The bicycle theory...in practice

 

Good morning.  And it is a fine, fall one.  The air is cool, but not yesterday's chill, and though the sky is thin with clouds, it's fine for walking.  I'm not walking yet, though.

This last week has been both brilliantly celebratory and dastardly painful, but this morning I woke after a long good sleep, and began to make bread...Challah, to be exact.  It's the Jewish new year beginning tonight, and since I'd spent most of last week feasting on Aunt Sadie's 100th birthday (more later), and driving home in the pained aftermath of over-indulgence, I'd not ordered the traditional round sweet bread ahead.  So I told Joseph, who was vetting the menu I concocted around various diets, that I would make my own.

I can't remember the last time I baked a Challah (the community center makes a really good one here).  But like the bicycle (once you know how to ride, it comes back to you time and again), I opened the Family Cookbook and there, in my own words, was the recipe down to the last detail.  Except for following the ingredient amounts, I hardly needed it.  And now, an hour later, yeasted and mixed and scraped and kneaded for as long as my wrists could hold, it's resting smooth, shiny, and round in its traditional bowl (the largest of a set I got early in my housekeeping, from that original store of Cabela's, which had a thick catalog) under a linen cloth from my mother's 1943 wedding shower and the also-traditional sweater (mine...I wore it yesterday in the chill) on top to keep it warm, as my grandmother did.

I'll show you the end result after it's baked.  It'll be half a day or more by then.  You can't rush bread.

Meanwhile, the porch and my post to you begin to wile away the hour and a half or so as it rises for the first time.  I feel good about this loaf and about the morning.

I've been reading A.S. Byatt's novella, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), which I plucked on a whim from the library shelf as I passed the Bs the other day.  It's a marvelous story about stories about stories while the woman at its center becomes the character in her own story.  (It turns out that there's a current film which steals in a picky way from it, but don't bother...it's stripped of Byatt's real story) 

With that literary spirit, and a bright square of sunlight like a note left under the bedroom door as I left the room, I thought how the aftermath of pain, even as it wanes, brings its wisdom of change.

Perhaps the new year's and the fall's seeping in makes everything I think of lately involve the impulse of spontaneity.

To wit:  Here's that book on the shelf as I pass...I take it.  It turns out to be a something which excites me, after so many others have failed to be anything but the usual over-indulged trivia.  Byatt's is rather an indulgence of language and learning and most of all the depth and fascination of stories, and what makes a story the sort that continues lively over 1,001 nights (which is part of Byatt's story's story).

Here's a story in the making, too:  I woke up one morning a few weeks ago, and decided that minute to order myself tickets to London, Scotland and Paris in early October.  I can see my friends Will and Dorothy there, and Uncle George's sister Ada, and maybe her daughter Catriona, lovely woman, and then in Paris meet a new friend called Emily.  I found a hotel off the grid in the 6th, just the right neighborhood for me.  I started a list of what little I will pack.  

And Aunt Sadie's birthday, the long ride to Hershey, long anticipated and worked toward:  suddenly even there is change...and though Barbara's planned luncheon in the garden room at the Hotel Hershey is lovely, one night Eileen and I find ourselves in Aunt Sadie's apartment playing Scop, an old card game, with her...trying to remember how, the rules changing every ten minutes, and laughing ourselves silly.  We'd brought other games and crafts to do with her, but this inspiration is inspired!  We hardly want to leave for supper, so we have some soup while we are playing.  Later, we are torn away by the others to visit, and when we return later that evening, Eileen and I tired as we pick up the hands we were dealt earlier, Aunt Sadie is ready for a new game.  Wordle, crosswords, the game of life itself...she is adept at them.

She is a wonder, that centenarian, game for anything.  If a walk in the larger Gardens is now too much for her, a walk around the gardens of her apartment is not.  She walks among the other residents in her independent living building like a queen...not haughty, not proud, but beautiful...resilient and affectionate and admired.  She doesn't hear well, but her sight is as clear as the finest lens on the Hubble (and much older). 

 She still teaches us all sorts of useful things and remembers what we need to know.  It is an honor to be her niece and learn.

I'll call her today and see how the rest of her birthday week is going, and tell her about the bread rising in my bowl.  

She'll ask me how I am, and I'll tell her...better, thanks!  The little pain left is not worth mentioning, though it is worth remembering...the sign of turning a corner, flying off, making old things anew.  Making a new story from the old and its old stories and theirs.

Aha.  I see it is time to punch down that risen dough and let it begin to rise again.  As we all can do.  Later, I will coil it into the shape of a long spiral of life and let it rise a third time.  In its own time.

Meanwhile, happy fall, dear readers.

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Later the same day

le shanah tovah...

to a sweet year!

A stitch in time

Last spring, my neighbors Holly and Steve announced that they were signing up for the John C Campbell Folk School's session at the end of August and invited me to come along.   I'd been wanting to take a class there; had been collecting catalogs over the years since other friends had gone, impressed with their offerings.

I waited a few days before I logged on (we could call it slogging), and sure enough the classes I thought I'd like had no more space.  The Campbell School, in Brasstown, NC (not much farther west or south than that and you are in Tennessee or Georgia) fills its workshops and sessions fast, so I apologized to my kind neighbors and laid the summer back.  

But then, two weeks before their classes began, Holly and Steve mentioned it again at lunch, excited to be gathering their things together for the session.  "You should come," they said again.  Oh, why not? I thought.  I could use a break about now.  They offered me a ride (it's a 6-hour drive from here to the school) and a place to stay with them...there is nothing better than an adventure with good neighbors.

Before I called the school, I armed myself with classes I thought I could still try...the mixed media class that originally was closed but might have (unlikely as it seemed) a drop-out by now, photography, clay.  Alas, they were all filled.  "I could put you on a waiting list," the registering staff member told me on the phone.  But there was another that still had one opening:  Wool embellishment and embroidery.  I'm sure she could hear my sigh...alas, my hands, for all the basic sewing they do, aren't really attuned to such close, particular needlework.

I come from a family of superb needleworkers, who sewed, knitted, embroidered, beeded, and embellished their own (and often my) clothing over four generations.  I seem to be the one who didn't inherit the necessary genes for precise work, though when I was younger I managed a few sundresses, a plain but silk shift, and a tennis dress.

On the other hand, signing up for something so challenging would have two advantages:  one, it would get me out into the school; and two, I'd learn something difficult, however handy I'd turn out at it.  I'll take it, I told her.

As it turned out, spending five and a half days, all day, learning the intricacies of the stem stitch, the chain stitch, the blanket stitch (I already knew that one, though I kept forgetting how it begins), the daisy, the fern and feather stitches, the French knot and too many more, filled me with new life.  I found the class and my classmates, not to mention Kit, the instructor's assistant who was my savior, delightful.  

Penny, our instructor, with a lot of years' teaching there, handed to us daily, lump by lump, a huge set of embroidery skills.  In a class where skills ranged from mine (almost nil) to expert, I learned to pace myself and do what I could.

Yes, it was hard.  No, I didn't become proficient, and I take the prize for the slowest student there...I didn't even begin two of the scheduled projects, because I was working so hard on my individual design (see below), planning and re-doing and re-doing again, taking out at least a third of the stitches I'd put in.  But I finished it.  

Despite hours of practice, motor memory, which our instructor assured us would come, failed me time and again.  Still, I was comforted that I had the running and backstitch in hand already (sewing tasks at home provide practice all the time) and though the stem stitch's first angle eluded me with every start, I loved doing the French knot, the daisy, the loop, and the fern.  I couldn't imagine a future sitting quietly to do needlework cushions, but absolutely everything I learned could easily become part of my own art.

Even more wonderful was the Campbell School itself.  It's been an important folk school in the region since 1925, when Olive Dame Campbell and Marguerite Butler, with education, deliberation, and careful planning, established it.  At first with an agricultural focus, only a few years later it incorporated traditional craft skills, which were much needed and much practiced in the mountain areas, as the self-sufficiency was and is essential in remote areas. 

 I won't go into its whole history here**, but Campbell and Butler chose its location well, after much study and with the full, even hearty encouragement of the rural population.  Landscape is an important backdrop to their philosophy that making by hand begins with ground rules...that is, begins from the ground up.  (Steve's woodturning class, for example, began by making the tools they would use.)

Here the natural setting, water nearby, hills and gardens and rough trails inspire.  Plain as they first appear on the outside, the school's rustic buildings open to large well-lit spaces and good equipment for working at each of the crafts it teaches:  woodworking, iron and metal work, stone and pottery, cooking and baking (I'm tempted to sign up for the next class the sweet cooking instructor is going to hold:  cooking in the wild...we forage for our food), chair caning, furniture building, photography, weaving, basketweaving, quilting, sewing, painting and printing, bookmaking, dance and music (we were serenaded at lunch every day outside), the making of musical instruments, and more unrecalled.

And its people:  goodness, what nice people, talented people, helpful people, genial people, from everywhere.  Besides a few North and South Carolina residents, my classmates came from Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Washington DC, Vermont, Massachusetts and the Finger Lakes of NY State.  Ages ranged from early twenties to eighties.  There were couples and singles and siblings and friends.  Many were on fifth or fifteenth visits working there.  

Because let me tell you, you really work.  All day, breaking for lunch, and, if you are lucky enough to have stayed on or near campus, often returning after dinner to finish the day's assignment.  And after that, there are talks and concerts and dances and demonstrations to attend.  There is a sense of community that is deliberate...essential to the way one sees and learns and accomplishes and communicates.

Holly and Steve had arranged to stay in a house well outside of campus, up a mountain on smaller and smaller unlit roads until gravel brought us to our lair, so night visits weren't practical.  Still, our shoulders ached from hunching over stitches, paint and collage (H) and wood (S).  We had our balm, though.

The porch overlooking a steep garden and beyond a setting of trees and blue hills became my focal point there.  I could step out of my bedroom with a cup of coffee and inhale the forever view.  Or rock with Steve and Holly at the end of the day talking about what we'd made and mastered (or not...quite).

Steve's woodturning

Holly's mixed media woman

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On the fourth day, I received a message from my cousin Lorraine in Lancaster, who serendipitously forwarded me a "Slow Stitching" link she thought I would enjoy.  She hadn't known where I was or what I was struggling over, but I was quick to tell her and excited to find the ways that version of the craft offered for my art. I showed the link to the others in the class, though Penny, the instructor, didn't seem impressed...she's a needleworker of some skill, of course.

What did I do on my summer vacation, one might ask?  It seems to have been a time of needle and thread, of making...my own as well as others'.  A broadening time, from June with the Florida quilters through August at the Campbell, one stitch at a time.

I can't wait for next year.

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You can read more about the Campbell Folk School's beginnings here:

 https://www.wcu.edu/library/DigitalCollections/CraftRevival/story/campbell.html#:~:text=Campbell%20Folk%20School-,The%20John%20Cchronicled%20life%20in%20the%20region.]

And look at its catalog here:

https://www.folkschool.org/find-a-class/