MY size!” she exclaims in surprise. 

She is witnessing the miracle that is neoprene fabric.  Since 1958, scientists and fashion designers have been collaborating to make stretch fabrics—“elastimerics” such as spandex, Lycra, or elastane to help slightly overweight women be “the same size” as their somewhat smaller, more arrogant cousins.  Stretch fabrics are basically synthetic rubber fibers produced by the polymerization of chloroprene—a process developed by DuPont in the 1930’s—proving that there really is “better living through Chemistry.”  Neoprene is sold either as solid rubber or in latex form and is used in a variety of applications such as orthopedic braces, laptop sleeves, and dresses that make you think you are anywhere from 2-4 sizes smaller than you really are.  The fabric comes in 2-way stretch, from selvedge to selvedge, (think of it as East to West stretch) or 4-way stretch, (North-South-East-West stretch) so as to accommodate 3-dimensional bodies of any shape, as well as any purloined hospital food they may have consumed.  Fashion designers have been using stretch fabrics as early as the mid-1980’s, first for swimsuits and bras, then for sports clothing. Now, it’s evening and formal wear.  Nothing simplifies the construction of clothing like stretch fabric.  One does not have to be incredibly precise to get a good fit.

The second cousin tries on the other two dresses, even though she has decided she likes the first one the best.   She thinks she will bring one back to the store and have the other hemmed a tiny bit.  So after examining a total of six dresses, mercifully, there are only two that need minor alterations.  It’s time to get out of here.

“When do you need them?” I ask, wondering if there really was an ‘emergency’ on the horizon.

“Well, by grandpa’s funeral.  But he’s not dead yet, so we are not sure when that will be.  I’m sure you have until the end of the week. Maybe we should have them by Thursday just in case.”

All the way back to Vermont, I consider these two women and the complexity of their situations—from their family ties, body types, and genetics to their relationship with each other.  There was a reason they needed to try on their dresses in front of a neutral third party, as well as a bond that made them shop together in the first place.  They are united in their love for their grandpa and their wish to honor him at his funeral by showing up in black neoprene dresses of identical sizes. 

My mind wanders off on the concepts of “Boundaries” and “Honesty” and how challenging it can be to choose between the old-fashioned Civility of good customer service and the need to maintain a pre-established schedule that is set up to be fair to customers and employees alike.  Rigidity vs. Flexibility. Sometimes, we cannot know the Truth—such as the day or hour Grandpa will head off to his Eternal Glory, simultaneously depriving one of his somber descendents of her dietary supplements and creating the need for stretchy grieving garments.   Sometimes, we know the Truth but we have to stretch it a bit—such as feigning Delight at having customers arriving after closing time, or imagining that we really ARE a certain size.  Sometimes, we think we know the Truth but we just don’t have enough information, experience, or compassion—such as those Life Experiences necessary to engender Loving Kindness for another’s compulsions.  Think of the days when none of our fabric stretched, Ever, At all.  It was not that long ago, when shirts were starched and jeans were like boards. The fabric of a family, the fabric of society, the outward manifestations with which we cloak ourselves in ceremonies, words, deeds, items from J.C. Penny’s… is it not wonderful now, to have just a little Give to them? The Only Truth that really matters is that Love has no Size, no Time, no restrictions or limits of any kind.

May we all be just a bit more Flexible today!  Stretch On, my Darlings, and thank you for your Good Work!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Fitting in in an Outfit

 Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s the time of year in New England when oak leaves sound like rain as they drop upon the metal roof here at Hermit Hollow.  So much so that when actual rain does fall in the night, I dream we are being buried in Oak leaves, which we almost are anyway...  I am relishing the shortened days of snuggling by a fire while applesauce and soup bubble on the stovetop.  But even in the midst of looming Winter, some hearts have already turned to Summer:

 An adorable woman with a glittery laugh enters the shop.  She comes bearing a blouse, some patterns, and a bag of fabric under her arms.  “My daughter is getting married next July,” she chirps, “and I cannot find a dress I like.  I told her ‘I’ll come, but not in a dress!’” Her laughter sounds like pearls spilling all over the shop.  She is unapologetic: “I HATE dresses,” she insists. “I’m just not a dress person. I guess some people are.  I just seem to get swallowed up in them.”  She talks as though Tom Dick & Harry’s Bridal Boutique has nothing but sea monsters hanging on the racks.  “So!” she announces brightly, “I’m skipping the dress!  I want you to make me an outfit instead.”

It turns out that she wants us to use her favorite blouse as a pattern for something similar in a dressier fabric. Then, we need to come up with a plan for covering her lower half—slacks maybe? A skirt, perhaps? A wooden barrel hung on suspenders? Something that looks like an “Outfit,” not a dress.

My ear keeps catching on the word “outfit.” All I can think of is the 1970’s when Sears used “Garanimals” to help muddled middle-schoolers and pre-occupied parents figure out which items of clothing “went together” by matching the animals on the tags.    Is there such a thing as an “InFit?” I wonder.  Is it like Tarot readings, where if the cards are upright they mean the outer world and if they are reversed, or up-side-down, they indicate the inner world of the querent?  “Don’t be ridiculous,” says Prudence. “Fits are only Out. There are Mis-fits, the Un-Fit, and my least favorite, Hissy-fits, but they are all Outward manifestations.”

“Don’t forget, my least favorite is the RE-fit, which is what this little Outfit is going to require many times!” I add.

 For the duration of the morning, my thoughts are snaggled on the concept of an Outfit and how it corresponds to Fitting In.  Clearly, this woman is willing to go only just “so far” to fit in and look like a “Mother of the Bride” at her own daughter’s wedding.  She is not going to let herself be consumed, either by a dress, or the proceedings of the day.  (I like her so much!) 

During my lunch break, I scan the etymology of the word Outfit.  It seems like it was first used around 1769 as a verb meaning the fitting out of a ship for an expedition—which feels exactly like what we are doing now, with the navy silk fabric this woman has chosen.  (Isn’t every wedding a Voyage of sorts?) Less than twenty years later, as of 1787, the verb “to outfit” had become the noun “outfit,” meaning “articles and equipment required for an expedition.”  Our American-English sense of “a person’s clothes” is first recorded in 1852.  By 1883, it can also mean “a group of people,” as in “I wouldn’t want to be a member of that outfit!” Merriam Webster defines the modern noun versions of outfit as “a clothing ensemble often for a special occasion or activity” and also “a group that works as a team…especially : a military unit.”  I smile at the idea that our tailoring shop is really an “Outfit Outfit” assisting Misfits.

Given what I know about the history of wedding gowns (which is not much but is enough to know that they got it Dead Wrong in the Outlander series…) it always seems incongruous to me when a certain “type” of person chooses to wear a certain type of gown. I know I am on dangerously thin ice here…bear with me…no one celebrates our freedom to make eccentric wardrobe choices than a woman who roams society dressed in her own sheep’s clothing, crusty boots and all.

HOWEVER…

The FACT is that what we choose to wear on the Outside—our “Outfit”—will inevitably elicit judgment from our communities about what our Inner state might be. It just will. Prudence nods vehemently.  She is thinking of bridesmaids emblazoned with Winnie The Pooh tattoos.  I nudge her roughly and remind her “Every form of self-expression is Valid.”  She rolls her eyes.  Unfortunately, these communal judgments have a lot to do with whether or not we feel like we “belong.”  Fitting in is all about our personal choices to conform; Belonging is about the community’s acceptance despite non-conformance.

So, what part does the Outfit play in Fitting In? Basically, Fitting In means trying to be like Everyone Else.  Belonging means getting to be ourselves no matter what.   The desire to Belong is a tremendously strong human emotional need, however, when everyone in a community experiences a sense of Belonging, there is a natural shift towards caring for and protecting one another. Brene Brown, a behavioral psychology expert focusing on courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, finds that “Fitting in is actually the greatest barrier to belonging.”  Her definition of True Belonging is that True Belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to BE who we are.

 These external representations of ourselves manifest online as well—in photos, even in the very words we let Out of our mouths or keyboards.  An extremely pious woman said to me recently “I just hate it when someone on Facebook posts about some tragedy in their lives and then you see at least forty people commenting afterwards ‘thoughts and prayers…thoughts and prayers…’ and you know damn well they aren’t saying REAL prayers!”  My eyes widened. “What kind of prayers are acceptable to you?” I wondered.  A stack of Hail Mary’s? Our Fathers? Or will anything from the Abrahamic Traditions suffice? Can we ad lib a little?  Who are we to question how another PRAYS?? Or what is in his/her heart for that matter?

But we do.  We look at their bodies, their clothes, their words—their OUTputs and OUTfits—and we extrapolate inward—this woman is wealthy and organized; that man hates change; this young person still has no idea where the Laundromat is and the semester is nearly over…   Most of the time, we do this innocently and unconsciously. I remember when I first started doing it myself:  Back in the distant past, when I was a little girl—sometime between the days of horse-drawn carriages and the invention of cordless telephones—my mother collected something called S&H Green Stamps.  These were a line of trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry & Hutchinson company (S&H), founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson.  My mother would purchase items in stores that offered a few stamps with each purchase.  She would save the stamps and select a “reward” from a catalogue. I would look at the catalogues that came to the house and read them to try to figure out what the “story” was.  I resorted to making them up, as we all do when we look at pictures of others:   The blonde model is going to choose this toaster, the brunette is going for that salad spinner, and the plastic-looking guy on page twenty-seven is lost—he belongs on a boat somewhere else in L.L.Bean-land… Catalogues teach us to judge ourselves and others—to choose, to “picture” ourselves as the models in the scene.  

What could it mean if, like this mother of the bride, we get to wear the clothes that we actually feel comfortable and ourselves in?  Fitting in takes a lot of energy; Belonging doesn’t.  Heck, if you could wear anything you want, what would you look like? Would you be like that four-year-old who went  everywhere in a Buzz Lightyear costume three months after Halloween?  Or would you deck yourself out in cheetah-prints and glitter? “No doubt a significant sub-set of the population would be found roaming Wally-World in bedroom slippers and pajamas…oh…WAIT!” says Prudence snidely, “Are you saying that an Advanced sense of Belonging is responsible for that?” I point out that her slip is showing and her tights are bagging around her ankles again so she shuffles away.

Ok, so you don’t have to roll completely with all your wacky ideas, but you can compromise and try and get as close as you feel comfortable, to your Authentic, badass self.  

 During so many seasons of my life I have felt like I did not fit in.  Often, I have thought that I just did not know which clothes to wear to make me feel less awkward—that it was about the clothing, not my Inner Being. Then, in my fifties I discovered that it is possible to go to a dance in a four-dollar dress bought that day at Salvation Army and Love the dancing and Love the music and Love the life you are living and the friends you are meeting so much that you don’t even notice when your bra cups slip around to the middle of your back.  You Dance anyway, for the sheer pleasure of being where you Belong in that moment—and you find way more partners seeking your hand for the next dance than if you were decked out head to toe in Yves Saint Laurent because you are Alive and Dancing and being Authentic to who you are. (“Though one must never underestimate the allure of bra-cups on your back, as well,”notes Prudence.  “All the Big Names will be going for it on the next season of Runway, no doubt!”)

 My darlings, you do not need ear gauges, pierced tongues, and an assortment of ripped clothing that smells vaguely of pot and patchouli to be “Unique” in order to Belong.  Trust me, if you dress like an 1850’s farm girl from the Nebraska Prairie in long woolen skirts and frumpy shawls of your own home-spinning, you will stand out!  You don’t have to wear what someone else dictates. You have to wear what makes You shine.

 I love how this Mother of the Bride is so clear about who she is and what she wants. People like that are often the easiest customers to please.  The ones who have no idea keep moving the target until we wind up remaking things over and over until both profitability and patience go completely out the window. We begin to wish such customers would go back to Tom Dick & Harry’s Bridal Disasters and get eaten up by one of the Sea Creatures they have hanging there.   The best Outfits ARE In-fits that let your Inner Light shine.

Shine on my darlings, I love you sew much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Every tool can be a hammer...

“The best investment is in the tools of one’s own trade,” Benjamin Franklin

Greetings Dear Ones!

The frost is coming on hard at nights now—making the ground sparkle in the starlight as I send forth the tiny hounds to do their last call of “dooty” before bed. The rash of Mumpkins (mums + pumpkins) that has infected every doorstep from here to Alberta is starting to subside—or at least wither and sag and look less virulent. Everything, including me, has decided it is time to Rest, rot just a little, and go to seed.  We clamber just a little earlier into our beds and the room is warm but the sheets are cold. Our flannel and fur-clad bodies radiate warm, safe, round pockets in the middle, with paws and toes gingerly exploring the frontiers of Cold at the margins and scurrying back to the warmth. When we awake before dawn, the room is icy and the bed is warm. It’s a time of Turnings.

Here at Hermit Hollow, the orchard apples have been harvested and are now either apple sauce or gently fermenting delicacies for drunken mice to nibble. Exciting things are happening.  We are building a shed for the sheep! “A She shed?” someone jokes. “No,” I say, “a SHEEP shed. There’s a P on the end.” What the heck is a “she shed?” It turns out, it’s A Thing!  A “she shed” is the feminine counterpart to the “Man Cave.” Who knew? Apparently, while some men (not all) like to have a dank hole in the cellar in which to wallow in their manliness, shoot pool, and consume frothy pints of hell broth with their brothers far from the madding cries of Suckerware parties and Pampered Chef implements, some women like to have an outdoor shed or building, upstairs in the sunlight, separate from the main building of the house—“reserved specifically for the use of an adult woman, in which she can relax and pursue her interests” says Pinterest.   Well, if you are me and your interests consist of cloven-hoofed wool and pellet producers, then your “She shed” will have a P in it. Come to think of it, it might have a LOT of Pee in it. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that these beloved Hermits are MASTER builders and I am learning how to swing a hammer properly (not just smash the nails until they are pretzels), drive in GRK screws, and how to measure many, many, MANY times. It’s a lot like sewing but with wood, except that fudging things by a quarter inch in sewing is forgiveable—in wood, it is not. They don’t use words like I do, like “skinch,” which means “skinny inch” in Nancyland. They know to the 32nd of an inch what a board should be.

While I am learning, I am also teaching. I am excited about having a little sewing apprentice in the form of an 11-year-old homeschooler in town.  She has bright, magnetic green eyes that collect ideas quickly.  I can almost hear the clicking sounds as I show her things and they snap through her lenses and into place in her brain forever. She already sews beautifully by hand—with neat, even little stitches that look like mice may have done them. My job is to teach her how to use a machine and all the other tricks of the trade. “Empowerment is having tools and knowing how to use them,” I tell her.  This is NOT sissy stuff.

 When people ask if I write this blog for seamstresses I have to laugh.  Heavens NO!  I think there are less than thirty-nine of us left in North America—what kind of target audience is that?? We are not as endangered as New Caledonian Owlet Nightjars but we should definitely be put on some sort of Environmental “watch” list. Seamstresses are a dying breed.  Most of us are too old now to mate so we have to indoctrinate the young we poach from other nests. Sewing is not hereditary anyway.  Those Stitch-witches who do manage to reproduce tend to give birth to offspring who say “Hey, Mum! Can you fix this? I need a costume by tomorrow…”

So, very carefully, I begin to teach my darling acolyte the names of our sacred tools and what they do.  I am learning the same things from the carpenters building the shed.  Everything has a name. I appreciate how overwhelming it is to learn this new language.  When the carpenters refer to a “framing square” I have to say, “Is that the bent thingy or the long thing with bubbles in it?”

“What’s this?” my student asks.  “It’s a seam ripper,” I tell her. “It’s for when you want to take out stitches, accidentally slash into the good fabric, and spend the rest of the afternoon saying bad words.” She nods bravely. “And what is this?” she asks, pointing to a rounded wooden object in my basket. “Ah! That…that is something special! That is a darning mushroom; it’s the Vegan version of a darning egg—for when you wish to mend a hole in a sock. You simply slip it under the hole and use it to hold the shape of the sock while you weave threads back and forth and say ‘darn-it, darn-it’.” She smiles in a polite yet concerned way. She hasn’t quite decided whether I am totally bonkers yet but she’s getting close. We discuss all sorts of nomenclature like warp and weft and selvage; placket, piping, and ruching, these dear (to me) and familiar (to me) words of our craft.  I had not quite realized how extensive this vocabulary is—how much “knowing” it contains and how it sounds as old-fashioned as witchcraft on young ears.  I think the hardest thing about any business (with veterinary medicine being the hardest, of course!) is learning ALL the NAMES for things first. For example, “This is a Cow. This is a Sheep. This is a brachial plexus avulsion of the nerves…” and so on. The language of sewing, like the language of carpentry, is specialized and so are the tools:  A hammer strikes; a vice holds fast; a lever lifts… And yet… as my wryly-wise beloved Builder pointed out to me recently, pretty much any tool can be a hammer. I nod knowingly. (Guiltily I remember trying to pound my son’s bookshelf into place using a gallon jug of laundry detergent. How was I to know the cap would shatter and that his desk would foam for the next three weeks?)

We need physical tools to do physical tasks—they make life so much easier and our products so much better. We also need Tools for dealing with emotional crises that are instrumental in building relationships with others and ourselves. I remember being down on the family farm—helping my father, who taught me the line “Don’t force nothin’; Just get a bigger hammer.” Get your hands on the best tools you can.  Don’t worry—better tools will come along in time.  Sometimes the best way to smash something into shape is with a gallon jug of laundry detergent—sometimes you are lucky enough to be using a Bosch SDS rotary hammer drill… Seek wisdom greater than your own to learn the difference. Invest in the best you can acquire. It’s worth it.

Use of tools is considered a very “human” thing to do. (Though many species are known to use “tools,” not many use laundry soap to build a shelf; I’m pretty sure that distinction belongs only to the subset of me.)  We shape the tools and the tools shape us.  Knowledge of our tools informs us that “everything happens for a reason.” Cause and effect are immediate and observable. Good Tools help us reverse, redirect, reshape and restyle our circumstances or garments or shelters. With determination and Good Tools, we can co-create or re-create the life we choose—no matter what Fate or Karma has decreed. Best-selling author of computer language books Jeff Duntemann is quoted as saying, “A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.” I agree.

Success in diplomacy, foreign policy, carpentry, surgery, seamstressing, even attending the upcoming Thanksgiving Dinner with the family—all require the Right Tools for the job:  Do we use our tools to Accept What Is or choose differently to Make the Best of something? Are stubborn perseverance and hard work the best options? Probably, somewhat, more often than never. Are Compromise, Acceptance, Patience, and Tolerance? Aye. About the same.  Which is it in the end—Do we “never give up” and just get bigger hammers? or Surrender to our limitations Gracefully? (That is, when we are full of Grace.)  Tools will change our thinking. Sometimes we can lift much heavier objects by being Smart, rather than strong. So the answer to both questions is YES. Yes. By all means, Give Thanks for all your Blessings. Then get a Seam Ripper and start over if you must. You can always Get a bigger Hammer.

Be well, my Dear Ones! May today be the day you gather your best tools and begin the work of your dreams.

Yours aye,

Nancy

People are Animals...

All God’s Critters got a place in the Choir; Some singing low, some singing higher;

Some sing out loud on the telephone wires;

 some just clap  their hands, their paws or anything they got now…”  Bill Staines

 Greetings Dear Ones!

On my way to the tailoring shop, I pause at a red light behind a car covered in paw-print stickers.  The bumper reads: “I don’t need a Higher Power. I have a cat.” And “I [heart] cats—it’s people I can’t stand.”   As soon as the light changes, she starts honking at the slow car in front of her.   With a wild wave of arms and flashing turn signals, she swerves left with unnecessarily violent acceleration.  Foul-smelling Anger in the form of dark exhaust fumes pollutes the intersection as I drive straight through.  I can’t help giggling for some reason.  I send the pissed off Cat Car a Blessing even as Prudence begins her commentary.  I remind Prudence that it is wrong to judge people.  She seems to think judging People Who Judge People is just fine. It’s really not.  “People should not MAKE me Judge them,” she huffs.  It’s one of her favorite lines.

I love people; really, I do.  If it were not for People, especially two people in particular, I probably wouldn’t even be here.  I used to think I only really got along with animals—that people were confusing and tricky—that is, until I realized they were just large, somewhat less furry animals in cloth costumes.   So I sympathize with the Cat Car driver.  Sometimes it feels like “everyone else” is out to get us and that only animals are safe.  We forget that any creature can bite.  I wonder about what softens in her belly when she gets home to her feline family—her personal domestic welfare population circling her ankles in search of the sound of a tin opener—no doubt they are needy and demanding but in ways that don’t bug her or insult her personal boundaries as much as an anonymous fellow motorist delaying her for three seconds at a red light.

In the shop, everything is bright and cheery against the gloom of the grey windows.  These past few days have had only the damp, foggy lights of a photographer with his strongest filter on, as the October rains extinguish the fiery maple and oak leaves and wash them to the ground.  My dear co-worker is in the corner working on a set of window drapes she has had to re-hem three times for a persnickety customer who has no idea how a tape measure works.   “I don’t know why it bugs the [poopy] out of me to have to do things twice, never mind THREE times!” she says.  I understand.  Someone with a perfectly “Zen” mindset sees everything as a “first.”  We wish we could do that.  Somehow, there is a big difference between hemming the same drapes three times and having three different customers come in separately with the same drapes.  We rely on a sense of forward momentum to maintain morale.   She steps on the foot pedal of the machine and the needle jams.  I hear both the machine and the seamstress whine.  Next, I hear a sound I do not recognize immediately—a low rumbling sound.  I know I’ve heard that sound many times but I cannot quite place it now.  My eyes widen. “Are you GROWLING???” I ask my friend in disbelief.  She sounds like a Rottweiler issuing a severe warning to someone about to lose a leg.   The growling snaps quickly and shatters into guilty laughter.   I howl with glee.  “Don’t tell anyone!” she begs.

“It’s Ok to growl,” I assure her.  It’s ok that we love our work and we hate our work.  It’s ok that we love people and harbor secret contempt for their choices too.  It’s too early on a grey day to succumb to being annoyed with People, so to cheer myself up I decide to use my magic powers to turn all our customers into animals.   For some reason, animals are so much easier to love than ourselves.  Animals are the necessary, blessed bridge to our own humanity sometimes.

First in is a very tall, somewhat meddlesome Hare with long, long legs attached directly to her back.  She is taking tango lessons and she wants us to make some adjustments to her dress to make it look as though she has a sexy bum.  She laments that she towers over all the Latin men with whom she dances so she never wears heels.  Her skirts don’t need hemming but she has taken elastic bands and bunched up the fabric between her pelvic bones in the back.  “Can you do something like this?” she asks.  “I really like the look of this.  This will be really easy for you—see? No sewing!  You just use a hair band. Simple!” On and on she goes, turning this way and that in the mirror, smiling and telling me how Simple it is going to be for me to do what she wants with “no sewing” whatsoever.   (I confess—I panic a little when people tell me how “easy” my work is going to be for them.)  What she has created, Hare-brained as it is, truly looks like a little rabbit’s powder puff of a tail.  Seeing her as an animal in a cute little fable I am creating helps me restrain the urge I feel to smack her.

Next in is a woman whose clothing smells of kitty litter.  I am tempted to turn her into a cat but she has the loyal, mournful eyes of a rescue hound.  She has nine suits from the late nineties that she has dug out of the back of her closet.  Thanks to a strong muzzle and regular leash-walking, she has reached her goal weight and wants all these suits updated for her “new” look.   The suits hang off her in a listless, apologetic way.   “I haven’t been this size in twenty years,” she says in a voice utterly lacking triumph.  The shoulder-pads look like benign tumors that need to be resected from under the faded hanger marks.  We have to take in all the skirts by eight inches—basically remaking them from scratch—then hem the jacket sleeves and take in the backs as much as we can without distorting their shapes and making her resemble a barrel-chested bulldog.  At the end of the day, these suits will still look exhausted, uninhabited, and baggy, like she herself does.  I desperately want to give this woman a good brushing—to scratch her behind her ears and find her something she likes to play with.  I want to see her eyes sparkle. I want to see what makes her bolt and bounce for Joy.  I want to tell her to ditch these old clothes and spend her tailoring money on getting something fresh that fits Who She is Now.  But she is still trying to be Who She thought she should have been twenty years ago.  She is loyal through and through, in a weary, saggy, resigned sort of way. 

A slim, slinky weasel with bright, cunning eyes and a tiny, pointy snout comes in next. She is adorable and perky.  She is upset that she cannot buy jeans with low rises anymore. Someone in the fashion industry has hit the “Up” button on the elevator of Women’s waistlines and she can no-longer reach the lowest floors so she needs her old jeans mended.  She has to keep them on life-support until the elevator hits the top and begins its inevitable descent in eight to ten fashion cycles.  She also squeaks about how baggy a certain brand of jeans are in the bum. “They just put too much fabric in there” she sneers, “—and it’s stretch fabric too!” My ears perk up.  “Tell me the name of those jeans again,” I say, “the ones you don’t like? Exactly WHO makes those terrible jeans with the big bummage?” I grab a pen and a scrap of paper to take notes.  (I have a good lead on where to shop now!)

The phone rings.  I cannot tell whether the voice on the line is a Goose or a Gander or just a heavy smoker. “Can you hem a pair of pants for me today, if I come in right now?” I pause to scan the shop and see how busy we are.  Before I can answer, the voice says with some impatience “You’ve done this for me before!” as if I should not hesitate to say “sure.”  I hang up, wondering why this person bothered to call if [they?] were already assured of the required services.  Eventually, the person with ruffled feathers comes in.  We take the necessary measurements and I agree to have the pants ready before closing time.  At no point during the interactions am I certain of which pronouns to use—even the trousers themselves are no clue—which is fine with me. I don’t need to know a person’s “pronouns” in order to do a good job on a quick blind hem.  Those species of waterfowl lacking visible displays of sexual dimorphism have enough trouble without having a gender-muddled seamstress adding to their woes.  They find themselves swimming upstream enough!    

A middle-aged house cat is just about to pay for his dry-cleaning when he pauses and burps.  He proceeds to cough up a small hairball, chew it, swallow, then comment on it for the next five minutes.  We learn all about his acid reflux, how he can no longer eat mice, how he’s allergic to certain kinds of kitty litter and how much he loves salmon but it plays havoc with his delicate bowels.  Instinctively, we all give him the averted-eyes body-language that indicates discomfort with his bland candor about his bodily functions. Languidly, he ignores the social cues and continues to behave as if he might through an ankle over his shoulder and casually lick his own arse right in the middle of our carpet.  Finally, with considerable relief, we get him to depart the shop by asking him where he has parked.  When the door shuts, we all talk at once, as if we have been simultaneously holding our breath.  “Save your confessions for a priest!” mutters Prudence to the departing car. 

“Do we LOOK like bartenders?” asks one exasperated seamstress.

“Jeez, Louise, I had no idea how far he was going to go with that…is there no one else in his life who can listen to that verbal diarrhea?” says another.   I think about how we interpret the actions of strays in animal shelters—Someone, somewhere, must have pampered him and convinced him that he was entitled to endless feminine attention.  Clearly, he’s just lonely and self-centered, with no one to rub his furry tummy. (Yuck. Now Prudence has a hairball.)

Some customers are difficult. There is no doubt about that.  Sometimes it takes a little imagination to see them as the funny, loveable creatures they really are.  But it’s work worth doing at the end of the day—not so much because they actually “deserve” it but because WE do.  It’s worth it to our own souls to laugh more, to love more, to see ourselves as Abundant enough to be able to afford any kindness to a stranger or a rangy, gentle Moose Mother who wants her Otter Son’s wedding to a Fish to be perfect.  Those strangers might be “Angels in disguise,” or they may be fellow animals in search of food and shelter and a cheap, quick way to cover up the tails they wish to hide. 

It’s Halloween, “All Hallow’s Eve,” the ancient Celtic New Year—a perfect time to notice the Cats, Critters, and Costumes around us—a time to prowl the Darkness around our hearts in search of Sweetness and the return Home.  These orphaned creatures craving attention, affection, and Milk Duds—they are US.  We can notice how awful we are and point it out to others via caustic messages of intolerance on our bumper stickers, or we can trust the Blessedness of our Inner Beings to bring light and warmth for one another as the days grow short and cold. It’s our fierce and free Choice.

 Thank you, Dear Ones, for the Good Work you are doing.  On this Hallowed Eve, I wish you happy hearths, hot cider, and much Mischief, Mirth & Music—tonight and ever.   I love you Sew Much!

Yours aye,

Nancy

It Must Be Nice...

Greetings Dear Ones,

 I am sitting at the laundromat crocheting a new finger-top to a pair of mittens for a customer while I wait for the machines to get done masticating my laundry.  This is a new laundromat for me and I am all charmed up because it only takes quarters—not those new-fangled credit cards that you charge up, then misplace in a pocket of the shirt that just got locked into the machine… The twenty dollars’ worth of pirate’s booty that the coin machine spits out is as hefty and reassuring as pieces of eight.  I am tempted to set sail for Bora Bora immediately. Who would spend such a heap of treasure getting crud off of clothes anyway?  How droll.  I can’t remember the last time twenty dollars worth of coins has made me feel so giddy, so Rich, so Invincible.  But dutifully I feed the coins into the eyes of the machines and my soiled clothing into the open mouths and begin the long wait.

 I love laundromats. I love getting everything Clean & Sorted all at once.  It does something almost as positive for my soul as for my wardrobe. Out the big picture window, the sky smolders a smoky grey above a hillside ablaze with oaks and maples in full glory.  Each leaf is like a scrap of flame as it flutters.  The mittens I am working on are shades of purple and green and complement the scene outside.

A woman waiting nearby sees me working and says, “It must be nice to be able to do that,” nodding towards my crochet hook. “I could never do anything like that.  I just haven’t got the time.”  I peer at her quizzically.  We are both sitting at a laundromat. I’m going to sit here with busy hands and she isn’t. Which one of us, exactly, has More Time?  “Well, you’ve got some time right now—I’ll show you!” I offer. “Oh no…” she stammers hastily. “I’ve tried before.  I just can’t do it.  I don’t have the patience.” Prudence raises her eyebrows but says nothing.  NOT having patience is one of the anti-virtues most likely to prompt her to get a run in her tights.  She also has strong thoughts about people who make Excuses instead of Efforts but at least she has the sense to take this rare opportunity to shut up.  “Patience” is a funny concept.  Personally, I don’t have the patience to sit still with idle hands! It drives me batty to go somewhere and forget my handwork.

The woman watches the yarn inching through my fingers, drizzling itself over the hook into tidy coils, like the watery sand-mud of a drip castle at the beach, then hardening into a firm line of neat, tight stitches. She sighs. “It sure must be Nice…” she says softly.  There is something about her wistfulness that melts me.  She feels a certain call, a certain yearning to be a Maker but she keeps churning up reasons why she cannot do it.

Normally, when I hear comments like “it must be nice…” (which I hear quite a lot actually! “it must be nice to be able to sew…it must be nice to be able to spin… it must be nice to be able to fix your own clothes for free…”) it brings to mind my Least Favorite Fairy Tale.  Perhaps you have heard it?

It’s a Grimm tale called “The Three Spinning Women,” first published by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in 1812, and it is certainly grim, in every way.  Firstly, there is a daughter who refuses to spin flax so her mother beats her.  A queen, rolling by in her fine carriage stops and asks what all the ruckus is about. The mother, embarrassed for her lazy daughter, lies and says she cannot get the daughter to cease her incessant spinning and that the squeaking of the wheel is driving her nuts.   So the queen tells the mother to let her take the daughter back to the castle with her, where she can spin to her heart’s content. “I have plenty of flax for her to spin and there is nothing I like so well as the sound of a spinning wheel in use. I am never happier than when the wheels are humming!” (I heartily concur.  This is the only part of the story I agree with—the pleasantness of humming wheels, that is, not the kidnapping of other people’s daughters.) Back at the castle, the queen tells the terrified (yet still lazy girl) that if she spins three huge rooms worth of flax, that she shall have her son’s, the Prince’s, hand in marriage and one day inherit the kingdom. “I don’t mind if you are poor—for Cleverness and Industry are dowry enough.” (Ok, I agree with this line too.)  So the poor girl is locked in the first room with all the flax and cries herself to sleep.  (“We HOPE she is regretting her Laziness,” insists Prudence. “I’ll bet she’s saying “It Must Be Nice to be able to spin flax now! If only I had bothered to learn, instead of frittering my time away on Social Media and Sit-coms…”) The girl cries for three days because that is the rule in fairytales—things happen in threes. On the third day, three kind fairies show up—one with a big foot, one with a big thumb, and one with a big lip.  They tell the girl that they will spin all the flax for her if she will agree to invite them to her wedding, call them her aunts, and seat them with her at the table. She agrees. (People who are desperate and lazy will agree to pretty much anything.)  So the kindly “Aunts” spin all the flax for her and she gets to marry the prince.  As promised, the Lazy Bride invites the Aunts to her wedding, where the rude, outspoken prince questions them about their “deformities.” The one with the big foot says her foot grew large from treadling the wheel; the one with the lip says it grew from having to moisten the flax with her spit; the one with the thumb says it grew from the flax rushing through her hands as it was being spun.   The Prince is aghast.  He bans his new bride from ever spinning again because he wants nothing to spoil her beauty.  And they all live “Happily Ever After.” Yeah, right… (sound of retching noises from Prudence)

There is just so much that is annoying about this fairytale.

Yet I cannot help being fascinated by the idea that the constant spinning had somehow “deformed” the three aunts.  As a fellow spinner, I can say that different parts of our bodies DO come to “embody” the wisdom that comes with many repetitions.  There IS such a thing as “muscle memory.”  Understanding how to do something and being able to do it well are two completely different things.  For example, my left foot “knows” how to treadle the wheel but it can’t—I am completely “Right-footed” in much the same way that most people can only write their signature with their dominant hand.

Being able to “Do Things” is NOT nice.  When people comment, “It must be nice…” Well, No, actually, it isn’t.  People who can do or make things have been at it a long time.  They have sacrificed parts of their body to endless repetitions that create deep-tissue “knowing” and change their bodies and brains forever.  There is a tailor I know whose hand-sewn button-holes are a work of art.  I long to be able to sew buttonholes like he does.  But whereas I have only done mere hundreds, he has done thousands. Therein lies the difference.

People who do things well make them look “easy” and effortless—like it might be “Nice” to be in the middle of a flow like that, with such economy of effort for such a rich result. Because hard work eventually looks “easy” people begin to think it is “nice.”

Last weekend, I watched a friend dancing at a fundraiser for our favorite public radio station in Boston.  She was floating about the stage as if she was weightless, as if she were reaching down with her feet to hit the beat on the deck below her, instead of pushing up off the ground.  She dances as if most of her body is the liquid representation of Sound.  Someone next to me commented, “Wow, imagine dancing like that!  It must be nice to be able to move with such grace…” I nodded.  What I did not say to the admiring stranger is that my friend has been in a horrific two-year battle with Lyme disease to be able to move at all.  It’s not just Nice that she can dance like that—it’s miraculous—AND she earned every bit of that miracle through her own daily persistence and the strength of her spirit.

Writhing behind her on stage sat my son and his merry band of music-makers. Each slice of their fiddle bows cut open a vortex between worlds for pure notes to enter, gush, splash and splatter all over the slickened dance floor.  I stared with pride and awe. I envied their ease with their instruments, yet I know there is nothing “Nice” about being able to play like that.  All creativity begins as some form of self-defense. I have heard him for YEARS, practicing until the wee hours of the morning; driven to claim his Powers; striving to create his identity through Skills, rather than the jeers of misguided middle-school peers who labeled him differently as a result of his learning style. 

What it comes down to is that there are two kinds of people: the Makers and those who marvel and say “It must be Nice.” What the Makers do is love the thing they do more than they love their own comfort.  That’s it. They embrace the inconvenience of doing things badly in order to begin to do things well.  They take the time it takes. They risk. They grow. Their change their bodies with their minds.

The now-done laundry before me is a harvest I pick over critically, deciding what to cull and what to keep.  I can’t help thinking of the line from poet David Whyte, “anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you” as I sort. 

Our bodies DO change by what we teach them.  What we have to do to them over long and patient hours is not the least bit “Nice.”  We are not “deformed” as in the fairytale, but we are Re-formed in our own image of ourselves as Dancers, Doers, Makers, Givers.  That which brings us Alive can’t help but make us Bigger. “Beauty” might be something girls in fairytales are born with; Magnificence isn’t. 

Autumn is the season of fires and farewells, a time of hoarding away or discarding in the liminal space between the tender, languid riot of Summer and cold Permanence of Death.  Is there something that you think would be “nice” to do?  Is there a part of yourself you see in someone else’s habits or craft? Plant that bulb today and one day it will shine a Light from within. You DO have Time. Grab it, Claim it, Pummel it by the hours, bit by bit, until you know the full Meanness of what it is you have accomplished.  And someday, someone might look at you doing That Thing it is you have chosen to do and say “Wow, it must be nice…” and You, with your big feet, your big lips, your thick fingers and aching toes will say, “Damn…It’s NOT Nice. It’s MAGNIFICENT.”

Be well, my Darlings! Thanks for your Good Work.  I love you Sew Much!!!

Yours aye,

Nancy

The Story and the Teller...

“Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution -- more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.” - Lisa Cron, Wired for Story

Greetings Dear Ones!

An amazing and wonderful thing happened to me the other day. Some children came to visit Hermit Hollow.  They weren’t just any children—they were sweet, old-fashioned, Magical children! (“Like the kind YOU were before video games were invented,” says Prudence.) They knew how to cup their hands to make fine china for make-believe tea; they knew how to take a blanket and throw it over a chair and make a palace or a cave; and they knew how to transform instantly into any kind of creature from pigs to kitty-cats, complete with authentic sound effects.  I crawled into their Shanty Blanket town and fell in love.  I was supposed to be “getting a lot done” on my day off from the tailoring shop. I was supposed to be doing office work and laundry and spinning wool into yarn I can sell, as well as a myriad of other useful, Boring things. Grudgingly, I pulled out the spinning wheel first, thinking it might entertain the children while their father talked with the other men of Hermit Hollow about Serious Grown-up Things.

“Do you know the story of Rumplestiltskin?” I asked. They did. 

“And Sleeping Beauty?” They nodded. They were up on their fairy tales.

“We’ve heard them all,” insisted the five-year-old politely. Her name is Ruby Rose and she wasn’t being cheeky—it was the truth.  Her parents had read every last one, multiple times, to her and her brother Toddle-thump, who was only just two.  They had also read a good bit of the Red Wall books by Jacques and other classics like My Side of the Mountain and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle—so many of my favorites! Instantly, we had a common language. I was thrilled. Prudence finds it so depressing when youngsters today have no idea who is Rumplestiltskin!

“We live in a cabin in the woods,” said Ruby Rose, “just like Hansel and Gretel. And every day they read to us,” jerking her head vaguely in the direction of her father.  It turns out that this family, sired by an ex-marine who has seen multiple tours of duty around the world, lives off grid and goes to bed with the sun and stories every night.  There is no such thing as T.V., electronics of any kind, or even indoor plumbing. These little ones have known no other life than the one of a pump-handle well and bulk barrels of beans and rice. They play outside in all weather.  Inside is where you go if you are sick or need to sleep. Prudence was enchanted.

These Magical children lay on the floor by my smallest traveler’s wheel, passively watching it whir around and around as we discussed the merits of flax vs. wool and how much work Cinderella really had to do.  They liked feeling the wool with their hands and helping me treadle with their stubby little feet along side of mine, all of us barefoot.

After we had done a bobbin’s worth of spinning and chatting, I asked if they had ever played a real harp--harps being the original instruments of storytelling.  I was not surprised to learn that Ruby Rose already had her own tiny Celtic harp.  When I dragged mine out of its enormous, padded case, her eyes widened to the size of hens eggs.  “It’s HUGE!” she squealed, clapping both hands to her cheeks. It towered over both children. The two-year-old looked up at it longingly.

“Peas?” he said imploringly.

“He means ‘please may we touch?’” Ruby informed me in that tone big sisters have when they have to serve as translator-diplomats for younger siblings.

“Yes! Of course!” I said. “I only bring out the toys I want to share. You are so good at knowing how to touch things gently, I felt sure you could do a great job with my harp.  I’ve only had it a little while now and I can’t really play it yet.  But isn’t it Lovely?”

Ruby Rose looked at me and wrinkled her brow and button nose in confusion.  “What do you mean you don’t know how to play it??” she queried. “All you have to do is go like this!” She swept her hands across the strings, making them tremble with sounds, back and forth, back and forth, like the sound of the waves or wind. “See? Easy!” She looked at me reprovingly.  I nodded.  I love how most five-year-olds are such excellent problem solvers. There was no point in trying to explain about hand positions and scales and whatnot.  The way to play a harp is simply to play it. Just like that. Easy. We all laughed at my silliness.

“Want to see my favorite way to play it?” I asked. They nodded.

“I like to make up sounds to go with stories.  Maybe you can help me—what do you think the Giant’s voice might sound like?” They picked among the strings until they settled at the bass strings—the longest, deepest sounding ones.  They came up with scary sounds and rhythms that sounded like the rumblings of a discontented giant—or a stomach that should not have eaten mystery food of indiscernable sell-by date from the fridge.

“And where are the fairy voices?” I asked next.  They made their way to shorter strings and more cheerful melodies.  “How about the wind? How about the storm? How about tiny raindrops?”  On and on we went, exploring the ways we could make sounds on the harp.  Finally, we were complete with that.

“Good!” I announced. “We have found all the things we need to tell the BEST Story EVER.”  They started hopping up and down with glowing eyes.  It was like I had just announced we were having ice-cream for lunch. 

“Once Upon A Time…” I began, as they plopped down on the ground and attempted to twist their legs into pretzels, “There were two Adorable Children…”

“Named Ruby Rose and Toddle-thump!!!” piped Ruby Rose excitedly, as if she could not wait a moment longer for me to say that part of the introduction. She was wiggling all over and patting her own chest and Toddle-thump’s head proudly and expectantly. (If the Audience cannot expect to see itself in the story, why listen?)

“Yes,” I continued. “However did you Guess? They were called Ruby Rose and Toddle-thump! How did you know that?  Have you heard this story before?”  They looked at me wide-eyed and shook their heads. 

“Well, Ruby Rose and Toddle-thump lived in a beautiful cabin in the middle of the woods, just like you two, and just like Hansel and Gretel, and they were the bestly behaved children anyone had ever seen.  They loved to go into the woods and hear the sound of the wind singing through the branches…” I motioned to the harp and they jumped up to help make the sound of the wind singing in the branches.

“One day, it started to rain,” announced Ruby Rose in a Theatrical Voice, switching to rain sounds. “And Storm!” roared Toddle-thump going for the bass strings. There was the equivalent of a Nor-Easter on the harp for several moments.

“Shall I continue with my story now?  Is it safe? Has the storm passed?” I wanted to know.  Ruby Rose held up a hand to stop me. “I’ll take the story from here,” she said, dismissing me as if this were a horse only she knew how to ride.

Now, I’ve been a “Professional Story-teller” for nearly thirty years—telling tales in libraries, schools, festivals, and birthday parties all over New England.  I’m always on the look-out for great stories or new ways of telling old stories.  One of the Best things about working as a seamstress in the tailoring shop is that every single customer is a Character and every single article of clothing they drag in there is a Problem with a Deadline. What is a Character with a Problem? I’ll tell you what—it’s the making of a Story!   As you might surmise from scanning this blog, there is simply No End to the Stories in my corner of the Shire. That’s because the two Most Human things we do, the things that separate us fundamentally from every other creature on this planet, are Tell Stories and Wear Clothing.  (Sometimes I like to do them both at the same time!) For as long as people wear clothes and need them fixed, I will have stories to tell. Some of the stories are boring and tiresome but most are not. It depends on who is listening.

You might think that I would be insulted to be pushed aside so readily by a Five-year-old who had not done her time at the feet of Duncan Williamson or David Campbell years ago in Scotland, or spent her college days devouring the works of Joseph Campbell and the ancient Greeks.  Frankly, I was relieved—she was going to do the heavy lifting and I could just rest. I was tired. I was also Curious. What does she know of setting, plot, and rising action, pivotal moments, or satisfactory resolutions?

Well, Everything, it turns out.  Five-year-olds who have been read to consistently from birth are some of the Best storytellers in the world.  They use complex words like “incidentally” and “regrettably” (which almost always improve any story) and their plot twists are real zingers, especially if they sense the listener glazing over! I listened to her with my eyes and ears and whole skin and suddenly realized she was teaching me a Wonderful New Thing about Storytelling that I have always partially felt but never really thought about cognitively until today.  This little girl reminded me that the most important thing about any story is not the Teller, nor even the story itself:  It’s the Audience.  Masterfully, she kept checking in with me to see if I was engaged—was I listening or distracted? Was I overacting my reactions? Was I, heaven forbid, paying too much attention to the little brother? How her “audience” responded shaped her telling visibly, audibly, continually. 

There is a holy Trinity between Performer, Craft, and Audience, in every art form—whether one is performing fiddle tunes, writing for the Tightwad Gazette or staging an Opera. Even hemming a wedding gown.  The Rules are universal—the audience must know it is Valued. The circle cannot be completed without achieving some sort of capacity to Receive, engage, ignite or delight. You can strike flint on steel all day long but without some form of tinder to catch it, there’s no fire.  If you are performing because you want it to be all about “you,” so that You can be loved, then you may wind up very sad.  If you are sharing something you love so that others might love it too, you might get a few more takers.  But to really hit the big time, you have to love your listeners.  Ruby Rose showed me that a good storyteller loves her stories.  A GREAT storyteller loves her audience. I could tell because we all got “squgged” at the end. (A squg is a squeeze + hug, she explained.)

I’m so glad these wee teachers came to visit!  I’m so glad I “got nothing done”— Sometimes, what I lose in forward motion, I gain in depth by sitting still and Listening.  And remembering the truth about Stories is probably the most valuable thing I have done in weeks.   It’s all about YOU, dear readers.  If you cannot see yourselves in these tales, and remember who it is we are deciding to love by doing our Best Work, then I’d better go back to mending socks and making anonymous thunderstorms on a harp. Or laundry… Yuck.  Who wants to do that?

Be well, my Darlings!  And be on the lookout for good stories!  They are all around us, like pumpkins and mums this time of year. We need them now, more than ever (stories, that is, not pumpkins and mums!), as the nights begin to gnaw away the margins of the day and we must seek Sunlight Substitute by the hearth. Stories not only bond us to other humans, they are the most human thing we can create, besides a pair of jeans that don’t fit. I wish you warm and merry, with many fond tales to tell and listeners to hear your love.  I love you sew much.

Yours aye, incidentally, with a big tight “squg”,

Nancy

Needs, Wants, and Desires...

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned 

Greetings Dear Ones!

A Cheeky little bridesmaid who has nipped in for a fitting just before closing time pops her gum and looks at her phone as I write up her slip.  Her gown needs to have the shoulders taken up, the sides taken in and three layers hemmed but she has forgotten her shoes so we have no idea how much. She will have to come back for a second fitting. “How soon do you hope to get this done?” I ask. “Is there a rush? When is the wedding?”

“Oh, no…” she says blithely, still looking at her phone. “There’s no rush.  I don’t need it until Friday.”

“This Friday?” I say, eyebrows raised, noting with a sense of panic that it is already Tuesday after 5:pm.

She gives me a startled, is-there-a-problem-with-that look.   “I don’t NEED it until Friday,” she says again with emphasis, as if this should fix everything.  

“I NEED this by Friday/Today/Tomorrow/2:pm….” We hear some version of this almost daily.  It always sends Prudence into some sort of rampage. “Oh really?” she screeches. “Need? Seriously NEED? As in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? Is this a physiological need? Are you planning to eat this gown to survive the winter? Or are you simply going to shelter in it as near to a buffet table as you can manage? Is it necessary for your safety, security or health? Is it your key to love and belonging? Esteem? Self-actualization? Do you have any idea what Real Needs are? Would you ever guess that there is a woman who uses our cutting table to make cloth, washable, reusable maxi-pads for homeless girls in Africa? What exactly do you think a NEED is, Madam? Perhaps the verb you seek is DESIRE. You desire to have this work done at your earliest convenience, if no one else’s!”  

Needs, Wants, Desires… What a struggle for us all!  You know that if I begin a blog with a quote about “desires” I must have spent the past weekend at the Vermont Sheep and Wool festival wrestling myself out of a lot of “wants” masquerading as “needs.”  No, Nancy my love, you do not NEED some Icelandic lambs no matter how silky their fleece feels to touch (nor ANY lambs for that matter—back AWAY from that beautiful morrit Shetland ewe!), nor do you need rainbow-dyed roving when you have TEN trash bags full of roving ready to spin already (yes, but it’s not rainbow…), or an antique CPW spinning wheel with a wobble… It’s exhausting to listen to my inner self begging in such a degrading manner.  She really should have been a lawyer, the way she can make cases for the Absurd, without a trace of irony or guilt. It’s like taking a toddler to Disney Land. It’s a jolly good thing my inner parent brought only enough money to pay for admission and lunch!

At the end of the day, when I return to Hermit Hollow and sit by the fire spinning my dull grey roving, I find myself very much amused and contented.  Desires are a wonderful way to tell us if we are on the right track—if we want more of what we already have, then it’s a twisted form of Gratitude, I suppose.  If you leave a session hungry to play more music; if you leave a dance looking forward to the next dance; if you enjoy your work and want to do more of it after a break—it’s quite possible that you are a Very Lucky Person indeed.  

A grandmother who recently attended her town’s Fall Fair comes into the shop.  She presents us with some pink fur and some other glittery fabric.  “I need you to make a unicorn pillow for my five-year-old granddaughter,” she says. “She did not win one at the fair and it was a disaster.  A Total melt-down. I looked at it and thought it was a cheap piece of crap anyway.  I don’t know why she even wanted it. I figure you can make her something better.”  We all smile at the little grandmother hobbling away from the shop, confident that she can make her granddaughter’s new and improved dream come true.  Prudence shakes her head in wonder. “Who says dreams have to come true?” she wants to know.   I find it endearing and also slightly naïve that this loving grandmother thinks she can edit and substitute and still satisfy her granddaughter’s longing to Win something, long after the moment has passed—kind of how my parents used to say our own home-grown beef burgers, running with pink juice between two square slabs of home-made whole wheat bread were “better than McDonald’s.” No kid in her right mind will buy that!  So many of our desires, no matter how fiercely irrational they are, are just of the moment.  Desires are like hunger pains—they come and pass all day long.   Sometimes it’s better to just go hungry.  Who knows if this kid will even want a unicorn pillow by the time we are done constructing it?

When my children were little, and especially at Fairs, I used to make them crazy by having them distinguish between needs and wants. “Darling, you need food, you want ice-cream… I buy the needs, you buy the wants.”  (They still bristle to this day when I ask if a purchase is a want or a need!) Recently, I got curious about the difference between these two and looked up the etymologies.  By now, I have read enough conflicting reports to realize I know Nothing for Certain, which seems like a very scholarly result:  It turns out that “wants” and “needs” actually were once very similar! No wonder so many children still confuse them. The word “want” as in “lack” comes from an old Norse word, vant, and relates to an Old English word wanian (i.e. wane) which meant “to diminish.”  The noun “need” comes from the West Saxon “nied” and was used to convey peril, distress, lack, necessity or hardship.  It comes from an older, Proto-Germanic root nauti- “death, to be exhausted” which gives rise to Gothic naus “corpse”, Old Irish naunae “famine, shortage”, and Russian nuzda “misery.”  It comes into English as “a means of subsistence” by c 1400.  

When these Germanic “needs” and “wants” get tangled up with the Latin “desire” is when things get interesting. (Who among you is NOT surprised that “desire” is derived from a Romance language?)  Since about the 13th Century, we have tended to agree that “to desire” is to long for or hope for something that is missing or absent.  It may or may not be a “need”—as in a Lover’s desire to be loved, a mouse’s desire for cheese, a Jack Russell’s desire to soil clean carpets… and so on.  But the old Latin definitions seem to suggest the word arises from a combination of de (meaning “away, of, or from”) and sider or sidus (meaning “star” or “constellation”).   Interestingly, the word “consider” seems to have the same root—translating roughly as “with the stars”—as in thinking about something via a form of fortune-telling using astrology or omens from the stars.  But I digress.  There is a newer theory now that an older, non-celestial meaning for “desire” is actually along the lines of “target, mark, or goal.” This too makes sense given that early humans navigated travels by steering by the stars.

As humans, we cannot escape our desires. Christians have a long history of believing that desires, especially carnal ones, were “temptations” sent by the devil to lead us, not upward, by the stars, but to Hell.  As if getting what we want is worse for us than not getting it—that we can be somehow even redeemed by forgoing our wants and “offering them up” as internal sacrifices towards points on our ultimate salvation-tally score-card.  Buddhists would have us believe that Desire and Ignorance lie at the root of our suffering.  And clearly, any grandmother who has witnessed her favorite five-year-old NOT win a unicorn pillow at a Fall Fair has indeed Suffered.  They don’t see “desires” as emanating from the stars but as base human cravings for pleasure and material goods and wants that can never be satisfied.  (The Buddhists, that is; not the five-year-olds.) Suffering is the result of desiring what we cannot have. (And also of dealing with five-year-olds.)  The absence of Desire is Nirvana.  But then, this must also be the absence of antique Canadian Production Wheels, and rainbow-dyed roving, and unicorn pillows, and cheesecake…. And… Who in their right mind wants THAT???

What if the ancients were right—that Desires are “of the stars” which guide us to who we really are and where we really need to be? We may, like the stars themselves, never actually reach them, but they inspire us to work harder, make sacred choices (sacrifices).  Of course, there are a myriad of stars and Desires. Some are not so good. It’s a good thing we have Free Will and access to homemade rainbow socks.  The journey back from where-we-should-never-have-gone-in-the-first-place can be a long one.

Ultimately, we are all “of the stars.”  The sheep’s wool I spin each night by the fireside begins as sunlight hitting grass, which turns to sugar via photosynthesis, which is eaten, belched up and eaten again multiply times by the animal, until it works its way into a follicle and turns into keratin strands, heaps of which I carve off their sweaty bodies each June.  Even the logs aglow on the hearth began as light hitting a forest and return to light on dark autumn nights.

What is our Job while we are here but to Be and bring Light in every form—from  woolen socks to unicorn pillows? And Desires light our path to Light.  What if our Desires are not hungers but instead Food? How we receive them, how we deny them, how our desires evolve as we mature and take on new wisdom—these are the ways we grow in Light and Love—so that one day, when someone meets us or our work, they feel a sense of warmth, of blessing.  Willa Cather, one of my favorite authors of all time, says in The Song of The Lark:  “The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”

So… When do you actually “need” those pants hemmed? And how will having them hug your bum just right help me bring Light to this world?

Be well, my Darlings!  Thank you for your Good Work!

Loving you to itty-bitty sparkling bits,

Yours aye,

Nancy