Lambsquarters (7 page)

MY FIRST RECOLLECTION
of the word “loft” is tangled in the attic of my grandparent’s cottage. It was a log house that Grandad had paid twenty-five dollars for and had moved to a piece of property he got by trading an old car. It was only four logs high—they were that thick. Big Timber Lodge, he called it.

Most of the cottage had no ceiling, just bare logs to the eaves, then the beams and rafters inside the roof. But on one end a second storey was framed, floored, railed and laddered, but unwalled, open to the room below. This was the loft. There were beds up there, but I was not allowed to sleep in them. My grandfather died when I was three. The cottage was sold. My memories are few.

I do recall being there—it must have been after his death, before my grandmother sold it—and only women were around. My mother, my grandmother, perhaps my aunt and my sister—city women. Mice were
caught in a trap under the bed each night. And in the morning no one could touch them. I remember taking them by the tails and running outside, hurling them over the bank into the woods. Poor dead mice that no one else would bury. And I, a budding Antigone, covered them with leaves and regretted their deaths. Honoured their corpses.

I think my grandfather was a loft kind of person. I think he understood spaces apart and yet connected. He was a painter and a writer, and he appreciated children. On his mantel he carved, “Beside This Glowing Fire May Warmer Friendships Grow.” He believed in fairies and Kipling and Dickens. And I regret his death. I regret not knowing him. But I treasure his paintings, his writings, his books. I visit his grave. And I carry his legacy in lofts.

When I first came to the farm—the day I saw it—I thought it had two lofts: one in the house and one in the barn. I don’t know how long it took me to correct my terminology. In Grey County, the space above the stable is not a loft; it is a mow.

You mow (oh) hay when you cut it, but you put it in the mow (ou). The former is done low to the ground, and the second hurts, or houses owls. How helpful is phonics with the letters ow? Other places have haylofts, but here we have mows. In fact we have hay mows and straw mows, carved from the same space over the stable.

A mow in early June is an airy place. If the timing and season have been right, the mow will be all but empty, with a few bales of hay left perhaps, some old straw on top of the granary. All the beams are exposed, as well as the mortises and tenons, the hand-drilled holes holding hand-hewn rungs in the ladders to nowhere. Straight ladders go up either side from the middle. Suicide ladders that go almost to the roof and abruptly stop.

Light seeps in through the barnboards and throws diagonal rays across floors golden with strawdust or green with hayseed. Like Zeus morphing through the planks in a shower of gold to seduce Danae in her tower, the sun slides through the cracks to conceive a Perseus of its own in the promise of fodder to come. And rain on the metal roof first pings then escalates to a thunderous roar during a spring storm. There is little to absorb sound: Echo cries her lonely plea.

The barn was empty when we first came, of course. No animals; no feed. That first winter it stood forlorn and unvisited. The rusty siding and tin roof were its outward signs of grieving and loss. And during our first summer it lay lonely too. I learned about baling and stooking and mowing that summer, but not in my own barn. I helped fill the neighbours’ mow with my hay in return for their knowledge. Books can’t convey the heat in the hay mow when the crop reaches the top, or the height of the wagon and thrill of riding on a well
packed load from the field. Sweating from working the land, bitten by cut stalks and thistles, I flexed my aching back and extended my weary arms.

The second year, I turned my barn loft into mows, one for hay and one for straw. I had my first sheep now, just a few, but they were resident. They would winter here, would need feed. The crop came in, abundant, dry, a little later than I would learn to like, but wholesome and good. We got the elevator set up: a long conveyor belt (just a little wider than a bale of hay) tilting from the barn bank through the door and across the barn floor to reach the highest mow. Until the haystack began to grow, the elevator just picked up the bales to drop them on the floor, a senseless operation. I knew now how to pack my mow with tight bales on the outside row, to build a wall of hay that would withstand the winter climbing. A reticulated wall, like the second stomach of a sheep (called the reticulum or honeycomb bag) where it was headed. We set up each row in the opposite direction—now lengthwise, now widthwise—for strength and safety. When a boot hit a crease between the bales mid-winter, the foot would just sink down to the knee, not forever.

The ladder came to life as the day progressed. Climbing was easy as the bales came in, just a row at a time. But getting down to the barn floor for lemonade between loads could only be done on those ancient rungs, set on the outer edge of the haystack, like a rock
face, a perpendicular decline. As the wall grew, the trip got more treacherous, extending beyond the ladder’s top, over the high beam, where there were no guardrails or ropes or carabiners. No crampons on my boots. My cottage loft had not prepared me for this. It had been small and safe, but I had been taught to fear it. Perhaps that fear festered and was now resurfacing.

I still resist the high hay mow on the first cold days of winter feeding, when I’m alone all day, where no one would find me if I lost my footing and fell. The sheep would bleat to be fed, but help wouldn’t hear.

The straw mow is smaller, beside and over the granary, which has pronunciation problems of its own. Grain fills it, but it loses the hard
a
-sound in the process and ignores the single
n
. Granary rhymes with tannery. Archaic words for archaic practices that go on all around us still if we will see. The straw mow fills itself. The golden bales are so light and dry they can be tossed gently into place. The straw gilds the mow and closes in both sides with living walls of bedding and feed. Gold and green. Echo, shamed and rejected as in the myth, disappears across the fields to the edge of the wood as long as the barn is full.

THE HOUSE LOFT
is still a loft, but changed too in its way. We first discovered it behind a derelict door, which revealed a forgotten staircase, unlighted, leading narrowly through unfinished walls. Dried plaster
oozed from slatted lath on one side; you could see the blackish insides of outdoor boards on the other. On a spacer between the two-by-fours was a mummified mouse. A bit big for a mouse. A mere case of a rodent, tanned from inside out, leathern and brown, the grey fur lost in its dry preservation. The stairs were decidedly steep, though not perpendicular like the barn ladders, and led directly to a dark sleeping loft, fallen into disrepair from neglect, over the back kitchen.

Mysteriously, nothing about the loft was quite finished. There were no walls or floor or ceiling, but loose boards left lying over the joists made hunched walking possible around the open stairwell. One small window graced—no it did not grace, it punctured the dormer end. The glass was cracked, fly-specked, cobwebbed, opaqued with years of disinterest.

I don’t know if we were told it was a sleeping loft or if I invented that use for generations of grandchildren, farmhands, and summer visitors who were brave or disrespected enough to sleep there. It was a summer heat trap, with no ventilation except from the crack in the nailed-shut window, yet the first frosts in fall would seep through the siding like short-tailed shrews.

During our first two years the loft stayed closed, dark, scary. But when the water ran hot, the light shone, the heat radiated and the brick tent encased a hearth again, it was time to designate the loft as a space for creation.

As long as I can remember, I have played at art, dabbled at craft. My grandmother taught me to knit when I was small, and I sewed most of my clothes at school. I learned sculpture and tried to paint. For a while I did pots, but something wasn’t right: the mess, the wet, the dependence on kiln and glaze. Only the mesmerizing circles of the wheel entranced me. And so here I turned to wool, to turning fleece into wool, to twisting and plying my need for craft with my love of animals and from them spinning a life.

I had a neighbour who spun. I followed her home from Alderney one day and boldly turned in her lane. She got out of her car, gave me a quizzical look, and I told her my business, asked her to help me, begged for the knowledge to spin. Malka gave me my start right then and there, invited me into her home, her studio, and slowly showed me the wool, the wheel, the magic of thread. She is a meticulous person, and her skeins are perfect. She is an artist, and her concepts are clear. Together we learned the secrets of my sheep (for she has none), the qualities of those first Hamp crosses with their bulky dense wool, and I made my first continuous thread, my first skein, my first pair of socks for my beloved.

The socks didn’t happen quickly. I needed equipment and patience and time. I suffered discouragement, despair and rage. At first I tried a drop spindle, an aptly named tool. A simple shaft attached to a whorl, it can be made from a stone and a stick, or a potato pierced with a
pencil, or it can be lathed from fine wood. Flicking the whorl sets the shaft spinning and sends the twist up into the fleece, which grows on itself as the spindle gently falls lower and lower. But as the yarn breaks in inexperienced hands, the spindle drops all at once, and the more it dropped the more discouraged I got, and the more it broke. If I could manage to spin a full length of yarn from hands to floor, I would stop and wind the results on the shaft and begin again. But beginning was perilous, so I stood on a chair to increase the length before I was forced to stop and wrap up the strand. It took forever to fill the shaft and the result was grim. It looked nothing like wool in a thread; it was lumpy and uneven, a thin spiderweb filament culminating in a blob of fleece, now thick, now thin, connected by the sheer force of the wool itself, an imbricated fibre, elastic and gregarious, sticking together with microscopic barbs that extended like paper dolls holding endless hands in a row.

I bought a spinning wheel. No more chair standing, or winding, or stopping. The bobbin fills by itself through a mechanical combination of cords or brakes, and the wheel is powered by foot. Both hands are free to feed the fleece, to control the twist, to guide the yarn onto the spool. It looked so easy when Malka spun. Her foot a soft rhythm, her hands relaxed, the fleece feathers in her lap, waiting their turn to fly.

But the wheel lost its pace at my touch; it balked and bumped and turned in reverse. It travelled the
floor, trying to flee my heavy foot until I wedged it in place. I abandoned the fleece and retired my hands for the moment to focus just on my foot, gently down and up, down and up, loosening the tension, working with the wheel and establishing a rhythm. So deceptively simple to turn the wheel at a steady pace, so discouragingly difficult.

I would just find my speed, make peace with the wheel, feel ready to add the wool and begin to spin, when suddenly it would stop revolving or reverse. I felt all the frustration of Jason’s quest, wondering how I could accomplish the labours necessary for attaining my golden fleece. The wheel was my wild bull, the raw fibres my dragon’s teeth, but my desire to succeed finally got me past the dragon (perhaps Malka spelled it to sleep) and the circle whirled, finally; it drew in my fleece and wound my thread on the bobbin.

Miles and miles of locks lay waiting to be formed into yarn, as they grew on the backs of my flock.

BEFORE WE TACKLED
the loft, we filled wool sacks in the barn at shearing and brought baskets of luminous fleece with its rich raw smell, thick with lanolin, into the house. There was too much to knit, too little time. I bought a loom and learned to weave. It was an instrument I could play like a keyboard to create full concertos of twills and tweeds, solos of diamond and cross. I used my full reach to throw the shuttle, to catch
through the web, a cloth growing under my eyes as I worked. Such comfort in climbing onto the bench, settling up to the beam, positioning my feet on the treadles, working the spaces with my toes, arching my arms for the throw. A settled position, not easily vacated in those days before mobile phones. There were times it was difficult to climb out, entranced as I was by the rhythm, the click of the lams, the scrutch of the reed, the ratchet clicking cloth onto the roller.

At first I had my loom in the kitchen, my wheel by the fire. But the fruit of that loom too often worked its way into the pots on the stove; wool turned up in the stew. And one day, in a fit of frustration with pastry that refused to roll, I went to throw a fistful on the floor and missed. Heddles and reeds, treadles and pawls covered in lard and flour. It was time the loom had a room of its own: the loft.

We shifted the stairs from west to east, filled the north wall with glass, set two dormers on each side and gave them gothic windows crafted by a near-gothic glazier. We argued with our carpenter, coddled him and cajoled him into preserving rather than levelling. From our own bush we harvested fat cedars, and by way of an ancient man with a shingle mill, we roofed our loft with our own wood. Our mason matched the brick with pilfer from a local ruin and built a nineteenth-century chimney pot around the centre flue for the wood stove below.