Wisdom

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Greetings Dear Ones!

There is a man who, when I call to tell him the latest dumb thing I have done, laughs and laughs and laughs.  No matter how I have presented the latest melodrama—as a farce, a tragedy, the apocalyptic end of my world (or an unfortunate cheesecake) as I know it, he laughs.  He listens in deep, cheek-bitten silence until the mirth bubbles up and over both of us like a dishwasher accidentally filled with laundry soap.  He tries to take me seriously, especially if I am either in tears or a red-haired Rage with every frazzled follicle on my head standing on edge. He tries. He just can’t.  He asks leading questions such as “what happened next?” or “let me get this straight…you drove the truck into the what?” just to keep the facts in view, never to question my motives or my sanity or make me feel like any half-wit might have known better than to eat a two-day-old burrito she found lying under the back seat of a car and wash it down with solar-heated Kombucha.  He’s on my team, never the self-appointed coach, or arm-chair quarterback yelling from the sidelines. I love that laughter.  It makes me feel safe again, no matter what crimes against Nature, Humanity, or dairy products I feel I have committed.  In his chuckles, I find witness, relief, absolution.  The Laughter heals me.  The only time he gets stern is when I begin to worry “what the neighbors might think.”  And by “neighbors” I mean absolutely anyone from the guy asking me to tailor his bespoke suit, which recently arrived from England, to that kid with the heavily tattooed feet who just wants her shorts patched, and yes, even my actual Neighbors!  (I even worry what other people’s dogs think of me.) Then, the only thing he ever says that constitutes “advice” is to say “Since when does someone else’s opinion about you matter to you more than your own? To Whom do you really have to answer?   (Just the fact that he says “whom” makes Prudence adore him.) Trust me, hon, what other people think of you is none of your business. Stick to the facts.”

This is tough medicine for someone willing to hand sew a zipper into what is basically a dress made of metal, just to keep someone happy.  No matter how I try to swallow the idea that other people’s opinions of me don’t matter, it never goes down smoothly.  I operate on the idea that every customer is Right and that they know best.  In actual fact, you and I know they don’t know best.  They might (occasionally) know what they want, but it is often not what is best.  They have crazy ideas and they need gentle, mothering guidance to say what they are attempting is not possible, not healthy, and certainly not fashionable.  I shouldn’t feel so guilty about trying to protect them from themselves.  But I do.  My job, as a service provider, IS to make them HAPPY.  Very Happy.  Not just happy with the work I do, but happy with their whole day, their whole life and the blessings of Fate that landed them in Vermont for this magical moment of our interaction. I want them happy they are Here.  Even more Dangerously, I want them happy with ME.  That’s when I know my ego needs a trip to the hedge clippers.  That’s when I have gone too far.  That’s when the trouble is sure to start.  Because that’s when I find I cannot say NO, even if I need to.

No matter what we each make in our little workshops, our primary craft is Soulcraft.   How can it be otherwise? There is so much to learn from the mistakes we make, the frontiers we encounter, the relationships we create with the people we are attempting to please, and the two-day old intestinal grenades disguised as bean burritos we really should back away from carefully and handle with tongs until they can be safely detonated by a bomb squad.  Everything is evolving and changing—especially non-refrigerated food items.  From these experiences, we gain Wisdom, along with deep gratitude that the toilet paper shortages have ended.

The word “Wisdom” is an interesting word.  The Greeks, in the time of Homer, used the word sophia (wisdom) to mean “skill,” as in the skill of a craftsperson like a carpenter or seamstress.  Whether one makes barrels or bed sheets, skilled manual labor involves a systematic encounter with Material—from which an understanding of the natural sciences emerges.  There is no denying the geometry involved in sewing! Sewing is a language of shapes, as are carpentry and many kinds of engineering.  A good seamstress can envision a series of puzzle pieces lying flat on a cutting table as encircling a body and becoming a garment in the way that a good carpenter can look at a pile of boards and see a house or chicken coop.  Craft knowledge entails the “ways” of the materials—that is, their very natures—which way the warp and weft will run, how cutting on the bias will affect the drape of the material.  Through pragmatic engagement, we learn universal truths about angles and divisions and symmetry and, most importantly, that you cannot keep cutting something and expect it to get longer!

In modern times, the concepts of “wisdom” and “knowledge” have been unhooked from each other and remain connected to Nature only in science.  In religious or spiritual terms, Wisdom has taken on a more mystical meaning.  It has been cut off from its concrete origins in Nature and made to represent ethereal realms of thoughts, ideas, severed inner knowings. But where do these “knowings” come from?  I would argue that they come from Experience.  I know that young children under the age of five cannot begin to “play” music unless they have played with music.  They need to experiment—to bebop around to their own rhythms and dance moves.  They need to explore concepts of tone and tempo in their physical bodies, through practice, through embodied manipulations.  No less than Aristotle backs me up on this:

Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts.  Hence those who dwell in intimate association with Nature and its phenomena are more able to lay down principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development; while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

Over and over again, as one “who dwells in intimate association with Nature” (Nature which, as we speak, is attempting to eat my house!)Experience teaches me what I can and cannot do.  Explaining this to my customers in clear, compassionate, forthright ways actually takes better care of them than attempting to do what I know is risky just to please them.  They have no idea how hard or easy some things are.  I do. I love the phrase “I’d rather turn you down than let you down.”

Thanks to a series of local small business initiatives and word of mouth, people are learning of the existence of my little shop space.  As more and more people emerge from their Covid shelters and realize the change of season means repairs need to be made to their winter long-johns, I am getting a steady stream of emails and phone calls inquiring what I can and cannot do.  I need to stick to the wisdom of Facts: “Yes, my love, I can adjust your waistband and hack your jeans all the way up to the crotch. No, you will not look like J.Lo in Daisy Dukes…” Without fail, the projects I agree to do for dear friends, just because I like them, or worse, because I want them to like me, have a way of not turning out well.  This leads to unpleasant amounts of soul-growth opportunities and tear-stained cheese-cake eating. 

Over and over, in little workshops everywhere, we keep learning to Tell The Truth, Be Ourselves, and honor others with Honesty, not opinions.   Now, if only we could get politicians to do the same!!!

Thank you so much for your Good Work.  Let the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Thresholds

I’m a dweller of the threshold and I’m waiting at the door, and I’m standing in the darkness, I don’t want to wait no more. –Van Morrison

Greetings Dear Ones,

We did SO much work here at the Land of Lost Plots two weekends ago!  I got totally worn out and needed a week to recover.  Some of it was actually even three-dimensional work, though the true heavy lifting of it turned out to be spiritual for me.  Two dear friends came and camped on the land—one in a tent, one in a tent-hammock, and helped my daughter and I find what we came to call “the spiral path” around this place. 

The land around my new home is anywhere from waist-deep to neck-deep (depending how tall one is) in weeds and brambles.  The women who came to help, both in their mid thirties, agreed that it is as magical and darkly confusing as an old fairytale that makes no sense until you realize it is actually a map of the female psyche.  For one thing, there is no way into the house except through the garage, which seems weird.   This place, with its slightly slanted barn, the mythical meadow we never actually found, and the deep, dark tangled gulch running steeply through the center, could be anybody’s psyche for sure.  It is the stuff of giddy daydreams and ghastly nightmares. There are doors, but they don’t go anywhere reasonable.  (One of the first things I did after moving in was fall out the front door onto a rock that is way too low to be a step and sprain my foot.  I had to crawl back inside and hop on crutches for a few days.)

The ladies arrived Friday night.  “What is our goal? What can we do?” they wanted to know, as they unloaded baskets and armloads of newly canned garden produce and summer squash and turnips and homemade pickles.  While we feast on both their fresh garden abundance and the energy surge they bring, I say “I don’t care what we do—we just have to do Something.  It’s like a tangled necklace.  We just have to start picking away at something to see what can come free.  Let’s try to make some sense of this by what gives way first.”

We decide to start by creating a fire pit so that we can drag two cords of rotted wood away from the side of the house and burn it (the wood, that is, not the house). We want a fire pit anyway so that we can sit around it and play fiddles and chat.  To get to the wood, some of which has actually turned to compost we could shovel rather than logs we could lift, we have to saw through brambles as thick as broomsticks. 

“Where should we make the fire pit?” we wonder.  We all agree that making it someplace convenient to the house, where we would not have to drag the wood too far, is an absurd idea—not nearly as much fun as exploring the twilight for a fairy circle, a little glen, a remote location with an opening in the canopy to the other world, where we can watch the stars.  I pause and feel grateful that I am not dealing with Practical people.  These women are strong and wise and magical.  Intuitively, they align with the priorities of having a fire pit and getting an outdoor claw foot bathtub operational over the need to build some front door steps or clean the garage. 

One friend, dressed in a linen dress, work boots, and gloves, fires up her husband’s weed-whacker and buzzes a trail through the grass.  Shadows lengthen around us as she meanders downhill until she comes to a level place that we all agreed “feels right.”  I fetch the push mower and the two of us hack a wide circle in the brush.  The stalks next to the ground are like straw.  We’ve had a drought this summer.  I worry about sparks.  With a pang of anguish, I think of friends in California who are displaced from their homes, sheltering in fear of the fires raging there.  I don’t want to be the one who burns down Vermont.

I run uphill, fetch a shovel, and cut a bulls-eye of sod out of the center of our circle.  “We need rocks around this, and at least four big buckets of water—one for each of us,” I say.  I lumber back up the hill for buckets and water while the other ladies bring chairs and wood.  I point out a place where they can go to find rocks that will be the right size for our pit.  They are large grey hunks of granite in a disorderly pile near the edge of the driveway.  They begin to peel them from the dirt that has scabbed over them, ripping roots away to free the stones.

“We must Name these rocks,” says the woman with the weed-wacker, her bright eyes glowing bluer than the rim of the fading sky.  “Rituals are the things that tell us about transformation.  We cannot transform anything without simultaneously transforming ourselves.  There are four of us—let’s each take three stones and carry them to the circle.  These are three burdens we are tired of carrying.  We must name our burdens and decide to carry them no further.”   Ok, she didn’t say it exactly like that…she was far more eloquent…but that’s as close as I can remember. 

I fetch a metal hand truck from the garage.  These “burdens” are actually just a little too big for us to carry so we go one by one, down the path alone, using the truck.   When it is my turn, I load three huge stones on the hand truck and head down the winding path, dragging the stones on wheels behind me.  As the pitch of the slope increases, I realize too late that it is really dumb to be in front of the Burdens, which are pushing me faster and faster down the hill, until I am running wide-eyed, blasting past the fairy circle, past our circle of earth, past our water buckets, into the weeds beyond.  One by one, scratched and laughing, I drag my burdens back to the circle, name them, and lay them down. 

Gradually, we have all the elements assembled—the fire, the water, the stone, the air—and we four humans who are made of a delicate recipe of each.  We nestle in to the camp chairs on that line between earth and sky and talk about our lives, our hopes, our burdens.   The pandemic has been hard on us as women, artists, and craftspeople—we share our fatigue, our fear, and our gratitude for having made it thus far.  We acknowledge the symbolism of letting our old burdens be the boundary around a new spark.  These are dark times.  We are here to bring Light and keep each other warm.  This is our own private Solstice.

We talk through the night until a new day.  I listen to the wisdom of those far younger than I and marvel.  They talk of what they want to “birth” into this world on the threshold of becoming—their babies, their music, art, and stories.  A dog crawls into my lap and he and I dwell silently as possibilities get explored.   We gaze at the dear faces in the firelight. The youngest is no longer a child.  She is a radiant Maiden.  The Maidens are ready to be Mothers.  With a sudden start, I realize I have been the maiden, been a mother.  It’s my turn next to be the Crone!  To the shock of those around the fire, I announce abruptly, out of context, that it is my intention to be a Badass Crone.  “Check my Facebook profile tomorrow,” I insist.  I’m going to update my job description to read “Badass Crone.”  We all agree it is time to go to bed.  The Crone is getting wound up.  “We are each called to step across the threshold of what we already know into a world of challenges in order to measure ourselves differently,” I shout as they stagger towards trees, hammocks, tents.  I go inside. This badass Crone sees no reason to let a perfectly good bed indoors go to waste.

The next day, we set out to explore the land beyond the fire pit.  We make a strange processional—there are four women trudging along in a variety of what each terms “work clothing,” which includes everything from canvas trousers, to yoga pants, and a 1950’s vintage Moo-moo and boots—followed by a small dog and a socially awkward rooster with separation anxiety named “Bertie” who thinks he is a house pet.  The brush closes around us quickly. As we slash our way along the path, we come upon a new threshold.  At this moment, the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping and turning back.  What feels like defeat becomes instead the realization that to continue the way we were going was just going to lead to more poison ivy, a lost rooster, not to mention possible self-inflicted machete wounds.   We pause.   The Crone loves the choice to stop doing what we have been doing, to honor the emerging wisdom that is telling us to turn around, to breathe, and feel the sweat trickling between our skin and clothing choices.  We always have the Choice to stop living in discomfort, to stop doing what we have been doing just because we have been doing it, to overcome our cruelty, which is rooted in dedication to an old idea, and choose a clearer trail.  Lack of comfort is usually a sign that we are on a threshold of new discoveries—or about to have to carry a rooster. (Trail-blazing Soul work is not for the light and fluffy.)

__________

Mere hours/days later, I find myself at yet another threshold: the loss of a dear friend and cohort of the past 28 years.  As I spiral my way through the grief, I see that it is a coiling path with many doorways leading me over old familiar ground as I make my way through a series of memories—most of which make me hold my sides and laugh in tear-streaked howls.   Like the time she and another friend had to go to the local emergency room dressed as Cleopatra and a jungle explorer  (complete with gum boots and coconut bra) after a Halloween party at my former home… Or the time she and I drove to Portland, Maine after midnight, after hosting a house concert, to run a half marathon the next day. We were so late to the race we had to start running from the parking lot to the starting line after the gun had already gone off.  It took us six miles to catch up to a one-legged woman on crutches (who, it goes without saying, was Magnificent).  Or the time we went out to lunch and accidentally threw our car keys away with the picnic wrappings and had to get local officials to come unlock the municipal trash cans. 

What I love best about this dear friend, apart from the fact that she was constantly tidying up and making tea for everyone,  is that she was always getting caught in the act of being herself.  She was Herself, Always—from the time she spent half an hour kicking a car in a public parking lot because her key didn’t work (turns out, it wasn’t her car!), to the time she accidentally brought a group of realtors to what they thought was a broker’s open-house on a sale property but turned out to be a mercy meal after a family’s funeral instead.  (Imagine laying granny to rest and coming home to discover her house crawling with realtors because someone had gotten the address wrong!) She was a source of Light and a profound influence on me through many stages of my life.  Her follies, which delighted us all so much, actually made it ok to be Me, by giving me a window to accept my own.  She was my dear companion through my own journey from maiden to mother to crone.  I miss her more than words could ever say.

Now, her spark has gone out, but not before she ignited other sparks.  So! Who will tidy up and make tea and make us laugh now?  We will. We must.  Whether we be mothers, maidens, or crones, it’s our turn to keep a firm grip on our car keys and Step Up.  Gaps are being made, spaces created so that each of us moves one step forward to take on a new role, a new growing edge, a new part in the pageantry of Life.  Though none of us could ever be like her, what we need most is to be Ourselves—moo-moo dresses, machetes, and all. What each of us is being asked is “Hey, it’s your turn now—Are You Available?”  We don’t exactly know where we are going or what is at the root of this jungle mess of a world we find ourselves inhabiting… nor do we need to have the answers to any other question… Just this: Are you available? Do you have the capacity, energy, capability and willingness to show up where you are needed, where you may be called?  Put down your burdens; they aren’t worth carrying.  Make some tea.  Imagine what shape your love will take next.

Chardin says, “The truth is, indeed, that love is the threshold of another universe.”  (And its portals are DOGS, right, Nora?) Love is how we continue to hold those who have left us.  Love is how we reach for those yet to come. Love is how we dance, Right Here, Right Now by the fires of our dreams.  True Love is our threshold.

I’m off to don a moo-moo and machete.  This is one Badass Crone saying “I love you so much.  Let the mending continue!”

Yours aye,

Nancy

A little Skin

Greetings Dear Ones!

Did you ever notice that when you are shopping for a certain kind of car you start to see that car everywhere? Or when people find out you like antique spinning wheels and treadle sewing machines, suddenly they become the theme of every gift anyone ever gives you?  I had a friend who mentioned she liked roosters and ever after, for years of holiday seasons, she was gifted with ceramic roosters, napkins printed with roosters, wreaths decorated with roosters, lamps made in the shape of roosters… Some would say that this is the Law of attraction at work, while others might say the Universe has a warped sense of humor.  (What else can account for the 1990’s proliferation of garden gnomes?)   And yet, no matter how many times we mention how much we adore gold bullion, winning lottery tickets, or a good working team of oxen, they all seem a bit thin on the ground?  It’s because Abundance sneaks towards us obliquely, where we least expect it, where we Observe Mildly without investing our Longing. 

In any case, to focus on the art of Cherishing better, I have been on a quiet little treasure hunt.   I have taken my eye off the horrors of What I Wish could be Different, and instead, watch from the corner of my eye…  Evidence is mounting that we are doing a better job of being kind to each other than anti-social media might have us believe.   Suddenly, without making too big a deal of it, I am seeing little random act of Kindness everywhere, as proliferous as summer goldenrod in the fields.  These are the things that touched my heart and taught me a bit more about Cherishing this week:

For the past month, a mother has been using my shop in the evenings, borrowing the cutting table and machines after I was gone for the day, to build the most beautiful and unique quilt for her son, who was leaving for college.   She had saved all his old T-shirts—each one commemorating a precious event or era in his life, from concerts to camps, school teams, and the like.  Her boy is now off to his new future, wrapped up in all the love and joy of his past.  On those bewildering days when a young man might come back to his dorm and wonder, amidst all the disorienting changes one is apt to experience away from home, who he is and where he came from—there will be this quilt, a second skin, waiting to ground him like only a loving parent’s hug can do.

A beautiful woman, who is also a very adept home-sewer, came in and gave me more than a dozen lovely summer dresses to hem for her.  “I want my legs to show a tiny bit more skin.  I am not the frump these dresses say I am! And I am outgrowing the thinking that I ought to do everything by myself or for myself,” she said, “Of course, I could do these, but I decided to honor your professional capacities and to honor myself in the process.  It’s taken a long time to realize I am worthy of being served.  Just because I can do something shouldn’t mean I have to.”  I melted.   There was so much power stepping into that statement.  Instinctively, I wanted to offer her a discount because of the volume she was bringing in. She batted it away.  “Do you hear me?” she asked. “I am worthy of full price.  For me to value myself and my time, you must do the same; that’s how this thing works.”  Wow. Good lesson!

A young, somewhat haggard man came in with a pair of torn work pants to mend and his wife’s jacket, which needed a new zipper.  “If you don’t have time to both things this week, would you please do my wife’s jacket first?” he asked plaintively. “It’s her favorite jacket and I hate to see her shivering.”  I glanced from his frayed clothes to the look of tender pity in his eyes and realized I was witnessing a marriage vow with real skin on it. (And yes, it's already time to shiver in the evening in Vermont!)

A gentle, soft-spoken man with velvet eyes came to collect his order and saw a complimentary mask hanging from the hanger.  He offered to buy it but I insisted I give them to all the customers.  “I have been wondering where to get one of these,” he said. “I want to get one for my husband who has to wear a mask all day long and they cut into his face. This looks like it will be so much softer on his skin.”  He was more excited about the fact that he had found a mask for his partner than that his jacket had been mended!

On and on the cherishing lessons came--the woman paying for her daughter’s bridesmaid dress, the inspiring friend setting up a recurring Zoom discussion on the book White Fragility,  a summer music camp imaginatively setting itself up on line to continue to nurture the community, each and every person I see wearing a mask and smiling….

I recently came across a wonderful story, shared by author Terry Hershey, about a little boy having nightmares.  To paraphrase, the little boy kept visiting his mother’s bed all night long and saying he was scared; he did not want to be in his bed alone.  She repeatedly sent him back to bed, telling him he could never be alone, as God was everywhere and always with him.  This failed to comfort him and eventually he returned and said he preferred “someone with skin.”

The story made me smile for so many reasons—not the least of which is the shear RELIEF that I no longer have those broken nights of sleep every parent endures, and those pointless 4 a.m. negotiations with “monsters under the bed.”   My heart goes out to both that boy (whom I remember being) and that mother (whom I also remember being).  This is partly why I used to put my children to bed with a series of prayers, bribes, lullabies, and live animals to keep them company.  (If skin is in short supply, fur will do!)

When I look at the Cherishing moments of this week—the gentle gifts of self I was privileged to witness, they all involve Skin.  I love that a middle-aged mother-of-many loves herself enough to show a glimpse of her knees.  I love that she lets my hands do her work.  I love that a young man has all the T-shirts of his youth, and the imbued love of his mother, still next to his skin, whenever he wants it.  Our tender human skin needs clothing for warmth and protection—like jackets when we shiver, and dresses for celebrations. 

It’s hard, during these Covid times, not to connect in touch, in hugs, in skin with each other.  Most people tell me that hugging is what they miss the most.  Yes, we get to “see” each other, “hear” each other—and stay what is ironically called “in touch” all over the world.  But we miss each other’s skin.

If we think of God as “Love,” yes, Love is everywhere.  Energy is everywhere. Ideas are everywhere.  But it is never anything we can touch, taste, see, feel, hear, or smell until there is skin involved—be it the skin of our hands or by the skin of our teeth.   It seems sacrilegious to think that an exhausted, flawed human near the end of her rope, could be preferable to “God” but to those of us who are frightened and need some comforting, skin makes a big difference. Cherishing is how we put our own skin in the game, no matter what color it is.  I am in awe of the way my fellow humans are doing this in kind little ways all around me.  All I had to do was notice and jump in.  Love has no hands but ours.  Thanks for your Good Work!  Let the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Cherishing School

“Cherish (verb): 1. Protect and care for lovingly; 2. Hold something dear; 3. Keep a hope or ambition in one’s mind.”—Oxford English Dictionary

Greetings Dear Ones!!

Yesterday, I managed to hack and slash my way into the blueberry cathedral and harvest a quart of the tartest, sharpest berries ever to dance on a tongue in purple stilettos.   As I savored the repeated contraction in my salivary glands, I gazed around me, upon the wheat field… the peach orchard… Pickett’s last fence… and decided that this place is like the Battle of Gettysburg all over again.  It’s going to take a bayonet charge to turn the tide of this chaos.  Col. Joshua Chamberlain, where are you now???  The peach trees look a little bombed out already.  Many of them are completely dead. I lie down next to the mower, which I have been dragging backwards through the grass because that is the only way I can move it, and dream of bees.  These trees need bees.  I’m SO looking forward to keeping bees again in the coming Spring.

Keeping bees with my children and attending “bee school” with them at the local community college, was one of the highlights of our homeschooling experience.  My son thought nothing of putting his bare hands into a gently humming miracle of golden, honey-scented, Happenings as we pulled out frames to study our colonies.  We saw new bees chewing their way through the wax caps of their cells; we saw the queen being fed and groomed; we saw endless running about and hurrying in the honey factory. It was magical.

Once, we had a colony go rogue and become nasty.  Apparently, they were going through queens like Henry the VIII. Angry sentries would fly out and sting anyone who came near the entrance of their hive—they especially targeted unfortunate husbands who did not feel the same way about beekeeping as we did.  When he had been run off his own property more than seven times and had ruined a variety of cell-phones in the process of abruptly consigning himself to the nearest swimming pool to escape, I was given an ultimatum.  Something needed to be done or the hive had to be destroyed.   I called a local Stinging Insect Guru. (Hey, Kids!  There’s a job you might not hear about at the college employment fairs!)

This guru listened to my story and told me exactly what to do.  There was just one problem.  I didn’t want to do it. I was now terrified of this hive.  I didn’t want to go anywhere near it.  I confessed this to him and, I am ashamed to admit, I even asked if I could just pay him to take care of this for me? That’s when he hit the roof and began to speak to me in a manner that sounded (to me) a lot like yelling, though he later insisted he never yells.   “People like you make me crazy,” he said with way more force than necessary, “I don’t mind getting calls from people who need help, little old ladies and people who have infestations they never asked for but YOU are responsible for this and you’re just scared and that is NOT the same thing at all!!!  I have no respect for you. Put your big girl pants on right now and ask yourself if you are a bee KEEPER or a bee have-er.  Then suit up, get out there, and DO WHAT MUST BE DONE.”

I hung up and cried.  His fury startled me.  He was AWFUL.  He was RUDE. He was MEAN… but worst of all, he was RIGHT.  So I had a big, snotty, sorry-for-myself sob session, then I put my big girl pants on and went out and did what needed to be done.  I waited until the more aggressive field bees had left for the day, then I blew more smoke into those hives than a freshman dorm sees after Parent’s Weekend, draped damp towels full of sugar water over the boxes as I dismantled the hive, then put the boxes of brood onto my other hives with layers of newspaper in between the boxes.  By the time the bees chewed through the paper to get to the foreign bees, whom they intended to fight, they had already acquired the scent of the new queen and calmed down.  All the colonies thrived after that.   With healthy queens in place, Peace was restored to the kingdoms.  

The Stinging Guru was right; that bastard was a fantastic teacher and I am grateful for the lesson to this day.  There IS a difference between merely “having” something, in name only, and cherishing it to the point that one is willing to do hard things in its service.  

I think about this with regard to my new customers.  I don’t want to “have” customers—I want to “keep” them. Cherish them.  I have decided to enroll everyone I encounter in my own private Cherishing School—so that after they graduate from having their clothes hemmed or mended, they will leave feeling seen, heard, cared for, and helped in whatever way is best for them, to the best of my ability.   Prudence is excited about Cherishing School.  She wants to be the new Head Mistress and give everyone punishments to write.  She is ready to Scold.  I tell her that yelling really only works on the Desperate, Honest, or truly Courageous—those able to face the truth of their consequences honorably, which is pretty much only down and out addicts and housewives with rogue bee colonies chasing their husbands into swimming pools—people  at rock bottom.  For everyone else, it’s going to have to be something more subtly persuasive—like true Gentility. 

A customer comments to me that the current political climate is getting so fraught “I can’t stand up for my own beliefs without being made to feel stupid by the opposition.  Anything I say gets an argument.”

“And do you listen to their arguments?” I ask.

“Hell no,” she says dismissively. “They are NUTS.  Why would I do that? But I’m sick of the yelling so I just shut up.”

“Instead of listening?”

“Yes.”

Hmm…. What I notice from my little corner of the workshop is that in every interaction with our fellow beings on this planet, we are showing each other in our behavior, attitude, and expectations what we have previously learned about Kindness.  We reveal how we have been treated by how we expect to be treated. Most of us don’t expect to be cherished.  It’s time we teach each other that lesson.  So, how do we begin? Well, how do children learn to speak a language? By being spoken to in that language.   They learn music because their parents sing to them and dance with them.  They learn kindness because others have displayed kindness to them in ways that are meaningful to them.   

This week, I had another fun customer.  He wore a mask, but that’s as far as he went in obeying my protocols.  I could not keep him in the dressing room.  It was like trying to keep weasels in a milk crate. He kept slipping past me, insisting he did not need to try anything on, as most of the stuff was his wife’s. Instead, he pushed his way through to the work table and spread out all his garments so he could show me how to do my job.  I don’t want to tell you too many details about him because I don’t want you to judge him… (Oops, now I’ve judged YOU.  Sorry!) But let’s just say he was from a nearby city and state rather known for “pushiness,” not to mention blatant support of the WRONG baseball team. (Bless their hearts!)  He wanted everything done yesterday but “by five p.m.” was a reasonable compromise.  He and his wife were going on vacation the next day and needed the stuff immediately if possible—or two weeks after they returned and had re-quarantined themselves.   Then he asked if I could meet him at the local food co-op to save him a return trip to my shop and up all those stairs.  He had other errands to run.

I could not stop laughing.  He was so fantastic—like a character out of a storybook who is sent to test the wizard.  Granted, I had enjoyed our exchange about as much as discovering I had finally smacked a pesky mosquito only to realize it had fallen into my own water glass… Still, after I got done sterilizing every surface of my shop and washing my hands, what impressed me most was his Innocence.  His inner radio channel was set to a fairly primitive dial and that was all he could hear, but that was not his fault.  Nothing had ever happened to wake him up or make him understand he could change his dial.  Yelling would never do it—he was too used to yelling. He tuned it out.  I decided that if ever there was a candidate for Cherishing School, it’s him.  Clearly, he is the way he is because he has a Cherish Deficit.  The easiest people to cherish are usually cherished by lots of people and therefore are not as closed off and brusquely defensive as this guy.  (Of course, the Easiest of All are those who have learned to truly cherish themselves…but that goes without saying.)      

I met him five hours later at the co-op with everything neatly done, on hangers, in a bag, with complimentary face masks holding the hangers together at the top.   He stared. His eyes welled a little.  “You people in Vermont are so nice.  Sometimes I can’t believe it,” he said, “I love it here.” He paused and surveyed the heat waves rising in the parking lot with far-away eyes.  “It’s different.”

I melted too.  It certainly is.

It’s a privilege to be kind. I’m lucky to be the amused/bemused witness of how people respond to kindness.   I try not to dwell on the implicit sadness around the fact that there exist people who are shocked by generosity, good will, attentive service.  Some of you reading this might actually be judging me for being too sweet to a customer who will now expect big things of me all the time—I might be creating a rod for my own back by spoiling people.   I don’t care.  We need more kindness in this world.  Especially when it is unexpected, lavish, and surprising.   And anyway, I’m NOT that sweet.  I’m actually a slightly rotten person, doing nice things just to see what happens next and getting caught in my own experiments.    I’m curious.  Are you?

Welcome to Cherishing School, My Darlings!   It’s a new research facility dedicated to exploring what happens when we suppress the urge to give each other the finger and instead give each other a hand.

May the mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

The Land of Lost Plots

“Manual labor to my father was not only good and decent for its own sake but, as he was given to saying, it straightened out one’s thoughts” Mary Ellen Chase

Greetings Dear Ones!

I woke up this morning in “The Land of Lost Plots” to find several trees down, including a towering cherry tree that had a long low bough out to one side that I had already picked out as the perfect site for an old fashioned rope swing.  I was going to make the wooden seat wide enough for two, like a courting swing, with nearby hammocks for arboreal-minded guests.  There was going to be fresh-squeezed sugarless lemonade and everything… But now, there’s going to be a hella lotta prime cherry firewood instead.  Life isn’t giving me lemons or lemonade—it’s giving me cord wood.  And I’m grateful!! Lemons won’t keep me as warm in winter as cordwood, and winter lasts about eleven months a year around here…

Yesterday, one of the strongest, most enthusiastic Hermit Hurricanes came to visit with his weed-whacker and managed to hack a swath of land around three sides of the house, until he ran out of string and the remnants of Hurricane Isaias overtook him and started to prune the trees.  Both have cleared a bit of breathing room around the house, which is looking a little less like a forgotten cottage in a fairytale and more like someone who just decided to shave after ten years and forgot how.  It’s Rough.  Last week, I took my little push mower, set it at the highest setting and gamely plowed a path to the barn.  It was ninety degrees out and I mowed until we both ran out of gas.  In the process, I ran over a lost boot—a really sturdy, size 10, steel-toed work boot someone had left in the meadow.   This land is full of overgrown garden plots, mysteries and surprises.   Taking a brush mower around here will be like sailing into an unknown harbor and having no idea where the rocks are.  Who knows what sunken traps or treasures lie beneath these waves of grass?

I can see lilies, peonies, and phlox struggling to avoid strangulation by rogue bittersweet and marauding wild grape.  They are putting up a diminishing fight as they bow backwards into the engulfing green.  There is a bramble hedge only a Knight in armor could sunder with swords to reach the sleeping blueberries locked within the walls of their keep, over which sagging rafters, grey as driftwood, signal a missing roof once upon a long ago… It’s like an ancient blueberry cathedral in ruins.

Decades ago, this place was dearly loved and cultivated by an endlessly energetic Gardener.  I can read her love in the still-thriving patches and plots of raspberries, grape, blackberry, and fern.  I know her name was Nell and I know she sewed (her antique treadle machine is still in the attic) and she kept sheep and spun their wool.  She was into photography, chickens, beekeeping, and Feeding Others.  I feel her welcome and her presence as I now take up the work she left behind.  

She was happy here.  I am too. I wander the mini orchards of apples, peaches, pears.   Small fruits cling to the branches—it’s just about harvest time for some of the peaches but they are tiny, Unencouraged.  Everything needs pruning, clearing, amending.   The land, like my own Spirit, feels simultaneously abundant and ravaged, full of Possibilities and in need of Enforced Tenderness.  Who doesn’t feel like this these days?

As always, my mind turns to how my exterior world is so often a metaphor for the interior landscape of one’s thoughts.  (I am quite certain there ARE random, abandoned, size 10 boots all over the place up there! Prudence trips over them and tuts in disgust. )  This property is crying out for Good Boundaries, weeding, prioritizing, and  Sensible Efforting to make the dream come true.  It’s a Big Dream.  I love working (I tell myself I have just bought myself an outdoor gym) but I feel a little overwhelmed—like if I pause and gawk too long, the weeds will snag me, drag me under, and eat me too.  (Was that the grizzly fate of the mystery boot wearer?) I keep wading through grass, like it is water in a bay at low tide, searching for a life jacket to rescue my hopes.

And THERE it is, on a scrawny peach tree, sagging apologetically into the wind. There, on the end, on the tiniest branch, clings a clump of yellow velvet the size of an egg.  There is the flesh and seed of New Life. There is the future… It comes at the weakest part, the smallest, most hopeful growing edge, not the strong trunk.   The sweetness is located at the most vulnerable part of the tree—the newest and bravest part—the part where the tree is Reaching.   This thought is like a boot I have just hit with my mower.

Trees need a few years before they fruit.  They need good soil and strong roots.  They need to endure a winter or two.  They need to Establish themselves and claim their space.  And ever, no matter how thinly, they need to keep reaching.  So it is for us Spirit Farmers too.  

I think about the sewing shop and how starting a business is very much like growing a tree or re-creating a homestead on land that has gone feral.   It is true for growing the Life of our dreams as well.  There is something to be said for the patience it takes for things to bear fruit and that a harvest is not only about picking the peaches and apples in front of us, but tending them all year long, before the buds even turn the trees to bee-bridesmaids in Spring. There is water that needs to be hauled, manure that needs to be valued, collected, spread as mulch.  The soil needs to be fed before we can be.   

For musicians, this means doing all our drills, all our daily practice, all our twenty or ten thousand hours that we plan to commit to whatever level of amazingness we are willing to risk being.  For cooks, this means waiting for the flavors to meld, holding back on the spices, then going for it when needed, always stirring and watching, “listening with the nose.”

There is no end to the Process.  There IS NO END to the work.  We must live within one day only, like addicts, content with all we cannot do, finding peace where we are.   We need the balance of strong roots and a sinewy, muscular core that holds up in hurricanes.   And we need to reach, to risk, to hope.  At the tips of our outstretched fingertips—that is where the fruits of all our laboring will be.

A recent customer says to me “I love sewing. I actually sew a lot but this bridesmaid gown and getting something to fit myself while I’m in it is a bit beyond my scope, that’s why I have to come to you.  I’m glad you’re here.  I know I could never sew for other people—it’s too scary.”  She is acknowledging my bravery.  She’s right.  I acknowledge it too.  I have spent years “Reaching” for these skills, learning from failures, enduring winters of “no harvest,” for this Sweet Moment when I can offer this beautiful young woman the fruits of my labors.   It’s a Glorious Sweetness indeed.  There are few things sweeter than knowing you have what it takes to help someone.

I know of many people, especially recent graduates, who feel so stalled by the disasters occurring in our world right now.   Jobless, Rudderless, they feel stuck, depressed, Unencouraged, Overwhelmed.  I get it.  I feel that way too… A LOT.  2020 feels like the Year of Lost Plots for all of us. May it also be the year of Surprise Fruits! All I can say is Stay Vulnerable. Life is about seeking our edges.  Keep Reaching! My Darlings, keep reaching like it’s a Yoga Class where you have supreme confidence in your leotard and you haven’t overdone it on the beans for lunch.  Go to the edge where you can grow the most and see what happens next.   Who knows who you may one day feed.  It might even be you.  Let the Mending Continue!!

With so much love for your Good Work,

Yours Aye,

Nancy

Painful Clarity

“Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.” –Ovid

Greetings Dear Ones!

One of the most savage and shocking injuries a seamster can sustain, apart from the obvious yet PURELY HYPOTHETCAL ones that spring to mind—like dropping an iron on one’s toe, sitting on the wrong side of a pin cushion,  or accidentally ironing your own boob (if it’s a hot night and one is doing last-minute, late-night ironing naked and the ironing board is set too high and/or the boobs are set too low)(NONE of which EVER happens…) is to have a chunk of his/her/their/my/our finger ripped off without warning as it gets caught under the buzzing needle.  It’s as sudden as a wasp sting and mutely stunning as a mousetrap.   It’s only happened to me a few times in my life and each time it occurs, I am amazed at how swiftly my body is able to short-circuit rational thought and decide instead to do exactly the Wrong Thing—namely, pull the punctured finger back hard, with all my force, while the needle is still in it.  If we could only pause, breathe, take the foot off the pedal (before I have stitched myself up to the wrist), calmly wind the needle to the upright position so I can dislodge the needle, not the flesh, I would only sustain the mildest of puncture wounds.  But No.  Lizard brain, which seems to think we can just systematically re-grow any body part that happens to get ripped off in a panic, has taken over and the results are very messy indeed.  

A friend of mine recently confessed that this had just happened to her for the first time.   As soon as she began telling me the story, my own finger began to ache with digital PTSD.  I could literally feel her story as she told it—the sharp bite, the pull, the sudden regret followed by shock and throb...  My body is really keeping the score on this one!  There is a white sliver of scar tissue through this finger that will store the memory forever.  More significant than my friend’s pain was her incredulity that such injuries can happen.   “Who knew?” she said, “I’ve been sewing for so many years!  I had no idea this could happen. I’ve never been afraid to sew!”

“It usually happens when we are really tired or really distracted,” I say, offering no help at all to no one what-so-ever.  She nods kindly anyway.

“I have a new rule: No sewing after 1:am.”

“Pain’s a great teacher, isn’t it?” I ask.   She nods wryly.  “How swiftly we regain all of our clarity and focus after such a zap!”

All I can say is that I am grateful to be a seamster and not someone who handles large saws on a daily basis! Our best tools can be very dangerous indeed.   We seize their power at our peril.  Pain reminds us to Pay Attention.

Pain, swift and shocking, is often the thing that plunges us from unfocused complacency to the momentary terrors of survival.  Hopefully, we wind up in the Center, with our dial reset at the Focused-Respect-with-a-dash-of-Gratitude that is Mindfulness.  This is how it is with those of us who work with sharp things that can bite us without warning.   We cannot be too afraid of our tools to use them, yet we must respect them!  It is the circular and recurring dance of the craftsperson—from Masterful to Humble, Radiant to Grateful, with the Innocence and Wisdom of a Fool.

I am a great respecter of pain.  In my deepening old age, I have learned to see it as the friend and teacher who bestows Clarity.  I am grateful for the ways it shows me the appropriate margins of my Free Will, scorched boobs and all.  I believe that Life is absolutely perfect and miraculous.  I look down at the deep pink scars leaving their trail of acid heat and pain across my torso as the shingles gradually heal and marvel that my body, which has learned how to get sick, also knows how to heal itself so wonderfully. 

I welcome these symptoms as a Gift (not a favorite gift, of course--more like that blue, port-a-potty-scented candle one gets in the neighborhood holiday swap).  They are the reminder I needed that I was too stressed out, stretched too thin, ignoring vital needs.   I thought, as I sometimes do, that I could manage the Unmanageable.  I forgot.  I needed to get “bitten,” as by a sewing machine, or Shingles, to wake up and remember.   I truly believe that everything that happens to me is for my Highest Blossoming and expansion—or at the very least so that I can stumble past the pile of boxes littering my new home, temporarily dubbed “The Land of Lost Plots,” and lie on the floor and rest.  Sometimes we all need to slap a post-it note saying “Out of Service: Closed for Maintenance” on our foreheads and call it a day.  This is NOT procrastination.  Procrastination is about unhealthy “baggage” and deep Resistance.   These are healthy boxes.  And they can wait.  I must rest.

REST is about faith that we are safely where we are supposed to be and there will be plenty of time and energy to do what must be done.   My physical condition is serving me and helping me bring love and attention to the parts of myself that I have neglected.  I don’t get to decide exactly what happens, but I do get to decide how I accept it—whether I shave my head and move to Bora Bora, or decide to wait it out on the couch, sipping lemonade and reading a book I’ve been dying to read.  Ailments are accelerated opportunities to stop judging ourselves and take care of ourselves instead.  They give others the chance to care for us.  They give us opportunities to Receive.  I am so grateful for the care I have received—the works of mercy from my loved ones to feed me and help me do all my chores. 

When I was young and suffering, I was told crisply to “offer it up for the souls in purgatory,” the idea being that the pains we encounter and endure in our mortal flesh are a chance to win glory for others; by uniting our suffering to Love, we participate in Salvation.  Being possessed of enough Imagination to qualify as a character in “Anne of Green Gables,” my young self could only picture what looked like a train station with numbers rolling and flashing up high on a wall, while crowds of anxious, disheveled souls looked at the lottery tickets in their hands and scanned for a match.  “I just need one pious, decent kid to get a splinter in his knuckle and I’m IN!” croaks a bag lady at the front hopefully.  “Not me,” sighs a dejected man, “It’s going to take  a crabby, middle-aged woman six month’s worth of fibromyalgia and all the blind fury of getting locked out of the IRS website four days in a row for not remembering her username and password to get me past those pearly gates…” And so they languish, in the eternal train station, waiting for the Living here below to step on a stray leggo in the dark and “offer it up”….

Our connection to our own pain is a connection to others. Any act of love we bring to this aching world brings Light.  We do not use pain to forget who we are, but to wake up and Remember. I see the news and I think—I/we did not come here to be a person of power, privilege, or prestige.  I/we came to be people who Love.  

This pandemic is hitting us all very hard.  There is not a soul who isn’t suffering in some way—small or large—physically, financially, emotionally.   It’s like our country has become not a melting pot, but a mending basket of so many things that need healing and fixing.  I know it feels overwhelming.   We are facing some huge tears in the fabric of society as we once knew it.   However, we can learn from our pains, individually and collectively, and we CAN “offer up” some of our discomfort (like the wearing of a mask) for the saving of another, even if we don’t know who it might be.   We have untold opportunities, like never before, to do some real Good and make some positive changes around how we value our lives. We can start with the littlest things and go from there, learning as we go.  And it’s ok to rest!  Thank you so much for your Good Work.

Let the Mending continue!

Yours aye,

Nancy

Not My Food

“I do NOT eat cheese unless seriously provoked!” –Ava Montesi

Greetings Dear Ones!

I have been obsessing about food lately.  For one thing, I was originally scheduled to be in Florida last week, cooking for 100 hungry fiddlers and cellists attending the Mike Block String Camp.  I was excited about taking my spice tote, knives, and pots on a plane and finding out how we would all fare.  As fate had it instead, I spent the weekend moving into my dream home and surviving on Cheerios and Gatorade.

As far as the move goes, this is the story I want to tell: “Once upon a time, a gentle woman decided to move all of her belongings from one location (storage) to another (farm in VT).  Everything went smoothly. Nothing got broken, not even blood vessels.  The movers showed up and were so helpful. It was so relaxing.  She knew where her keys were at all times.  There was no Nor’ Easter hosing them like a fire hose as they unloaded in the dark—wait, it wasn’t dark!  It happened all within the sunniest hours of the day. But no one got sunburned!” (Can’t you just hear the Disney orchestra swelling in the background, as little birds chirp sweetly, and the narrator—who has one of those Epcot 1960’s advertising voices—relays the information confidently and soothingly… ) “Her children never had to deal with a crabby, tactless, third-shift mom who snapped at them ‘please for the love of all that is holy, stop asking me why I kept [this thing] and just move it over there!’  There was never any bickering and all bladders and stomachs were magically synchronized….”

But no… That is not the story. 

The REAL story is that my four children, two of whom I gave birth to, two of whom are mine in spirit, worked like sled-dogs for fourteen hours at a time.  For a woman who sees love as Service, I could not have felt more loved as they bent their backs again and again to haul the endless loads.  They never complained; they never quit.   Together, since the movers never showed, we learned how to pack a truck and we did a darn good job. The piano arrived not only intact but mostly in tune.  Only my desk has to be glued back together.

Feeding everyone during a move is very challenging.  A dear friend was waiting at the house with a wonderful spread for us as soon as we got there.  She had beautiful bread and a generous variety of vegan fixings for sandwiches.  One young woman, made a plate of just the fixin’s and explained that bread is just “not her food.” I was curious. “You mean like you are gluten intolerant?” I asked.  “No,” she said, “It’s just not something I eat.  Like dogs don’t eat cat food—that kind of thing.  Of course dogs most certainly enjoy eating cat food, but it’s not as healthy for them as dog food.” I nodded.  “And sheep will happily gorge themselves on chicken feed but it will kill them if they bloat.” 

As happens when I hear a new idea, I expanded it as far as it would go.  I looked at the boxes stacked around the rooms and thought of Marie Kondo and the spark of joy my possessions were supposed to give me.  I must admit, the spark was damp. I looked at a couch and thought “You… are not my food.  You do not feed my spirit. You will have to go…”

As I go through the boxes, one by one, and dust off memories—I ask “are you my food?  Are you giving me heartburn?”  It’s very useful. 

The notion of what “feeds” us even carries over into the shop when I go to work on Monday.  A woman brings in some summer dresses to be altered.  “I just love this one,” she says wistfully.  I’ve worn it until it’s tired.  It’s so old but it’s so comfortable. Then I bought this new one and it’s just not right.”  She gazes unhappily at herself in the mirror.

“Madam,” I say, “This dress is not your food!” She looks startled.  “I mean, it’s not nourishing your spirit and making you glow with health and strength.” Understanding dawns and she agrees.  She tries to say this is her fault, that she has changed shape due to the stress of the pandemic.  I wave that aside.

“Let’s hear none of that!” I say crisply.  “Clothing needs to feed us, not swallow us whole and make us disappear. You are you and this dress needs to fit you not the other way around.”

“How would it be if I brought in a dress I love that fits just right and had you copy it?  Could you do that?”

“Yes.  Yes, I can,” I told her.   It makes me think back to a time in the other shop when we had to make six denim dirndls for a woman who lived on a Christmas tree farm.  Denim dirndls were clearly her food.

“I don’t know where I bought this dress and I they don’t seem to make them now but I would rather choose my own fabrics and pay someone local anyway.”  Something in her brow softens.  She pauses and considers me very kindly.  “I’m so tired of picking through what’s out there and feeling like those are my only choices.” 

I nod.  We are going through so many shifts right now, it’s hard to consider yet one more, but I do believe (and dearly hope!) that we are going to come to our senses and stop destroying our planet with disposable “fast” fashion (like “fast food”) that is not even nourishing to our creative spirits.  We want, and deserve, better quality that is more sustainable—even if we have to pay more for it.  The right dress will make us feel like we just ate something healthy—not like we need to dive headfirst into the nearest box of Swiss Cake Rolls to numb the pain.  I feel stronger, braver, and more satisfied when I wear things that are “my food.” The right shirt can be a long-time cherished companion if made well, of durable material.  We want things that can sustain us for the long haul.

On my way home, I stop at a friend’s house for a socially distant visit in her lovely garden.   Excitedly, I inform her that I am going through a phase of seeing the whole world as “food” that nourishes our spirits (or doesn’t.)  She understands immediately.   We talk about ourselves as if we too are “food.” We start talking about relationships and heartbreaks we have endured in the course of our lives.  We talk of our children and our hopes for them.  We talk about ourselves and about how, as matriarchs-in-training, we often feel obliged to “feed” everyone else first.  We forget to feed ourselves.  We feel hurt when what we have to offer others is “not enough” or “too much.”

I wish someone had told me when I was younger, that I am a perfectly delightful batch of brussel sprouts but that not everyone likes brussel sprouts and that’s OK.   It would have eased the sting of rejection in ways I could understand.   I wouldn’t have spent so much wasted time and energy trying to turn myself into a cheeseburger. There is absolutely nothing “wrong” with brussel  sprouts.  Some people (like myself)  Adore them (“especially roasted with olive oil, salt, and garlic!” says my inner chef, beginning to drool into the keyboard), others call them “fart bombs” and would rather move pianos on a daily basis than eat one.  The beautiful thing about Life is that it is a smorgasboard of opportunities and choices.   My favorite movie character, “Auntie Mame” says “Live, Live, Live!  Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Sadly, once in a while, we meet someone dazzling, someone fantastic, who offers us the most delicious crumbs we have ever tasted.  We hunger for more crumbs.  It takes a while, given the nature of intermittent reinforcement and the addiction it creates, to realize we are never going to get more than crumbs from this individual.  A big piece of the pie is never going to be ours.  That’s when we need to walk away and say “Sorry, but crumbs are not my food.”

We are not here to weaken and starve. Life is our Feast!  We each get to make the choices that are right for us.  Just think, if all our possessions, our clothing, our relationships and our own prayers and practices are nourishing us and making us stronger than we have ever been before—what shall we do with all that Strength?  What then? Who would we love better? What would we change?  Just think of all we could Mend!  As a society of caring, daring, loving souls, we could create the kind of Buffet where everyone gets fed.  

Let the mending continue!  I love you so much.

Yours aye,

Nancy

A new house with Shingles!

“What I need…is a strong drink and a peer group”—Douglas Adams

Greetings Dear Ones!

Sometimes I tell you very personal tales so you will see how Glamorous and Sexy the secret life of a seamstress is. Sometimes it’s so that you can hug yourself and thank your lucky stars your job does not require you to stab your thumbs repeatedly with seam rippers on a daily basis.  Sometimes I just want to give those of us dedicated to living our lives as a warning to others the sense that we are not alone.

I am writing to you from beneath an oak tree in the shade of Hermit Hollow where I have been lying down, doing seamstress—ok, maybe just stress, yoga.  It feels good to skip a day at the shop and lie here, watching the blue fall upward into blue between the leaves above me.

This week, my body, always looking for new and exciting ways to redecorate itself, temporarily gave up its struggle to grow a luxuriant mustache and decided to erupt in shingles instead.  My torso looks like a third-grader’s rendition of a coral reef.  Luckily (and true to form), we did only a half-ass job so only half of me is covered in angry bubble wrap.  The little beings in charge of such things must have gotten distracted when the hornet stung me in the sheep shed (actually, it stung me in the leg) and decided it would be more fun to inflate my thigh to twice its normal size and set up a cellulitis.  About 48 hours later, someone turned the central heating up way too high and left it there so I got a chance to go to the local ER and find out if the fever was from a. shingles, b. because my leg was infected, c. Covid-19.  It was a pleasant enough visit. I enjoyed sitting in the air-conditioned waiting area with a clipboard, taking the little quiz I knew most of the answers to: i.e. Name? Date of birth? Address? Drug sensitivities? Insurance? What brings you here today? (just how existential is it ok to get on these questionnaires?) Only a few questions stumped me.  I was given medicine that might make me dizzy and sent back to the Hollow to recline beneath this oak tree for three to five weeks until my symptoms dissipate.

Only I can’t:

Tomorrow, I close on the purchase of a new home!  This could have a tiny something to do with the stress I am feeling.  (Or maybe it’s just from watching too many White House press briefings...)  The new house is a dream blend of Anne of Green Gables, Charlotte’s Web, Little House on the Prairie and Faerie land, all covered over with six years’ worth of weeds and neglect.  A Project!  Who knows, when we get out our swords and hack back all that bittersweet, we might find a sleeping Beauty! (“You’re more likely to discover rabbit drug dens and weasel crime scenes worthy of Redwall,” says a cynical young hermit.) Fearing I might be too feverish or dizzy to drive, our Noble Elder Hermit offers to drive me to today’s final walk-through. On the way home, a storm blows up and a dead tree slams down on the front end of his car, more than likely totaling it.  We smell the broken gas line through the airconditioning vents.

Now, I am busy counting “things.”  My Irish granny taught me that bad luck comes in threes.  Are we done? Shingles, a wasp sting, a crushed car—that’s three, right? Do the three belong to me alone or is it collective?  Is he on his first?  Is there a time limit? What about my shoulder? Do we “count” that? If so, I’ve had my “three.” Can we chalk the write-off of the car to a simple, singular “no good deed goes unpunished?”and spare him two more ghastly events like having mice poop in the cutlery drawer, or a Jack Russell write his name on the couch? (Which, technically aren’t accidents, as there is clearly malice aforethought…)   And what of the youngest hermit’s recent 8-hour bout of food poisoning from eating vegan hot dogs left in the back of the fridge for too long?  How does that figure into the calculations?  (We should have known those hotdogs were going off when they caused me to break wind so loudly that the sheep thought I was calling to them through an open window and they all paused their grazing to answer back…)

My father says, “Stop counting your troubles; count your blessings.”  He’s right. Gratitude is the Attitude to have.  We are SO lucky not to be dead.  Seeing a twelve-inch-diameter tree trunk bouncing off the hood of the car, then sailing over the moon roof was the kind of event that makes one want to spend more time playing the harp, knitting, or doing hand-worked buttonholes and less time grumbling about the news.  The fever and shingles are a Blessing--I’m delighted with an excuse to wallow in oatmeal baths and read until the water goes cold.   Secretly, I love feeling crummy because I get to do things that make me feel so much better.  I LOVE lying under this tree and listening to LIFE in every size and shape pulsing, singing, chirping, tweeting, hissing, and buzzing. I’m thrilled to be HERE NOW. I hope you are too.

2020 is being pretty rough on a lot of us.  It’s Ok.  We need stuff like this to see how strong we are, how much fun we can have despite the circumstances, and to remember what is truly important to us.  Every time something seems to be going wrong (like finding out my health insurance was actually tangled up with another woman named Nancy Bell, who is ninety-six and lives in Burlington)  I slap my palms together, laugh, and say “YESSSS… Bring it!” If this isn’t for my Highest Good, it makes a damn good story.  When you adore absurdities as much as I do, all of Life becomes a festival. Bad luck may come in threes but blessings are unlimited.

So! Let us be merry!  And let the Mending continue…

Yours aye, with love & laughter,

Nancy  

P.S. Suddenly, a thought occurs to me. Another “thing.”  I just realized that after the walk-through, the listing agent gave me the automatic garage door opener so that I could use it to get into the house tomorrow.  The keys will be in the kitchen.  That garage door opener just got towed away with the car…. Sara June’s words come to mind: “Curiosity is the way in. It is difficult to be curious and also have a plan.” Curiosity will definitely be the way in, as having “plans” seems like a waste of time today!

Loosening Up

“It is always better to be slightly underdressed.”—Coco Chanel

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s HOT here at Hermit Hollow.  In this damp heat, with menopausal hot-flashes strong enough to power the turbine of a small river boat up the Mississippi, I lose my starch faster than a young man’s collar at the prom. I live this far north for a reason!  (As locals say, “If summer comes on the weekend, we usually have a picnic.”)(Thanks, Mac!)  I am slumped on the couch wearing stale running clothes that have been worn running, then into the local river to cool off, then running again, then left out in the rain over night.   It’s like when I was ten years old and lived an entire summer in the same swimsuit until it basically rotted off my body by the time school started in September.  Languidly, I ask a fellow hermit what a good blog topic might be for the week—since my brain has melted, along with the cheese that was left out on the counter since lunchtime.    She pauses, carefully considers my recumbent form—draped in all its vanity and glamour—makes a gesture towards my “ensemble” and asks “how did this come to be considered “clothing?”

“You mean my In-active wear?”

She snorts.  “Yes.”  Apart from the occasional plod or swim, this “outfit” is mostly worn for languishing in oppressive heat and humidity.    I begin to wonder—is it Sportswear if I play no sports? Active wear if I am inactive? Athleisure—for those masquerading as athletic while we build the muscles of a couch potato? (My couch potato is Baked.)  As far as I know, this “clothing” did not exist when I was a child—though George Washington was photographed trying to ford that river in skin-tight trousers that very much resemble something Lululemon might charge a lycra-clad arm and a leg for…   

With the effort it might take others to lift bowling balls, my fingers begin their laborious hike of the keyboard in search of answers.  My fashion history books are all in the shop, which seems a million miles too far away for a car whose air-conditioner is malfunctioning. 

Apparently, this “fashion” has only been around for about twenty-seven years.  Lorna Jane Clarkson is credited with making these human sausage skins and calling them “Active Wear” (most of the “activity” being getting them on).  The fabric itself has been around since 1958, when a scientist from DuPont named Joseph Shivers invented better clothing through chemistry with the introduction of Spandex fibers, which were then manufactured into Lycra cloth.

Then Yoga became trendy.  Once the physical, mental, and spiritual discipline of fifth-century Hindu elite aesthetes, yoga is now responsible for fashions one finds everywhere from supermarkets to boardrooms. Occasionally, we even wear it to lie down on mats, breathe ponderously, and lift seriously heavy things like our own arms and legs, to enhance our physical and emotional well-being.  

I do a modified version I like to call “Seamstress Yoga,” which involves only one pose:  I lie flat on the floor and think about all the work I am not getting done.  I wait there until I a. fall asleep, b. smell something burning, c. hear someone yelling, barking, or baah-ing.  It’s very strenuous.  Oh sure, my aim is to participate in a “theistic philosophy teaching the suppression of all activity of body, mind, and will in order that my Self may realize its distinction from them and attain liberation.” (Merriam Webster)  But instead of attaining liberation, I pretty much lie there and mentally cook, write, or sew and listen to Prudence fretting about the To-do list before I get up, grab the scissors, and start running.  (Yoga makes me extremely productive!) As soon as I master it, I will proclaim myself a Guru, involve some my cuter farm animals, and charge big bucks for it as a side hustle to subsidize my cloth addiction.

This week, as I was lying on the floor “practicing,” I spotted some cloth peeking out of a tub under my cutting table. Suddenly, I couldn’t stop thinking about making a pair of pajama bottoms out of that India Print cotton.  They were quick and easy so I whipped them up while I was simultaneously on a phone call with a car insurance salesman, hitting “mute” when I had to run the serger.  (The insurance guy never suspected a thing.) They might come in useful if I ever decide to cut myself out of these running pants!  

Wouldn’t you know it? Pajamas are the ultimate and original in leisure wear? Pajama pants in block print India cotton are straight out of the seventeenth century.  “How many times do I have to tell you,” carps Prudence, “that there is truly nothing new under the sun? Read your history people! Yoga pants and jogging bottoms (ugh, what a name!) are nothing more than medieval hose in less sea-worthy fabric.  And Pajama bottoms are, well, PAJAMAS.”

Pajamas, it turns out, have been around since the Ottoman Empire.  The name comes from Hindi and means “leg clothing”—“pae jama.” Nicknamed PJ’s, pajamas were traditionally loose drawers or trousers tied at the waist with a drawstring or cord, and they were worn by both sexes in India, Iran, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, usually with a loose, belted tunic on top.  Though the name is Hindi, such a style of dress is known all throughout the Middle and Far East. As early as the seventeenth century, European sailors, traders, and merchants were bringing back pajamas and using them as exotic loungewear to signify wealth, status, and worldly knowledge. (And some people think Oprah started all that!) 

They weren’t really known in the west as sleepwear until the 1870’s, when British colonials introduced them as an alternative to nightshirts.  Before then, everyone—men and women alike, slept in some version of a night gown—either a shift or a long shirt.  Like myself, people then weren’t in the habit of changing their clothes that often during a plague.  They wore the same under garments next to their skin for many days, even weeks.  (Prudence shudders, rolls her eyes, and wonders how the species survives…)When they woke up in the morning, they just added layers and posies of dried herbs to cut the um, “fragrance.”

In the West, Pajamas, though used by all genders in the Middle and Far East, were only worn by men until the 1920’s, when Coco Channel stunned the world with her “Beach Pajamas.” One languorous stroll along the water at the Riviera resort town of Juan-les-Pins, and suddenly, fashionable ladies donned beach pajamas all along the world’s most stylish coast.  Formerly, they were accustomed to wearing woolen swimsuits that buttoned at the neck and wrists. The swishy palazzo-like pants and bare-backed jumpsuit styles shocked the public in the interwar years. What made these so scandalous was that women were appropriating “male” sleepwear and wearing it in public! (Prudence still thinks pajamas should NOT be seen in public, certainly not in the frozen food section…) It was kind of the 1920’s equivalent of modern college co-eds running about campus dressed in men’s boxer shorts.

Well, if the survivors of the horrific first world war from 1914-1918 were further traumatized by bobbed haircuts, flapper dresses and ladies wearing pajamas on the beach, what must they have thought after another world war had ended and 1946 saw women roaming the beaches in bikinis! Ladies, who had been making themselves more comfortable in their leisure clothing since 1910, had transitioned all the way from Edwardian corsetry and tight skirts to “relaxed clothing in order to play sports.”   (By the 1960’s if women relaxed any more, they would have to run naked, which it seems, some of them even did.)

I for one cannot blame those 1920’s women for seeking their freedoms, as looser fitting, boxy styles with drop waists in silks and crepes paved the way for the relaxed wide leg trousers that followed. Later, in the 1960’s and 70’s, beach pajamas made a resurgence, this time known as “palazzos.”  With modern concerns about sun protection from UV rays, we may see yet another rendition of beach pajamas, perhaps even beach parkas. With more folks working from home, we may even have “Business Pajamas.”

Prudence and I spend a lot of our time listening to books on tape or watching historical documentaries as we work.  Lately, I’ve returned to my fascination with the era of Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I.   (This has resulted in Prudence developing serious concerns about cod-pieces.  She is dreading the day they ever reappear in style. Things like codpieces and 1980’s-style shoulder pads should only ever know a single incarnation.)  We see the over-arching patterns (forgive the pun) of humanity’s quest for fashion and comfort.  It’s a balancing act involving the practicalities of fiber care and personal taste.  Fashion has been called a “train” but really, through the eyes of history, it is more of a Merry-Go-Round. Silhouettes are alternately constrained and set free; waistlines rise or swell like tides. Usually, the fashion trends are intimately connected with both the scientific discoveries and the politics of their day.

Home has always been where we could relax, with less formality, in private.  I’m pretty certain that Eve had a version of more comfy fig leaves for kicking about the cave.  The eighteenth-century Banyan evolved into my granny’s 1950’s “house dress,” which one can still order from the Vermont Country Store, just up the road a stretch from Hermit Hollow, for those wishing to transform instantly from maiden to matron in three yards or more of pastel gingham with a rick-rack trim.  This is the 1950’s version of “sweats”—only more versatile: In times of deprivation, one could even lie down in such garb and become the family picnic table.  

Outwardly, we are changing our fashions continually to embrace our “new normals” as we adopt novel activities—women playing tennis in 1910 required a new “outfit,” as did those attempting to smash small white balls with something called a niblick (a.k.a. “golf”).  Now, to go grocery shopping, one must wear “facial fashion.”  As we turn the leaf on a new chapter of modern history that embraces a more inclusive definition of love — both culturally and, at last, politically — I hope that our minds and hearts are as capable of expanding as our clothing. I think about the relaxation of fashion and the relaxation of our rigid gender norms and relaxation of what true and proper love is supposed to look like.  We are definitely adept at making ourselves more comfortable.  Isn’t it time we made others feel that way too?

On Saturday, July 4th, my beloved country will be celebrating its many rights and privileges and commemorating the rejection of a tyrannical foreign power that conquered the globe in its imperial quest for pajamas.  On this day in 1776, our citizens claimed their rights to Life, Liberty, and haircuts at gunpoint, then went nuts with fireworks, parades and picnics—traditions that are pretty much continuous to this very day.

Freedom, Safety and Comfort are eternally in a dance with each other as Society decides not only the limits of its fashions but its politics.  To a certain extent, they are dependent upon the unique choices of individuals.  But individuals can be influenced by the collective—by trends.  The Founders both deeply valued majority rule yet feared mobs. Freedom, like Yoga—is not a “thing” but a process, an act of Balance; being able to access “repose” while taking a strong position takes unbelievable strength and flexibility. We need to keep practicing—keep bending, stretching, reaching to grow strong.

While Prudence equates the devolution of our clothing with the erosion of our moral standards, I certainly do not.  I recognize that I may have a ways to go in updating a look that is simultaneously flattering, comfortable, considerate of others, and environmentally sustainable.  I’m willing to learn.  In my medieval leisure wear—I’m ready to start a new (old) trend here at the Hollow. But first…

I’m going to need some help getting out of these running pants!

Celebrate your Freedoms, My Darlings!  Make sure others share them too. And Keep up your Good Work!

With Sew Much Love,

Nancy

Allowances

Greetings Dear Ones!

It’s been a quiet week at Hermit Hollow.  As a beloved Scottish nephew commented when he visited America last summer, “the air is quite chewy here.”  It’s heavy, viscous, humid—full of bug breath, sweat, and the syrupy seduction of flowers.  Dragging in a lungful makes for quite a meal.  One can only breathe deeply a few times a day without getting dizzy. The recent thundershowers and downpours do nothing to dilute it.  The garden is happy—the bathroom towels, not so much.  Both are growing robust specimens of plant life.

I am grateful for time in my shop.  The giant windows face north, and the shadows keep the bricks cool on that side, so the windows let in lots of light but no heat.  With the window fan and some rollicking fiddle tunes on in the background, it’s a merry place to hide from a hot, exhausted world.

My shoulder does not let me do too much yet, especially of the repetitive motions involved with mass mask-making, but I am able to do simple things for my few customers.  Three people came to see me this week—one to collect clothing she left in February, the other two for dress hems.   Neither of them had any idea when they might get to wear these dresses, since they were quite formal, but they wanted them to be “ready” for the future when we can get dressed up and gather in bunches to eat cake and see what everyone else is wearing.   When I cut the bottoms off the dresses, there was enough fabric leftover to make a matching face-mask for each dress, just in case.  

One day, as I was sorting and stacking my fabric, I came across a sturdy piece of dark wool twill I had always meant to turn into a French apron.  My thought was that I could slip it over my regular clothes as I do my homesteading chores and not have to come to work with any hay or animal feed in my pockets.  Until now, my choices have been do chores in pajamas, then change for work or change first and hope for the best.  (The Best is usually not what happens around sheep who think they are lap dogs.) Neither is it particularly lovely to be getting ready for bed and realize you have sheep turds in the flannel cuffs you roll up because you never get around to hemming your own clothes.  I know, the very Clever among you are thinking something reasonable right now, such as “Nancy, why don’t you just wear three separate outfits each morning—change from your pajamas to farm clothes, do your chores, then get into clean clothes for the public portion of your day?”  Prudence heartily agrees. All I can say is, you have not been reading this blog long enough to know how truly Lazy I am.  I would need to go back to bed again after all that physical exercise (just to get the jeans on and off in this heat is like an advanced Pilates class)—which would require yet another change back into pajamas...   Too many decisions to make, too much wrestling with buttons and zips, way too many bad words for the gentle inhabitants of Hermit Hollow—it just doesn’t bear thinking about.

Nope, with a strong set of muck boots and this marvelous French apron I am about to make, I might almost stay clean.  Impulsively, I decided to do make it right then and there.  Why wait? I spread the fabric out across my cutting table, grab the pattern and the rotary cutter and start slicing.  From my calculations, this will take me a half an hour max. 

Two hours later, I am frowning into the dressing room mirror and remembering all I had forgotten about seam allowances.  Seam allowance is the area between the fabric edge and the stitching line on two pieces of material being sewn together.   Since 99% of the sewing I have done for forty hours a week for the last six years has been altering existing clothing, rather than using a pattern to make things from scratch, I have forgotten how much the seam allowance can affect the eventual size of a garment.  Naturally, in my haste, I had ignored all the directions.  After all, damnit, I know how to sew!  Alas, to review: If the pattern designer gave you a 5/8 inch seam allowance and you sewed it as if it was ¼ inch, well, there’s some tricky math involved here that means you just made the thing Too Dang Big. By Far. (Keep in mind that the difference between sizes is sometimes a mere ¼ inch!)  It may come as a complete surprise to some (namely, Me) that the opposite is also true.   If the seam allowance is  a ¼ inch, and you sewed 5/8 from the edge around the whole thing, well…get ready to wire your jaw shut for the next three weeks or donate the item to your local charity shop.  OR… take out all that stitching and start over. (Have I mentioned how LAZY I am??)

You would think I would never forget this lesson, which I first learned in high school, when I made a jumpsuit for a friend of mine.  She wanted me to make her one like mine so I took the pattern, which was cut to my size, and just added a few inches to all the seam allowances, thinking that would solve the problem.  Ladies and gentlemen, it did NOT.   Like anything else governed by the laws of physics, seam allowances must be Respected.  One cannot flippantly toss them an extra fiver, as if they are a hotel lobby boy, and expect them to do one’s bidding.  You don’t alter a pattern from the edges, I discovered--one must alter it from the center of each piece. (Is this not also true of so many other things in Life?) The resulting item was so badly proportioned and ill-fitting my friend was actually insulted.  “Is this what shape you think I am?” she asked tearfully, as her breasts flopped out through the neck hole.   My panicked giggles and frantic denials were a strain on our friendship ever after.

One of the main reasons for having extra seam allowances is so that fragile fabric, especially if it has a big weave, cannot unravel.  Sewing too close to an edge on fabric like that weakens the join. The fabric will give way around the stitching, no matter how strong or fine the stitching may be.  The unfortunate result of a seam under strain in such condition is that something resembling pizza dough will make its way through the opening, even if I have not set foot in a pizzeria since the lockdown began.  

Allowances are important: Allowances for extra time, extra emotional spaces around transitions, allowances for differences of expectations.  (Especially allowances for difference of opinion!)  Where one side comes together and meets the other to make a join must include a necessary and sacred Space that allows for fabric integrity and easements around curves.  We disregard it at our peril. There is room for adjustments if we pay attention to what we have allowed.  They are boundaries that both contain or give, if done properly.  Everything from Time Management to Prom Gowns or Relationships will depend on what we “allow” in those margins. 

In some ways, the more ragged edges of my life are not exactly coming together as Planned.  Though, in some surprising ways, the results of faith and trust are wildly better. I’ll make allowances for that!

Be kind to yourselves and others, my Dear ones!  Thank you for your Good Work!  May the mending continue….

With Sew Much Love,

Nancy

P.S. I definitely should have allowed more time for this blog!

Labels

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” Toni Morrison, Beloved

Greetings Dear Ones,

A Beautiful, Optimistic, and Practical woman arranges to meet me at the shop to have her new summer pants hemmed.   We both wear masks and maintain our distances as best we can in my cozy space. I only briefly see her eyes and hair above the mask.  So how do I know all those things about her?  I’m kinda guessing… But deep down I know the following truths:  #1. A wrinkle-sprinkled woman who speaks lovingly of having grown children is Beautiful just for all she has endured, witnessed, adapted to, and created.   Warm and loving, smiling eyes are Beautiful.  They just are.  We don’t have to look any further south than that.   Happy people who laugh easily can’t help looking Gorgeous, even when their faces are covered.  No amount of make-up or hair dye makes a sour-pus look radiant.  #2. She brought in white pants.  Anyone who wears white pants is Optimistic, to say the least.  (The only white I ever wear is dog hair, and then unintentionally.)   Everyone knows that white fabric has been specially woven with microscopic, magnetic threads that act as a vortex for things like ketchup, paw prints, and sometimes paw-prints made of ketchup.  White pants are generally sullied within moments of removing their price tags, never again to regain their former pristine elegance.  I’m not sure a pair would survive a ride in my car, even if I double bagged them.  A woman willing to wear white is a woman willing to take on a lot of laundry and any other Dirt life may send her way.  She dares to spend the whole day standing up. She can cope.  #3. She had five pairs.  Sure, she can cope—but she has a back-up strategy.  She’s practical.  She knows the fate of white pants but she wants them anyway and is willing to embrace contingencies.

“I don’t need to try them on,” she informs me.  “I just need them all hemmed to 30 inches.”

I look at the pants on my cutting table.  My eyes narrow. She makes haste to head for the door and I call her back just in the nick of time.

“Ma’am,” I say, “wait! I don’t think any of these are actually thirty to begin with…” I grab an inseam and stretch it the length of the ruler at the edge of my cutting mat.  As I suspect, they are just twenty-eight inches.  She looks on from the doorway.

“How can that be?” she asks. “Well, I ordered them online.  Of course, nobody can go to stores and try anything on right now so I just ordered them.  And they came and I opened the packages and I just assumed I needed to get them hemmed.  I need to get everything hemmed.”  She is looking at the pants the way the that wife on the 1980’s T.V. advertisements for Stove-top Stuffing used to look when she found out her husband would prefer stuffing to mashed potatoes.  She is visibly rattled.  Her world does not make sense.   She inches closer to the pants and reaches out to touch one.  “Now what do we do?” she asks.

“Have you tried them on yet?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you go in the dressing room and slip on a pair and we’ll see if maybe you want to send them back or make them into capris.”

She does.  She emerges a moment later and they fit perfectly.  Nothing needs to be done to them at all.  It turns out that she is not a thirty either.   The next four are exactly the same.

“You’re turning out to be my toughest customer ever,” I say, “now if you’ll just pay me five-hundred dollars, we can call it a day!”  We both laugh, knowing I am kidding on both accounts.  She leaves happily with her pants, promising to recommend me to everyone she knows.  Apparently, I do good work.

I love exchanges like this.  I love the micro “journey” I take with each customer as we explore the facts vs. assumptions surrounding each order.  So many times, people have assumed the labels are the facts.  If there is one thing I have learned about being a seamstress it is that LABELS are NOT FACTS.  Not even alternate facts. 

Labeling clothes is a fraught business, as folks forced to clothe themselves with the help of cyberspace are beginning to discover.  Labeling people is even more dangerous. 

On Monday, I celebrated being a person’s mother for twenty years.  First he was a “baby”, then a “toddler”, then something Very Interesting that sometimes wore pink ball gowns and sometimes resided for days in the swamp behind our house, then he was a “Teenager”… something he and his sister had dreaded.  (When they were little and would fight, they would accuse each other of “acting like a teenager,” which was the worst thing they could think of.)  Now, the label “teen” no longer applies to either of them.  He’s a braw young man “in his early twenties” (VERY early—as in two day’s worth).  

I hadn’t seen him since March 12th so I drove to Boston and we met outside and walked along the harbor, had cake, and one of those lovely, heartfelt mother-son conversations that make me so grateful and inspired to be his fellow traveler on this adventure.  We sat on a floating dock until the gentle rise and fall of the waves made us feel icky from eating so much cake.  We are landlubbers with sensitive middle ears; we really should stay on farms, eating potatoes instead of chocolate mousse, and venture nowhere near boats! But the strange times of 2020 demanded this.

We talked about how things have changed so much between us in the last year, since he moved out and went to Boston—how my jobs as his mom have evolved with him during the span of years from wet-nurse to cook and laundress to teacher, chauffer, and life coach.  I’ve worked my way up from janitorial services to occasional consulting and banking.   We are no longer within the reach of each other’s arms but fingers, which dial cell phones, provided one of us hasn’t dropped ours in a river, or down a toilet, or left it somewhere stupid with the ringer off.  We talked about relationships and labels and how the best relationships defy labels.   Love has a way of crawling out of whatever box you attempt to call it anyway.  The Greeks tried to sort love into seven simple boxes: Eros (passionate), Philia (intimate, authentic friendship), Ludus (flirtatious), Storge (unconditional familial), Philautia (self-love), Pragma (committed companionate), Agape (empathetic, universal), but I’m not totally buying it.  I think there must be hundreds, not to mention endless hybrid blends of the original seven.

It takes a while for us to live through and correct the inaccuracies of the labels we encounter.   It takes wisdom and curiosity and sometimes requires getting Naked to access the truth. Just like that lady’s white pants, you know you are on to something when you stop looking at the tag and put them on, next to your bare skin, and see how it actually FEELS.  Does it fit you? Good.  That’s Happiness, no matter what the numbers say.

As humans, it’s common for us all to grasp at labels, especially in relationships with other humans.  We need to know what things “are.”  We need to measure, quantify, classify, predict.  But just because we are capable of growing bizarre life forms at the back of the fridge (I probably have the cure for Covid-19 there right now!) does not make us “Scientists.”  Using the scientific method on emotions can have tragic results—usually as a result of our unconscious biases in the trials.

We all want to find our “soul mate,” “The One,” “the love of my life,” –a specimen so highly classified and rarified that we can barely breathe to consider such perfection.  But these labels come with damning standards and implicit judgments, expectations, and comparisons.   Pain, ecstasy, jealousy, insecurity—these all bear witness to the levels of intensity inherent in a certain label.  One expects Grand Things from an Yves Saint Laurent silk blouse or Dolce & Gabbana suit.  When there is “no label” we are free to proceed with Curiosity, Hope, a sense of unattached adventure and exploration.  We are free to check in with ourselves and notice how WE are showing up, rather than how the Other is either delighting or disappointing.

One of the reasons I love shopping for second-hand clothing is that the tags mean nothing.  If you know a bit about the history of fashion, the tags may give you clues, but that’s all.  Companies get bought and sold, manufacturing differs depending on the source of the cloth and where it is assembled, even according to dye lots.   Even size representations have changed many times over the years.  One must take each garment at face value.  The main question is, Does It Fit YOU? If not, what has to change? Can we do that? Or do we need to leave this treasure in the bargain bin where we found it?  It’s the Serenity Prayer embodied in every outfit.

We often assume we are getting what we expect.  Sometimes we aren’t.  We need to look closer, get involved—literally Get IN, to see what’s really what.   Beyond labels is a world of surprises.

We have all worn a lot of “labels” in our lives—as daughters, sisters, sons, and friends—lovers, husbands, fathers, wives.  In my own case, the label of “mother” has meant very different things to me depending on which child I am dealing with, which disaster, which triumph, which era or phase… To the point that I don’t really know what “motherhood” means any more except that I keep showing up and it keeps getting better.  It certainly is NOT what I thought it was.  There have been times when I was rigid and uncompromising and unwilling to change my ideas.  Sometimes I was right to do this—especially when they wanted a “real” fire in their snow fort.   Sometimes I was so rudderless, so out of ideas, so self-abandoned that I had no compass—open to any ideas, including the notion that the Fairies had stolen my children and replaced them with changelings. I’m sure the same is probably true for Fathers too—though I don’t know.  I have not been a father. 

Father’s Day is coming up.  Some have earned that label, some have not, no matter what their participation in the biological event may have been.  But the label itself does not really matter. 

The Love Does. 

For those of us struggling with some of our labels—Labels by which other people judge us or think they know who we are—white, black, pagan, Christian, Democrat, Republican, fat, thin, gay, straight, us, them—the biggest sorrow for us all is that we might not “fit.”  Take it from this humble little seamstress—You DO.   You Matter. And so does that person you think does not like you very much.   Take heart, Dearies--there’s not much that can’t be changed in a life, a country, or in a tailoring shop.  It’s just a question of effort.  Start by forgetting the label. Look at what’s real.

And sometimes, things are already fitting better than we ever imagined.  We just need someone to point that out so the celebration can begin.

Thank you for your Good Work. 

With Sew Much Love,

Nancy