Let It Be Simple
Sometimes all you do for a month straight is look at the moon and wear wool socks.
“Diaries show that whoever the spinner was in the family, farm daughter or matron, hired girl or slave, [they] might typically spin 10 knots equaling one skein, or 800 yards, a day. The rule of thumb was that it took four spinners working full time to supply one weaver.”
— Wool: Unravelling an American Story of Artisans and Innovation
I tidy the business of the year wrapped in a silence so complete it makes my ears ring. On the porch in the most complete dark, I can hear the snowflakes sizzling on the chimney pipe. The muddled impact of the flakes on the lake sound like far away radio static. I am, as far as I know, the only person around for miles. My hound dog whines at the door of the porch, wanting me to come in or to come out with me. I leave the stars outside under an invisible new moon.
Returning to the same location in all seasons of weather and life has primed me to relax into an immediate state of quietude upon arrival. I can feel the languor of summer vacations even in the chill of November, December, January. When my parents began our yearly trips thirty years ago, there were no TVs or computers in the mountains, no cell service and no wifi. While I am here, my habitual reach for my phone stills, even though I no longer go down the road with a calling card. I pull the same slightly scratched VHS tapes from their wicker basket . I keep a drawer full of wool socks and sweaters year round. There is a spare lip balm and a toothbrush in the bathroom. My Bean boots wait for me at the door.
When we would come for a week or two, my father taught me how to adjust my eyes for the dark. I am not not afraid of the deep edges of the woods. We walked without flashlights while he pointed out the constellations, as bright as his childhood in rural Michigan. We’ve brought the telescope up now. In the winter, the lake is a bowl-shaped mirror, illuminating everything with reflected starlight. It’s still snowing. It’s been snowing for days, the night sky only showing through in patches.
My most familiar clothes wait for me in the bedroom. A shabby canvas hunting coat full of pinprick holes; an unnerving orange flare of a beanie; lanolin-laced secondhand sweater; mended slippers. I prefer the slight barnyard smell of lanolin in my knits over instant softness. I drive four hours for my favorite socks; they are best appreciated in an air of hermitage. I bring up my favorite mittens, hand knit with flowers and leaves. Those I keep with me all winter.
Every inch of every acre of the lake is filled with pleasant ghosts. Even alone, it’s crowded. Thirty years of wool socks and bathing suits and skinned knees and secret cigarettes and making pasta. My mother’s slippers, fizzy with shearling and appliqué dogs, sit by the bed. My father’s birding binoculars rest on the window sill next to his rocking chair, my brother’s ski boots in the closet. My twelve year old self eats pancakes in the kitchen.
The tough rag rugs hold the stove heat to them. Even the wide wood planks of the floor have a soft glow of warmth. The sun streams through the picture windows in the morning, falling in bright slants against blue snow. In the evening, the full moon is bright enough to take its place.
I ring in the new year sledding on cheap plastic disks with my grown cousins, laughing so hard my ribs hurt, a chunky scarf flying as I chase the person who knit it for me. I push my father on a sled, adjudicating a race between him and my uncle, throwing snowballs that soaked through my mittens. When I am too warm for all my layers, I collapse inside to spin on a terrible little spindle a stranger gave to me. I do it very badly, with bright red roving I bought to patch a coat, curled up on the couch next to my mother, who is remembering how to knit.
I learned to spin wool as the year was getting old. Two hours each way out west, I watched sheep be sheared and felt raw wool, unscoured and greasy. A whole hall was lined with collapsible tables and plastic trash bags filled with wool. Sold as a full fleece, your hands came away greasy from the crimped locks. All were adorned with notes, some a picture of the sheep and a bit about their personality if you were lucky. I was delighted— some spinners in their booths had brought their sheep and alpacas along to the fair, neat in small hay-strewn pens where people could gently pet them and admire their softness.
Because I was alone, I lingered with the makers and experts in their booths, gathering business cards and chatting. In the very back of the hall, a woman was spinning on a dramatic swing arm contraption that sailed through the air as she clicked and clacked her way through the process of making yarn. It was a wooden antique with a working life, and around her other people spun, on electric powered and treadles or on vintage great wheels that dwarfed the sitter. Their excitement was infectious. I was gifted a raw dowel with an eyehook on the end, bisected by a plastic disk. Two women taught me simultaneously, laughing as they interrupted each other. When I took out my new spindle and the small skein of undyed wool at home, I could feel the tiny lamb I pet in the hall.
In their cabin, chatting with my parents, I spin an uneven cord out of the loose roving, an unruly single ply that twists on itself. My incredibly crafty mother, who can knit and sew and upholster, who made every curtain here and helped me sew my wedding dress, acts like I’ve learned a magic trick. I nervously talk over how to ply with the friend who knit my beloved mittens. I can’t knit for hell or high water, but I’d like to try weaving. I’d like to try everything. Here, it feels like there is infinite time.
I’ve spent the few past years making frantic, enormous piles of resolutions I couldn’t fulfill, my time and energy out of my control. I love the optimism of the new year. Despite a long list of things I want to do and try and see, I have no big plans to change my whole personality this year. I want less. To do less, less noise. Less laundry. More space in and out. Nothing revolutionary — just breathing room. I simply feel full, like I’ve eaten too much of a delicious meal, a snake digesting its over large belly. It’s something like hibernation. After a these hectic years, I have plenty to chew on. I feel mostly creaturely, not like a creator.
Wool is animal too, like us. It holds moisture and memory, releases heat to warm us when we’re damp and cools us when the fire gets too hot. It remembers the creases and the wrinkles, holds itself. Shopping on a screen, admiring the fit of a sweater in the grid, it is shockingly easy to forget that’s what makes it special. Wool has been recovered from shipwrecks years later and sold at market, springing back into new shapes. It can absorb up to thirty percent of its own weight before we even notice it changing. It’s as alive as we are, parts grass and sun and water and growth. It’s a material that knows how move between inside and out
When my head feels too full and the room a little crowded, I walk down the bridge across the creek, punching my boots through cat ice. It snows and snows, feet deep on the porch, so I wash my wool in the white. Out overnight, covered in fluffy piles, and dig it out refreshed. The snow is good for both of us.
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Phenology1 Lately: Snow crust glittering in the low, fast-moving sunlight, the tracks of deer and hares and mice, the trees on the mountain rendered in sharp, white clarity after days of flurries, deep blue of the shadows under the pines, bright moonlight cutting through the window in the belly of the night, utter silence of behalf of the birds, long slow icicles threaten the gutters
Wearing Lately: Scandinavian knee socks with blue and white diamond patterns, tattered black wool Gelurp clogs, silk long underwear, grey vintage EMS sweater with a rollneck, classic L.L. Bean duck boots, Land’s End down coat, hand-knit green mittens and scarf, grass-colored Carhart beanie
Reading Lately2: Wool: Unravelling an American Story of Artisans and Innovation, Peggy Hart; Fibershed: A Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy, Rebecca Burgess with Courtney White; The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World, Daisy Dunn; Garments Against Women, Anne Boyer; The Beauty of Everyday Things, Soetsu Yanagi; The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry; I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman; A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen and the Sardine Dress, Alison Hawthorne Deming; A Short History of the World According to Sheep, Sally Coulthard; For The Time Being, Annie Dillard
Phenology, also known as observational biology, is “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate…Examples include the date of emergence of leaves and flowers, the first flight of butterflies, the first appearance of migratory birds, the date of leaf coloring and fall in deciduous trees…” Thank you, Wikipedia. The transcendentalists loved, and folks who know me from Twitter will know that the Morning Report started as brief, daily phenological reports. It seems like a nice way to preserve the spirit of the thing.
I use now Storygraph to track my reading after many years of pretending I could remember all the books I am reading—I love it! Highly recommend, especially given I am a maniac who has many unfinished books going at once.
Love this place and love you