About Sarah

Posts by Sarah :

Another world

Texas (5 of 5)

West Texas in February. It hasn’t rained since November. (No longer quite true now that I’m posting this; the temperature dropped 40 degrees and it sleeted the day after we left.) The air and the earth are bone dry. In fact there is little division between them, as the windy season is arriving and the two elements have struck up a permanent molecular barn dance. We get intimate with dirt. Grit in our nostrils and pores. Great clouds of it billowing out of the children’s pants when I try to thwack them off before letting them indoors. Ada’s hair is a tumbleweed.

But the sun is warm. (The dirt loves the sunscreen. The children look like tiny miners squinting in the light after a day in the pit.) The little peach tree behind the barn is already setting blossoms. My in-laws’ new house is muscling up out back, shrugging on its plywood and Tyvek and half a roof, and there is no playground like a construction site. The kids bicycle through the future rooms and pull Jolly in a wagon. They haul in scrap lumber to block in the furnishings. They excavate the big dirt pile and slide down the sides.

And it is livestock heaven: six sheepdogs, a brazen and friendly cat, five horses, a little herd of heifers, Muscovy ducks, and sheep. The kids are beside themselves. “Hwose ooouuuut! Wide! Wide!” Jolly pleads, shaking the gate to the corral, trying to scale the saddles in the tack room. And we do. His cousin’s gentle old horse is willing to amble along with a speck of a boy on his broad back, and there’s room at the front of his aunt’s saddle to nestle him aboard the more sprightly gray mare. Jolly is alight with joy, humming happily and crowing “Bump bump bump!” when a faster pace jostles him a little. And when it’s Ada’s turn, the lead rope comes off. She listens seriously as her aunt explains what to do. She is calm and confident, sitting tall, unflustered when Brownie shakes his head or stretches his neck enough to pull her forward. She coolly steers him right and left, circles the arena, stops and starts as she wishes, waves to us railbirds with our cameras.

Texas (4 of 5)

Texas (2 of 5)

Texas (3 of 5)

We put the horses up and then help move some sheep to the pasture near the house. They’re half-grown Dorper lambs, born last autumn and still impishly sneaking milk from the ewes, so Amy cuts them from the flock one at a time and passes them through the gate. We straddle their stout warm bodies, fingers buried in their coarse wool. My lamb yaws and plunges; I tighten my grip and stroke her under the chin. Amy heaves the trio of sheep into the back of her ATV and deftly ties their limbs with twine. Their ankles are wonderfully delicate, slender as my small son’s wrists. They blat and void showers of moistly shining pellets. Their sides heave with worry and I speak soothingly to them. “Why are they frightened, Mama?” my daughter wants to know. “We won’t hurt them!” “Yeah, we’re not going to kill them yet,” chimes my unsentimental nephew, old enough at almost five to have seen the cycles of life on the ranch a few times over.

All these years I’ve been a knitter, and I grew up with horses and plenty of other animals, but it’s my first time handling sheep. Even with three legs hobbled, the lambs periodically struggle to right themselves. I clamber into the back of the ATV to ride with them and make certain they don’t try anything foolish. Sure enough, the largest gets some leverage with her free leg and tries to plunge overboard. I hoist her off her little flock mate and keep a grip on her wooly neck. Her breath is moist and warm on my arm. The third lamb gives up the struggle and closes her eyes. I like these sheep. It might be better if I didn’t; they aren’t wool growers or pets and there’s no escaping that they’re raised for meat. But I am pleased to be cozily amongst them, hands and a knee on their round bodies, rubbing them gently to make the restraint friendlier. I’m a long way from being a shepherd, but I’m glad to know my fondness for wool holds up when it’s on the hoof.

Texas (1 of 5)We’re far from home. Ada begs to stay forever. The journey back is three and a half hours in the car and two plane rides. I knit as we roll west over this unfamiliar country, studded with yucca and treeless mountains. We’ll be back.

On board

Thank you from deep in my heart to everyone who’s responded to the last post with encouragement and wisdom. I am feeling so much more hopeful just reading your words, and more helpful, too, with your concrete suggestions for supporting my friends down this tough road.

Meanwhile, it feels good to take some action. Bristol Ivy is up to something, something in which I instantly felt I should join her. She’s been quite eloquent on the subject of the Sochi Games and human rights, so please do click over and read her post. I love her sentiments about kindness as a form of subversion and rebellion. And I love that she’s inspiring knitting designers to follow her lead in donating pattern earnings to equal rights causes during the Games. To do my bit, I’ll be tallying up all sales of Winter Garden through the end of the Olympics and donating that amount plus a matching sum I’ll kick in myself. I’m still doing my research to decide where the money will go, as there is so much good work being done by so many different groups. I’ll let you know.

UPDATE: I’ve just donated $260 to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Thanks so much to everyone who bought the pattern during the Olympics. It feels great to be part of something positive.

Blizzard

Winter is licking our city at last. Snow is falling and the wind is up; teeming clouds of infinitesimal flakes swirl and mount through the air like vast schools of glittering fish or bird flocks that seem guided by a single consciousness. But the wild weather and snow day excitement cannot lift my heart just now. I have to write it to feel for the way forward. If you need coziness and good cheer today, I beg you click away.

On Monday we lost my husband’s godmother, who went more rounds with terminal cancers than anyone dreamed was possible and lived with courage and grace and brazen joy in the face of every difficult day. On Tuesday another beloved person we count as family shared her own diagnosis. The test results flooding in bring black news. Despite her knowledge of the battle ahead and the suffering soon to begin, my friend wakes gleeful at the forecast snow, brimful with the blessings of her life, tender and thoughtful to everyone around her as usual. I know too many of us have felt it, this desperate urge to throw your body between a loved one and the tide, as if you might somehow stop it rising to swallow them. The uselessness you feel because you can’t shelter them from the pain and sickness, because the comforts you can provide seem so peripheral and so puny. (If you’ve lived this, if you can talk about it, will you please tell me what can I do for my friend and her husband as they slog through grim months of treatment? It looks like the full battery of chemo, surgery, and radiation will be necessary.) I thought we’d age together, she leading the way and teaching me how to do it with dignity and delight. I can’t compass the notion that she might not be here. I can’t think of my children growing up without her.

I’m knitting a sock because one stitch after another seems to be the only way I can move through this moment; holding still feels like letting the grief and worry fix me with their yellow eyes so they can creep close and gobble me down. I am trying to imagine how I might grow more like these two women I’ve loved so well, these brave tough incandescent women who knew/know how to knuckle down and live into the world, how to savor its stew of pain and beauty. But it’s a proper blizzard inside and out today.