one hundred and one

strands of milkweed

According to my records, this is the hundredth issue of The Gusset.

According to Substack, it’s the hundred and first.

The actual count doesn’t matter overmuch, other than as a reason to notice:

1. that I continue to love being here

and—

2. that of these five score and one, a crazy number have been written with milkweed.¹

I say written with rather than written about because when it comes to this plant I am very much not in charge. Again and again the stalks have simply appeared and insisted on being part of whatever is going on—even unto a hand full of dry stalks practically forcing their way into a corner of my overcrowded car in the midst of a middle-west windstorm.

Idaho, Iowa, Oregon, Vermont, Nebraska, Colorado—

—and in the only clear space to be found amidst unpacked boxes—²

—there ki is.

I cannot resist.³ But then why would I want to?

Spotting the stalks is amazing. Peeling off the outer bark is viscerally delicious. Releasing each fiber from its neighbor (so glossy, so confident) is ridiculously satisfying.

And the rhythmic satisfaction of twisting strand after strand and gloating over the accumulated inches like a dragon with her hoard? Embarrassingly gratifying.⁴

There is even (now and again), the chance to actually make a thing.⁵ But only when the idea is right (or I’ve run out of adverbs).

If I look in my old diaries, I can find the moment our relationship began.⁶

And these drawings remind me, in part, why I continue to be smitten.⁷

Why milkweed should continue to show up for me, however, remains a mystery.

Happily, it’s a mystery I don’t need to solve.

I can, however, admire this plant’s perennial persistence—

—ki’s insistence on existence.

For if this amazing plant, along with all the books and ideas and trees and other miracles of the world, can keep showing up—⁸

— so can I.⁹

1. Here are just a few:

Milkweed lessons — June 2023

Milkweed and Mending —March 2023

Dog Bliss and Milkweed - May 2023 (right after Beryl and I found each other)

Drunk on Nettles and Milkweed - March 2024 (this one includes videos of releasing the winter retted fibers (like the grey ones in the photos above) from the stalks.

Indigo, Sourdough, Milkweed and Mint - August 2024

2. Truly — I opened a box at random and there were the lovely hanks of last autumn’s fiber.

3. No internet searches, credit card numbers, passwords, packing, shipping, taxes or tariffs involved. Not even a spinning tool beyond than my fingers. Just some dead sticks: by the side of the road, at a rest area, in a neglected corner of an independent living facility, in a friend’s gorgeous garden, in my new back yard. Almost (if not quite) as amazing as the sun in the morning and the moon at night.

4. A lot of gathering and twisting but not much making of finished projects. I talk about that a bit in The Purpose of No Purpose, a post that includes some videos of autumnal fiber gathering. Indeed, if you compare these videos with the ones in Drunk and Nettles and Milkweed (also linked above), you can see the difference between working with fiber that has been through an entire winter and that which has just started to rot after the first few hard freezes of the fall.

5. A stash that is extremely easy to store!

6. The first drawing was 14 March 2020 in case you wondered, and the others were drawn later that summer and into the fall in the first summer of Covid, Cancer and Chemo (my husband’s). It’s not putting too fine a point on it to say that milkweed saved my sanity.

7. Just a note to say that the time to harvest milkweed stalks is after pollination and Monarch butterfly nourishing season are well over. For of course those are the things that really matter—as well as the plants existing for their own sake. My little bit of fiber-twisting nervous-system regulation is a lucky and lovely by-product.

8. Even when we try!

9. First— thank you Janine Bajus (knitter extraordinaire), for bringing this word into the Gusset comments last week. The moment I saw what you’d written, I had to warp a loom.

And second (because this is the last footnote and I needed someplace to say this), A Field Guide to Needlework (my soon-to-be-former website) is off line, and I send MANY apologies to anyone who has tried to click a link in a post or purchase a guide and ended at a 404 Not Found page.

For reasons too numerous to go into just now, I’m in the process of trying to build a new site on a new platform and it is taking longer than I thought. Hopefully I’ll at least have the store up and running before too long—though truth to tell it is hard to focus on web persona reinvention (much less new site-building software), when there are seeds to be planted, wooly planting pots to be knit, trails to be explored, milkweed to be twisted, and words to be woven—all while dong a little real life reinvention in this new place. But it is on the list and when there is something to link to, you will be the first to know.