Spinning living colors

At work, a mason jar of bright pink phlox stands beside Cate’s self portrait drawn in shades of green, a narrow leafed bonsai, a photograph of Howard Nemerov. On the coat hook hangs my jute bag, and inside, my spinning. Yes! I’ve learned to handspin with a drop spindle, and I love it. I’ve spun three balls of roving, and maybe that’s enough for a hat.

Our Allie baa Baah is, it turns out, a Romney ewe. This afternoon, in exchange for a burlap sack full of her wool, I’ll learn dyeing with natural plants (goldenrod and tansy) and Elizabeth, the teacher, and I will pick the vegetable matter out of Allie’s fleece to prep it for carding.

Anthony is still in South Dakota, and Cate is on Prince Edward Island. Everyone on the farm is swell. Two weeks ago our Sumatra hen surprised us by appearing from under the hen house with a dozen peeping balls of fluff. What a bustling, bossy mother she’s become, looking after her chicks, keeping them in line, warming and sheltering them beneath her wings.

I think of chicken metaphors and similes, so timeworn they’ve become clichés. Now I know what it means to be “a mother hen;” it’s a high compliment. “Before the cock crows,” is early.


We have a new family member, an angora goat, named Hermione, from Elizabeth at Spinnakees' Farm. She's gentle, potbellied and still shy (Hermione, not Elizabeth.) Her fleece is a lovely blend of silver, gray and black, and like Chloe with one ear up and one ear floppy, Hermione has one horn long and one stumpy. Since Hermione’s buckling left for another farm on the day we brought her home, she came in milk.
I’ve learned to make goat cheese. Easy, then roll in in a blend of herbs--amazing.

Playing with fiber and planning to dye is awakening my creativity (oh, yes, I planned that pun.) At lunch I purchases 30 skeins of embroidery floss, a vivid tactile palette. Yesterday I bought beads.
I’m thinking of dyeing unbleached muslin, sewing and stitching and beading it. I’m tired of drab clothes.
I don’t want to do the same old dame, expected whirls and flowers, sun, moon, butterflies and oak leaves. So I ask myself—what moves me?
Here are some answers:

hands ☼ faces ☼relationships apparent through posture ☼ birds on a wire ☼ my underwater world ☼eyes ☼weeds ☼alleys ☼ broken things ☼things unexpectedly exposed that shouldn’t be ☼old people ☼stubbornness ☼ masks ☼bowls ☼ genitals ☼ snakes ☼ anguish ☼ euphoria ☼