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.

As December approaches, I slip the ends around one another, a forced embrace, and loop them again to secure a knot. It is not smooth in this place, there is a visible difference, but everywhere else in the thread is varied, too. I see the circle of relationship, with the world, with a person, within a family: it is a tangled thread that is constantly breaking and being retied, thinning in places, bunching in others. 

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.