What’s bright blue and fluffy and light and compliant? What makes colored dust bunnies all over the living room floor? What can be transformed like magic into one of a thousand different lovely, useful things?

This,

once it’s prepared like this

and lying in eager hands, feeding into a spinning wheel orifice, like this…

becoming this…

and then, who can even guess what?

 

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you…” (1 Thess 4:11 NIV)

“She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands” (Pro 31:13).

 

DAY ONE: Prepping and spinning royal blue semi-luster wool…

It’s been awhile since I’ve taken time out solely to sit here by the front window and treadle the foot works and flow the wool into yarn. To sit without something simultaneous going, like movie dvd on the now blank flat-screen or baritone voice across the room reading a shared experience of novel or history or biography.

The only show plays outside my window, more static than some action flick but every bit as captivating: the vivid hues of those sister oaks standing sentry beside the driveway, lit by low-slant afternoon sun rays, drama-set against ashen gray backdrop of maples and poplars already nude.

I could have fetched a recording before starting, could have sat and listened while flyer whirled. But something precious lies in uninvaded quiet, punctuated only by foot treadle rhythm and whisper of well-oiled wooden works.

The coiled snake of roving shrinks and shortens and disappears altogether as the spool fattens up with deep blue yarn.

Another roving, more wool twisting and winding on, and after a time of quiet foot-and-hand work, another filled spool to remove.

Such a pile of this silky long fiber has languished too long in its vast basket. How good to see it becoming!

And what will it become from this, henceforth? That’s a future adventure to decide. Part of a weaving, perhaps—a shawl or a throw or even a vest or cape, I think, considering Sheep Betsy who gave it to us, with her unique characteristics and gifts.

The wheel spins ’round and the flyer twirls, and were young ones watching, their eyelids would droop, blink, droop lower, and soon small heads would nod sidewise, eyes surrendered shut.

 

Such drowsy peace often overcomes the restless, sleepless spinner, that once I used to steal downstairs in night’s dark to soothe my soul to brink of dreams.

It is a good thing, this spinning, so much for its own sake that I tend to twist and ply the yarn and wrap it into skeins or wind it into square-ish balls, then make of them arrangements to accessorize a matching room’s décor, hung from pegs or piled in bowls or baskets, symbols of being, and becoming.

*****

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