Mending the Circle
A string of
rough wool circles my wrist. It was spun not with a spindle but with my fingers,
my intentions.
October. I plunged my hand into the bag of dirty fibers, an afterthought
thrown into the corner of a barn after the shearing of ewes and before the
birthing of dozens of soft-limbed lambs. The birthing time of Spring felt like a distant ancestor to this season of red and orange and brown. I pulled out a fistful of the tangled hairs
that once marked time with lengths of protein, marked movement with bits of
leaves and clumps of mud.
I teased out strands to make the wool bracelet that
would remind me of this day in the barn. Remind me how tired I was from chasing
turkeys down a hill when they escaped, how my arms ached from shuttling buckets
of grain and water to the broiler chickens in a far off pasture ringed with
oaks and maples, how my mind kept spinning with all the different kinds of
grass and feed and fowl and four-leggeds to know. How farming is hard and dirty
and wonderful. How it is the most necessary skill in the world right now. How
much has been forgotten, how much is rooted in remembering.
November. A month has gone by and the wool now on my wrist, spun between my fingers into a long line of dirty white, reminds me of these actions and ideas. It is stretched out and dirtier, soaked with rain of the Northwest and flecked with soil from the garden. It has grown thin in parts.
As I pull off sweater after sweater, it breaks with
the friction of fiber on fiber on skin. I am startled at my sudden anxiety as I
hold the once-circle-now-line in my palm. I wonder if I will remember laughing
hysterically as we chased turkeys down a hill on an autumn afternoon. I wonder if I can trust my
brain to remember anything without visual cues. I wonder if it means that the
relationship that helped to weave this circle together is somehow damaged,
broken, as if this wool is tied with fate.
What happens when there are so many bunches and knots that
the bracelet is no longer a bracelet because it is too broken and knotted and
thick to fit around a wrist? It becomes a ring. A promise wrapped several times
around (other) flesh and bone to become something new. A something that will
always fit, a something that can always be connected, tied, mended over and
over.
This is what we do. This is what we are: knotted and tangled and worn thin
in places and always able to wrap ourselves around what we love, what loves us,
and go on as a something old and new.
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