Needle And Thread

Spent some time with  needle and thread this morning, repairing my spouse's pants.  But first I had to blow the dust off the tray that holds my sewing supplies.

It's rainy and gloomy today, what my mother used to call "a day for mending socks."  A day for staying indoors, sitting by a window, working at some undemanding yet productive, soothing task.  I can still see her, darning egg in hand, bent over an old sock while our Andalusian maid regaled us with stories of Holy Week in Malaga as she folded the laundry.

While struggling to thread my needle I thought of the two pairs of socks I had thrown away in as many weeks.  Each pair had one hole in one sock, but they were different colors, so I couldn't combine the remaining good socks into a pair.  I remember thinking, "I should mend this hole," and then quickly, "Life's too short to be mending socks."   Before I could change my mind I dropped them in the trash, and now they're on their way to a landfill, along with 85% of clothing purchased in the U.S. on any given year.

I've been feeling some clothes guilt lately, having bought two dresses in the same month as the Bangladesh factory disaster.  But one of those dresses came from Gudrun Sjoden, a Swedish designer who, on her website, advises us to wear our old clothes with pride and to wash them only when they are in fact dirty.  Otherwise, she counsels, we should just air them out and spot clean them.  Needless to say, her clothes are manufactured in observance of fair-trade and ecological standards.  When you buy one of her outfits you feel that you're actually contributing to the well-being of Mother Earth.

Nevertheless, I know that the kindest thing I can do for Mother Earth is to keep wearing the clothes that are presently in my closet over and over and over, until I die.  If I stop washing them so often and begin to mend them, I can probably even pass them on to my descendants.  This is how it was for most of human history, after all, with textiles being saved and reconstructed to fit the next generation.

If current apocalyptic scenarios come true, those days may come around again.  Good-bye then to clothes as entertainment, as expressions of a spring day's mood, as symbols of momentary enthusiasms.   Hello to clothes as mere weather protection.

But maybe there will be some good times in exchange.  European lyric poetry began with the chansons de toile, the songs that women sang while sitting at their weaving a thousand years ago.  Maybe when the economy collapses for good and the climate changes beyond recognition, on rainy days women will again sit together by a window, mending socks, telling stories, making up songs.

Why I Live In Vermont

Some of you have asked how I ended up in Vermont.  Here is a piece I wrote a while ago about the process that led me here, entitled "Magnetic North":                                                                      

The attraction began in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1959.  I was a freshman in high school, newly arrived in the U.S. and drowning in a river of southern English.  I would grasp at words as they floated past, but could not reconcile the currents that engulfed me with anything in the Primer Curso de Ingles that had been my sole preparation for school in the Deep South.

It was a Catholic high school, so miracles and visitations were not unheard of.  Mine came in the shape of a freckled girl whose family had just moved to town, and the miracle was that the first time she opened her mouth in class I understood everything she said.  Her words were as clear and precise as if she had clicked them out on a typewriter.  She did not stretch her vowels out like taffy, and though she spoke faster than the southern kids, I could tell exactly where each word began, and where it ended.  I could follow her train of thought.  It wasn't that different from mine.

She took me home with her one afternoon and her mother, her father and even her little sister all sounded the same.  No drawn-out diphthongs, no languid cadences.  Here was an entire family whom I could understand.  

My friend and her parents were from Massachusetts, which I learned was in New England.  I thought that someday I would like to live in a place where everybody spoke like that.                                                                                                                              

Graduate school took me out of the Deep South, all the way to North Carolina.  By the time I arrived in  Maryland in the 1970s,  language had ceased to be an issue:  I was not only dreaming, but even counting in English.  

                                                                                                                     

The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing then, and I was determined to achieve self-sufficiency in the acre and a half that surrounded our house.  I had an ambitious vegetable garden with an asparagus bed, and twenty-seven fruit trees.  For protein there were a dozen laying hens, and two Roman-nosed Nubian dairy goats who looked vaguely like Barbra Streisand.

As I had never grown a tomato, pruned an apple tree or milked a goat, I did a lot of research at the local library.  This consisted mostly of reading back issues of Organic Gardening and The Mother Earth News, and I noticed that many of the articles and letters to the editor came from New England.  The writers alluded to sugaring in the spring, and to goats coming into heat as the trees began to turn in the fall.  They advised readers to be vigilant about frozen water buckets in winter, and to keep a stack of old blankets handy for covering tender veggies in case of September frosts.

September frosts!  As I sweltered in the heat of the interminable Chesapeake Bay summer, the fantasy of living in a land where gardens snuggled under blankets, water buckets froze solid, and roadsides were free of that tropical menace, the kudzu vine, became more and more compelling.

The  library also had a shelf dedicated to books about country living.  These were more lyrical than practical, and I read them with the same passion with which as a child I had read about Heidi and her goats.  It was there that I first found Noel Perrin, Louise Dickinson Rich, Scott and Helen Nearing.  In the children's section I discovered the illustrations by Tasha Tudor.  I had read Thoreau years earlier, but the life he described seemed impossible to translate into the twentieth century.  The writers on the country living shelf, however, were very much  alive,  and they had one thing in common:  they all lived in New England.

In the 1980s, as the Maryland countryside succumbed to suburbia, I had to give up my little homestead.  But at the least provocation I would launch into nostalgic stories about the hens I had kept and the goats I had known.  “What do you mean, you kept hens for eggs,” people would say.  “Don't you need a rooster for that?”  The reactions when I mentioned my elegant Nubian does were so predictable and so dispiriting, having to do with tin cans and foul smells, that I soon dropped livestock from my repertoire of party conversations.  Would I ever live where I didn't have to explain or excuse the things I really cared about?

 It took almost four decades—about as long as it took the people of Israel to get to Canaan--but I finally made it to a place where the roadways are free of kudzu (and, because this is Vermont, of billboards as well), and MacMansions are few.  Where a near neighbor makes world-class cheese with her goats' milk.  Where, when I tell people I keep hens, they ask “what kind?”

Yesterday, in yoga class, the woman who usually sits on my right was late because one of her sheep had gotten loose.  After final meditation, while we were rolling up our mats, the woman who sits on my left gave her a short lecture on the best kinds of livestock fencing.  As I was walking out, the instructor confided  that she is  thinking about keeping bees--her gesture towards saving the planet.

From where I sit at the computer, I can see my hens pecking and scratching at  the newly-green grass.  In the garden, the spinach is up but growing slowly because of the cold spring.  The apple trees are in bloom, but I have a stack of blankets ready, since a hard frost is predicted for tonight.

The farmer who hays our field dropped by on a chilly, sunny day last week to discuss plans for the coming summer.   He complained about the rising costs of diesel fuel, and told me his philosophy on breeding cows—he prefers to wait until they are two years old, when their pelvises are fully developed, because it makes for easier births. 

“You know,” he said, finally getting around to the real topic, “this field of yours really needs manuring.  I hope you don't mind.  It'll stink badly for a couple of days, but that won't last.”

  

His speech was as crisp and clear as the Vermont air, and I could understand every word he said.

Sundays At The Church Of The Internet

For the first quarter century of my life, I went to church every Sunday.  I didn't mind the Mass so much, but the sermon did me in.  As a child I fidgeted in the pew, but as soon as I became capable of critical thinking, I fidgeted inside my head.  Proud of my book learning, I passed the time identifying logical fallacies and deploring the oratorical style, or lack thereof, of the man in the pulpit.

After the Ite, missa est released us, I would tear the chapel veil off my head and complain to my mother about yet another ridiculous sermon.  She, who probably had the same objections as I, would counsel humility, the suspension of judgment.  "But," I would counter in full adolescent preen, "if God didn't want me to use it, why did He give me a brain?"

Then for many years I didn't go to church at all.  But when life got difficult and my sense of invulnerability faded, I became aware of an annoying longing for spiritual guidance.  This led me to join crowds of lapsed Catholics and Jews at the local Unitarian church, but my old critical habit soon reared up its wizened head, and I stopped showing up.

After we moved to Vermont I started listening to On Being because it came on NPR while we were eating Sunday breakfast.  And because I usually missed part of it while I was out feeding the chickens I would later, when I thought of it, go to the website.

And I was off.  With the wind of the Holy Ghost in my sails, I discovered Viktor Frankl,  Richard Rohr, Pema Chodron, Sylvia Boorstein.  Eckart Tolle, who looks like a Dark Forest elf, reminds me of the German nuns who were my first teachers.  Also, he owns a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  Do these sound like frivolous reasons to listen to a spiritual teacher?  If those priests of my childhood had owned a dog--or had a wife and children--I might have understood them better.

The vagaries of links led me to someone I would never have looked up, Geneen Roth, who lost all her money to Bernie Madoff and wrote beautifully about it, and to the illustrator Jennifer Orkin Lewis, whose works make me want to draw, or write, or something...

I know all too well the orthodox rebuttal to my digital spiritual wanderings.  I am picking and choosing what feels right--as opposed to what IS right--which is utterly non-Catholic.  But I'm not so sure about that.  No Sunday sermon on the dangers of mortal sin was as stark as Pema Chodron's message about the need to accept the impermanence of all things, to give up hope for good.

These digital homilies are hardly touchy-feely--at least the ones I read.  They deal with the inevitability of suffering and the need to be present, because the present is all we have.  And if an internet sermon makes me want to write or draw or stop thinking for a minute and just look into the green woods, isn't that all God's work?

Could Someone Explain About Leggings?

I am not against leggings.  In fact, I own several pair.  But I'm not sure I understand their raison d'etre.

In winter one wears leggings and socks inside boots, but in that case, why not just wear a pair of warm tights?

I like the look of leggings and sockless feet in flats, but if it's chilly enough to cover my legs I probably need something to cover my feet, too.

In warm weather, some women wear leggings under dresses, but it seems odd to encase one's legs in lycra when the point of a summer dress is to let air circulate.

The logic of leggings escapes me.  What have I missed?

Good-Enough Parenting--Her Story

As a baby, I never crawled.  I was held in someone's arms--my mother's, my grandmother's, my various aunts'--from birth until the day when I struggled out of that constant embrace and tottered across the room.

Our apartment in  Barcelona was large, which meant that I could gallop top-speed down the hallway that ran from one end to the other.  That was the only place where I could run.  Outdoors, on the street, I was always holding somebody's hand.  It was a big city, after all.  I could have run out into traffic, or gotten lost in the crowds.  I can still feel my mother's convulsive grip whenever we stepped off the curb.

While my five-year-old future husband was in the kitchen making pancakes for his lunch (see http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2013/05/good-enough-parenting-his-story.html ), I hardly ever entered our kitchen.  There was always water boiling, or hot oil spattering, not to mention the bottle of lye lurking under the sink.  And I don't think I ever helped myself to a piece of food until I was a teenager and living in the U.S.  Food was handed to me at regular intervals by a responsible adult, like Communion, and I ate it obediently, whether or not I was hungry.

I was never out of sight of an adult.  Although I had my own bedroom in the apartment, I did not sleep there until I was in second grade.  Before that, I slept next to my parents' bed.  (This may be why it took them sixteen years to have another child.)

I spent my early years going places with my mother.  On Sundays I would walk with her to Mass, where I entertained myself by looking at the statues of the Virgin Mary and, as a last resort, at the Stations of the Cross.  Then we would take the metro to hear my father's orchestra play their weekly concert.  I sat as quietly as I could through endless Brahms, Beethoven, Mahler.  I stared at the extravagant Art Nouveau decorations of the hall, and tried to catch a glimpse of the only woman in the orchestra, the harpist, who was always stuck way in the back. 

On weekdays I went to the fish market with my mother, or out on the wide avenues to look at the windows of fancy shops that sold exquisite leather purses and silk scarves, or to dusty fabric stores that I hated almost as much as the Mahler symphonies.  All too often we would go to visit people, usually frail elderly ones who had to be kissed and who expected me to sit quietly for the whole endless afternoon.

My bodily safety was of great concern to the adults around me.  I was told when to put on a sweater, button my coat, take off my gloves.  I was advised to breathe through my nose and not run too fast lest I should fall.  When we moved to Ecuador our house was on a two-way street, and my mother would send the maid to take me across to meet the school bus, much to my embarrassment.  I was twelve years old.

The only physically adventurous thing that happened to me as a child took place one summer on my grandparents' farm.  My uncle, who was barely out of his teens, was leading the cart horse back to the barn and he let me ride, warning me to hold on to the collar.  He was walking alongside, singing Oh, Susanna! (Con mi banjo y mi caballo, a Alabama me marche!), forgot himself and slapped the horse on the rump.  The horse broke into a trot and I let go of the collar and for a delicious moment flew through the air until my uncle caught me.  He made me swear not to tell anybody, and in September I returned to my life of buttoned sweaters, symphony concerts, and apartment life.

Thanks to an accident of fate--I was the only child of an intense mother in a close-knit family--I didn't just have a pair of helicopter parents but two full sets of grandparents, a great-aunt and -uncle, four single aunts and a young uncle rotating above my head at all times, offering cautions and advice.

And yet, I made it.  I did not grow into a recluse or an idiot or a particularly fragile flower.  My pancake-making husband and I could hardly been brought up more differently from each other. But we were both, in our parents' respectively quirky ways, truly loved.  And it appears that, with that as a given, kids will prosper no matter what.

Good-Enough Parenting--His Story

We were at table with some friends recently, talking about the foods we used to like as children, when my husband said, "I made pancakes for lunch one day when I was in kindergarten."

"How nice," we said.  "Did your mother help you?"

"No," he said.  "The day I made pancakes I was alone in the house."

We put down our forks and, bit by bit, got the story out of him.  It seems that, arriving home for lunch and finding the house empty, he decided to take matters into his own hands.  He found the box of pancake mix, measured some into a bowl and poured in the milk.  Then, having lubricated the griddle with Crisco, he set it on the stove and turned on the gas.

While the griddle was preheating, he went into the next room and dialed his girlfriend's phone number.  The girl's mother answered and wanted to chat, but he was worried that the griddle would overheat.  He finally got rid of the lady, ran back into the kitchen, climbed up on a chair next to the stove, and started ladling batter onto the sizzling griddle.

We stared at him with our mouths open.  "What?" he said.  "I knew how to make pancakes.  My grandfather had taught me.  Besides, that was nothing.  I was babysitting my brother and sister when I was eight."

"You were?" we chorused, the food now cold on our plates.

"Sure.  When my parents went out they would put my brother and sister to bed.  I got to stay up and watch TV."

"But," I said, putting aside scenarios such as fires, gas leaks, and sudden fevers that might deter parents from leaving an eight-year-old in charge, "weren't you scared that a robber might come?"

"No, no," he said.  "I knew where the .22 was kept, in my parents' bedroom closet.  I knew perfectly well how to handle a gun.  I'd done lots of target practice with it in the woods."

This was childhood in the 1950s, not in a sharecropper's cabin in West Virginia but in suburban New Jersey, in a household of caring, college-educated if possibly over-optimistic young parents.

There is a lot of criticism today of fathers and mothers who overprotect their children. Helicopter parents, I know how you feel!  I refused to go to a Rolling Stones concert with my once gun-wielding, pancake-making spouse because my baby had developed a couple of funny-looking spots on her forehead.  To you I dedicate this story of pancakes and guns, not as an example but as reassurance.  Kids, mostly, can survive anything.

(For a completely different story of childhood survival, check tomorrow's post.)

Tree Of Life