Main Garden, snuggled under a blanket of leaves for the winter

We continually find words and phrases used commonly in today’s culture, but which had roots in our earlier lives as a people who grew their own food.

This year Thanksgiving was nearly upon us when we completed the process of putting the gardens to bed. Then it dawned on me. A hoedown originally meant just that:  it was the time we put our hoes down for the winter, and that is definitely cause for great celebration.

That root meaning has all but disappeared from our dictionaries;  hoedown now refers to a particularly lively country jig, often experienced at a barn dance.  It makes sense, though, as putting farming tools down for a few months is a good excuse for dancing madly.  I wonder if that first Thanksgiving included a hoedown dance or two, for exactly the same reason.

At our house we celebrate times of completion and change. In March it’s sugaring off (the end of gathering and processing maple sap), and right now we are enjoying the delight of hoedown. We sing and dance and give thanks for another year of rich harvest and for the promise of winter rest.

Even if you’re not a farmer of any stripe, it is good to remember that somewhere, someone is putting a hoe down after working all summer so you’ll be able to eat all winter. So sing and dance and celebrate with your farmer, wherever s/he may be!

I was walking Simon late yesterday afternoon, when the sun was nearing the horizon. Simon is pretty slow these days, so I had time to just stand and look west down the hill and over the woodlands.

I love this time of day; the lighting is almost always spectacular, even when the sun is hidden in deep clouds. Yesterday, though, it wasn’t, so the nearly-naked trees were brightly backlit.

Suddenly something flashed toward the bottom of the hill. It looked like a fluttering splotch of gold-white light, and it was soon joined by more. I think it was a flock of birds, the sun shining through their wings. But for all the world it looked like butterflies of light flitting across the horizon.

Really, it doesn’t make much difference what caused this sight—it was amazing no matter the source. Hundreds of them in groups of three, seven, twelve … butterfly-flight pattern down pat, shining, glittering, sparkling lights flying between the trees, seeming to disappear as each escaped the sun-glow.

I believe Earth is providing mind-boggling spectacles all the time. But most of us seem to need a slow dog in our lives to open our eyes.

Thank you, Simon.

No, not the athletic kind. I finished the Big Weaving Project of a Thanksgiving table runner. This was a stretch for me since I’ve never tried overshot weaving before. It sounded complicated (and the threading draft was downright scary), but the wonderful woman at the Yarn Barn, where I purchased the pattern, encouraged me and explained the process in a way that sounded doable. Here are a few shots of the process:

I haven’t been regular about blogging lately, as my family is good about reminding me. Summer hours are loaded up with food-related duties, and now I have chicken duty (one I love as much as the food stuff!) as well. That leaves little time for blogging and other relaxing pursuits.

Like weaving.

We were blessed with the gift of two looms, one a 48″ floor loom and the other a 15″ table variety. Though I didn’t mean to get involved with either, of course I did. The practice of warping (creating and placing all those threads that run the length of the fabric, from front to back on a loom) is a mathematical and coordination challenge, and I love both. Weaving (the part where you send a shuttle full of thread from side to side) actually takes the least amount of time in the whole process.  Who knew.

As I was setting up the large loom for some dishtowels, I got to thinking about our good fortune in receiving this gift. In the first place, the generous donor included everything an accomplished weaver needs: shuttles and bobbins, extra heddles for the warp yarn to pass through, two reeds (another place for those warp threads), a large variety and quantity of threads and yarns, a warping board and books galore. I’m pretty sure the purchasing of all this was well over $4000.

But that’s not the real value, in my book. The real and impossible-to-calculate worth is the experience of the first owner as she moved from one project to the next. I did not know this weaver, and her wonderful husband passed all this along to us when she died so I never will. Not face-to-face anyway.

But there is so much of her infused in her tools. I see how she set up her heddles, what her colorway preferences were, the way she warped her loom (yes, there are different methods).  And there are times when I feel her presence nearby as I’m working. It happens when I feel stuck, and then suddenly I know exactly what to do. Several days ago it happened when I was warping those dishtowels. I wasn’t stuck, but I was filled with a sense of what her own mental discipline and rambling might have been as she carried the thread from peg to peg around the board. Again I felt her gentle and humorous reaction when I realized that one decision I made about how to structure a counting thread could have been done more effectively; it was as if she was saying how she had done the same thing herself and that doing it “wrong” is always what teaches us the most.  How true.

I have no idea how such communication occurs, I just know that it does. And the result is that I understand that I am as much of a thread as those on the loom, being woven into a tradition as old as humankind itself.  Our forebears, whether blood-related or not, are the foundational warp for the ever-growing work of life. I am blessed with the richness of feeling my life intertwine with those of all my ancestors.

And you absolutely, definitely, most certainly cannot put a monetary value on that.

I was recently referred to a wonderful site with great blogs. In particular I love one about farming and the fear of failure.  Anyone who’s tried their hand at something new risks failure, and farming is fraught with possibilities for doing things quite wrong.

It got me to thinking about failure in general, though. I recently entered the world of weaving, thanks to a generous (very) gift of a floor loom and loan of a smaller table loom. Both arrived with some terrific reference materials, and I did my homework before trying my first warp. That one took two of us nearly two days to complete (and that was on the smallest loom). Then I sat down to weave.

I was hooked from the first shuttle throw, and being hooked is rather important when one heads into the unknown. I made several thousand mistakes on that first piece, from warping boo-boos to wonky edges to missed threads on shuttle throws. I had to look up every term used in the books because most ‘new worlds’ have their own languages, and weaving is no exception.

But the most interesting thing that happened was I realized how much I had learned with that first attempt. When I was done I knew a whole lot about weaving jargon, why warp tension is important, how to smooth out those edges, what a difference a yarn change makes and lots more. I could hardly wait to get going on the second project, during which I more than doubled my understanding of the ins and outs (literally) of weaving.

So … did I fail at weaving on either of those attempts? I certainly made a boatload of mistakes, but were they failures?

Of course not.  Mistakes are just mistakes, and they also happen to be the most efficient way we learn new things. Because I was enthralled with the idea of weaving, I wasn’t discouraged when something didn’t turn out quite like I had anticipated; I was eager to figure out how to do it differently the next time.

If mistakes aren’t failure, then what is? I thought about that this morning as I mucked out the chicken house in the rapidly heating, humid morning. I know I’ve had the miserable experience of “feeling like a failure”, but what had caused that awful ache?

And then it came to me: the only way to fail is to do nothing. I hadn’t been trying something new when I felt like a failure—I’d been sitting on my derriere watching others collect wisdom by goofing things up.

This just begs for a cute caption, but I’ll refrain. (If anyone else would like to contribute, however, feel free!)

Simon (left) has been encroaching on Smudge’s territory for some time. He finally reached the nose-to-nose range last week. Oh, if only that danged grill weren’t there …

This year we decided to run oats rather than corn for drying, and in spite of the monsoon season this summer has turned out to be, we harvested them (yes, in the rain) on Sunday morning. They are drying happily in “the barn” (the one-time refectory).

I have found that stripping the grain, chaff and all, from the stalk is soothing work. I spent about two hours at it yesterday and today, and have nearly a bushel of “oat pods” to show for my work.

Ah, farming.

Some of my old poetry was unearthed this weekend, so I took a little nostalgia trip down poetry lane. I had forgotten about another tree loss that occurred when the remnants of Hurricane Floyd swung by our place years ago. The photo that spawned this piece is long gone, but maybe you can paint one for yourselves:

_________________

Floyd, swaggering down the hill,
bragging his prowess and
arrogance (Storm with Attitude).
A red maple dowager, unable
to resist his mile-a-minute dance,
weeps beside the road,
buckled under his
heavy breath and windy embrace.

Collapsed
on hand and knee,
face down in the pool
of leaves
cried off in her falling.
Making obeisance,
awaiting the transformation
that comes in death.

Surrender. Atom by atom,
death and rebirth,
here an ant, there a bat,
down the hill
a baby red maple …

and Floyd?
spent by his own laughter
his children nourish this birthing:
here an ant, there a bat,
down the hill
a baby red maple …

I’m sad to report that one of the little ducklings has disappeared. Which is, most likely, a nicer way of saying that one duckling has become “good food” for one predator or another—possibly the cat who spent all of two hours in its nice new garden home a few weeks ago. We thought he would be a great vole-inator. Turns out he much prefers songbirds and perhaps ducklings.

Drat.

So, one little life has been sacrificed, and for that we are saddened as well as resigned. That is, indeed, life on a farm. Reality. Truth.

Another duckling was injured but managed to escape the fate of its sibling. Bill called me to appear in the kitchen with my “suture kit”, otherwise known as my quilting equipment. Needle in hand, the two of us stitched the second duckling back together. It was  a large but fortunately surface wound. After a day sequestered in the barn, we returned it to its reduced family.

By late that afternoon the wound had reopened, either by the duckling itself or its siblings and moms. Back in the kitchen emergency room, we stitched again, and this time reinforced our work with a bit of superglue. And it was back to the barn cell for the little one.

S/he is spunky, and within hours s/he was figuring how to escape. Successfully, I might add. Several times. Clearly the wound wasn’t all that significant, in spite of the stitches and glue.

So today Sr. Emm created a mini-run outside, and Marilyn (Marilyn??) spent the day in the shade of the redbud tree, bathing in a makeshift pond, catching bugs and feasting on grass. Perhaps in a few days, when we are confident that the healing process is firmly established, s/he will be reunited with family once again.

We don’t want to rush things, though. How many times can you sew up a little bird before it decides to call it quits? For now, this little duckling is beginning to accept the human factor that has suddenly become such an immediate part of its life.

But the sooner returned to the real family the better. We can assist every now and then, but there is no viable substitute for the real thing.

Ah, family.