risky behavior

in which Sarah and Beryl are ever surprised by how things unfold

It’s Tuesday morning and I’ve just deleted yesterday’s draft¹ of The Gusset.

Oops!

Not that what I had was terrible.

Clouds that shape themselves like locks of wool and succulent yellow plums are pretty compelling, at least to me.

It’s just that while standing in the midst of three boxes of rapidly ripening stone fruits awaiting their turn in the fruit dryer while also gathering my thoughts for this week’s missive (and twirling my spindle in the moments between), I suddenly remembered a comic I once drew that seemed perfectly pertinent² and went to look.

2020

Thus is a person distracted from her plum-strewn path.

For I also found this:

2019

How not to be struck by the coincidence of a YS (young Sarah) critique on the exact same day a year apart? ³

How not to spend the rest of my Monday —

—immersed in the opinions, plums, comics style and blackberry harvests of the past?

2016

How to stop exploring the pages of book after book, searching for for mid-August moments⁴ and remembering:

— how it felt to be recovering from the Rough Copy decade⁵—

—what it was like to be freshly in love with backstrap weaving—

—and what a brain-buzzing thrill it is (or at least has been), to make compelling objects with the materials at hand?

How not, in turn, to wake up this morning and watch myself swirl through emotional options:

1. I could keep pulling nostalgia-laden books off the diary shelf while reveling in the bittersweet, and write about that—

2. I could forget about the past and turn to the pile of linen yarn⁶ a dear friend just gave me—

   

3. or I could take Beryl’s advice (at least I assume that is what she meant when she said “except now you have me”),⁷ and let the one inform the other.

After a trot and some coffee and a nice chat with a beaver (who splashed their tail at us in what felt like an expression of “duh”), I found I had chosen door number three.

For while it can be crazy compelling to spend time with the opinions and pleasures and pains of the past—and it is certainly useful to be reminded yet again of the spiralic nature of my creative energy—

—it turns out that remembering former creative thrills actually helped fuel the brain-buzzing endorphins my body is delivering right his moment as I gaze into the halves of my grandmothers’ double boiler and contemplate the unknowable (and murky) waters of the present.

So here I am, mesmerized by the third boil of this unexpectedly grubby linen⁸ —

—content to be cleaning the most recent arrivals in my used coffee filter collection—

—excited to be part of this unfolding version of the Gusset—

—and prepared (I hope) to be surprised by whatever comes next.

Remember to comment with the button above rather than by hitting reply for if you choose the latter I won’t see your lovely words. Thanks.

1. I usually begin putting The Gusset together on Mondays —editing images, taking pictures of relevant comics, trying to put some order on my thoughts—so that on Tuesday I have something to work with. There is almost always a LOT to do/redo which is why I am always well into Tuesday by the time I push send. Kinda scary, then, to start from scratch. But off we go anyway! Fingers crossed it all makes sense.

2. Especially pertinent given last week’s post in which Young Sarah and her opinions featured rather heavily.

3. Geez, Young Sarah —cool though you are, I AM allowed to evolve. Just because you were filled with the thrill of all the new things you were learning and doing, doesn’t mean that is the only way to live. Indeed, were those all your opinions, or are many of them the words of the people you were around at the time—people determined to shape you into a person they approved of—coming out your mouth????

4. Through the comic-drawing years that is. I dried a lot of plums and made a lot of stuff in the decades before I began recording the individual days.

5. The Rough Copy Tapestries— the prologue of a novel I wrote and couldn’t leave alone until I wove the words into 13 tapestries and cut them off the loom, one after another, and could revise no more. The weaving took four years (after years of writing the original novel). The recover took at least that long. Or longer, for truthfully I may never be done,. How not to always want to return to the magical land of Palouse by the Sea?

6. In helping some people clear out the studio of a local textile person unable to do her work any longer, my lovely friend Vicki ended up with a garage full of tools, equipment and materials, in the midst of which was this box of linen. And while I don’t adore spinning linen, I do love weaving with it— so how not to lighten Vicki’s load just a little bit?

7. As a rescue dog, Beryl’s past is a mystery to me. As mine is to her. Naturally, however, we’re both informed by whatever we’ve done before which hopefully makes us both more interesting than ever. Or at least willing to be surprised by our respective weirdnesses.

8. There is enough linen here, both fine singles and three ply, to make lots and lots and lots of stuff. Some of it will undoubtedly be woven into swaths of open plain weave for gauzy bath towels and wash cloth —and for those I’ll work directly from the cones without pre-washing (cuz all those things are easy to launder later.

I also, however, hope to use some for tapestries and want to be sure the fiber is as clean as possible before I begin so as to avoid future discoloration of adjacent weft materials. To that end (like all mill-spun yarn I get cuz how knows what oils or steaming or other pre-treatments exquisitely orderly commercial skeins have had), I chose to treat this yarn as though I had spun it myself which means boil a couple of times in washing-soda water. And my, am I glad I did! I’ll show you next week how it looks dry. At least that’s my plan. And I ALWAYS stick with my plans, don’t cha know

:-)