October 3, 2007

Shearing, Yes. Eating, No.

In honor of National Spinning and Weaving Week (Oct. 1-7), I've decided it's time to tell the story of my Earth Mother days. In the early '80s, when the rest of you were spinning on the dance floor and weaving your way home after too many Tequila Sunrises, I was a sheep farmer. My flock provided many a spontaneous hands-on lesson in amateur veterinary science (I know how to milk a sheep and dock a lamb's tail). They also supplied a heap of wool for me to spin and weave. It was all part of a "back to the land" madness that prompted Starter Husband and me to acquire such esoteric skills as making beef jerky. The stuff was stringy and greasy and probably should have killed us, but we survived to play pioneer another day.

Growing our own clothing was our master's thesis in the field of self-sufficiency, but we started out with Survival 101: Keeping Warm. The Indiana winters can be brutal, and we had two small children and not a lot of money. Instead of feeding the voracious oil furnace in the basement, we heated our little farmhouse with wood. It was an endless cycle of chopping, splitting, piling, lugging, and stoking, but the fact that the heat was nearly free made up for the sore muscles, the burned fingers, and the layer of ash over everything.

Next came Survival 202: Growing Your Own Food. Here's what I learned from this course. Chipmunks love strawberries and no amount of chicken wire will thwart them. Also, when left unattended, a zucchini can grow to be more than 3 feet long and lends itself to much hilarity when handled by little boys. We had better luck with the tomato plants, which became sauce, paste, ketchup, and, when too rotten to can, an exploding ball for a zucchini bat.

It was time for Survival 306: Making Your Family's Wardrobe. My trusty Singer and I sewed everything but the boys' shoes: t-shirts, shorts, pants, and jackets. When they were well-outfitted, I moved on to Starter, who was partial to wool shirts. I picked plaid material, of all things, and spent the next month trying to get the patterns to line up. Then I made him a down-filled jacket from a kit. It came with the goose down compressed into tubes that were to be inserted into channels in the nylon jacket. A scene from "I Love Lucy" ensued and, six months later, I was still finding goose feathers in odd corners.

Survival 405: Roasting Livestock on a Spit was almost my undoing. Starter decided that we should host his department get-together and serve roast pig. This was not pork on a Styrofoam tray and wrapped in plastic; this was a hog on the hoof from the farm up the road. I refused to take part except to make the barbeque sauce, so Starter and a friend went to select the pig and haul it to the butcher. By the time I saw her, Petunia was gutted, hairless, and trussed. Trouble is, she still had her head. I went back into the house, curled up on the bed, and prayed to the zucchini gods to make me a vegetarian.

So, when Starter suggested that we raise sheep for meat and wool, I told him that I would never again eat anything that had a name. This philosophy caught on with the boys, who starting naming their lima beans.

We got a sheep, then another, and another. We borrowed a ram with black wool and had lambs with lovely gray wool. We learned to spin and I bought a loom to weave cloth. When the boys were old enough, they helped feed the flock and hosted their classes on field trips to see where wool comes from. We never ate any of our lambs, although I can't guarantee that the ones we took to the livestock mart were bought by vegetarian spinners and weavers.

I'm glad the arts of spinning and weaving have survived. Not everyone has the fortitude (or the acreage) to grow their own clothes, but it's important to know that clothing didn't always come from a sweatshop in China.