How to Live Slowly By Braving the Hard Work

There’s been a slow pulling away this year, a slowing down of the urgent need to photograph everything beautiful. A sweet surrender of life away from what the world expects of you, of sharing every moment. Lately its just been me enjoying life with myself, and not through a sense of obligation.

Right outside the front window a pheasant is scratching in the underbrush, picking at scraps, wandering the grass. The ash trees are speckled with yellow and the prairies have all gone to their dull golden color I love so much.

And I’ve been doing things, dreaming things, thinking things. And its like my friend Bev said about texting everything and sharing everything because its so easy, when you finally see someone, hug someone after miles and time apart—you’ve lost some of the preciousness of catching up.

So this me catching up, because despite how much I would love to travel and meet up and hug you and sit down to a real talk, the world makes it awfully hard.

And besides, it is autumn and writing words always comes sweeter in the autumn. Once the first frost laces the prairie I’m all for hoodies and the old boots, for home and the fall garden harvests, books and putting stories on paper I’ve been daydreaming of all summer . . . I’ve got a few of those lying around, too many to make into actual books, so I’m taking a stab at short stories for most of them. They may turn into novelettes because I’ve never really been good at short stories, parameters or limitations in general. So we’ll see what comes.

The summer was wild and beautiful and I loved every burning minute of it, and how I came by 85 bags of raw Icelandic wool is one of the finest tales I have to tell.

It started in April when we “ooed” and “awed” over the glorious wool my boss had in the garage. Fine owner and breeder of some of the oldest and purest breed of sheep, he had tons of wool. Beautiful grays and silvers, blacks and browns, the colors, I’ll have to show you the colors.

Donna, Gary, and I dreamed about building a spinning wheel while potting up plants last spring. But the world exploded and everyone and their dog was home and fixing up their houses and their yards, and we courageous souls of Agriculture ran the entire months of May and June, helping new gardeners, planning landscapes. It was a good year to end on, for Alan and Janet.

Early morning, before an adventure with siblings, Facebook Marketplace offered me something. A spinning wheel. A beautiful antique spinning wheel from New Zealand dated 1983, only an hour away.

The lady had tears in her eyes when she sold it to me. I paid her in cash, but she told me I’d driven a long way and wouldn’t let me give all of her asking price. I sent her a picture of the first yarn I spun, rough as it was, ‘cause she’d asked me to.

There’s a little local yarn store in our small town and I picked up two springs I needed for the brake band, and it was mine. A gentle, slow anticipation, long lasting and glorious met me that day.

I asked my boss what he was going to do with all that raw, beautiful wool he had before he sold the store for good. He shook his head and said he’d probably throw it away, he didn’t have room for it at home. But he looked at me and asked if I wanted any, and I smiled and told him the story of the spinning wheel. He smiled because he loves things with history, because I loved them, too. He said just bring my truck and he’d put a whole pallet on there.

So I did. And then he gave me another.

I’ve washed it and dried it and hung it for the winter, I’ve spun from roving, but there’s just something about spinning straight from fleece, uncombed and uneven. It makes me feel real, actual, how honest it feels there.

The whir of the wheel and the treadle, the wool in my fingers and the fibers catching and spinning.

There’s this going back to old ways I’ve always longed for, and I'm looking at my hands and stiff wrists and touching wool spun like in ages past, and I just can’t believe it did not give some amount of unmitigated pleasure to those long before me, to spin, to knit, to make, to create, else how could I be sitting here loving it?

And perhaps I’ve rediscovered something that was forgotten or lost altogether. Now I understand the slowness of life, the time and how precious it is to be present every moment, in every step.

Perhaps there were some bound to the slowness of their time, but they brought us gifts today by living their lives just as they did with what they had. By braving the hard and the ugly because for them it was the only way.

And here today, I’m thinking this is the way it ought to be. Me, sitting at a spinning wheel or chopping my own wood or building my own fire to warm my house, remembering the old and long gone, and thanking those that lived there for coming before me, for doing to the hard work, for making and creating, and for the joy it brings to do it again, and again.