Today is the last day of the current incarnation of Hanks Yarn and Fiber. You can still find us online, where we’ll be relaunching the website with a big bang sale on July 4th. People keep asking me how I feel, if I’m OK, with that same sad concern in their eyes from when people asked me how my dad was doing. And this may surprise you, but… I’m OK. This is what I can’t seem to get people to understand (maybe because I’ve had more time to think about it? More time to work through the stages of grief?) but really, it was worse for me before we told people. It was worse when there were days we spent more being open that we took in with sales. It was worse when we couldn’t order any yarn and the shelves looked depleted and sad. It was worse when I couldn’t be honest with my friends about my worries of the future. It was worse when I couldn’t get to sleep at night, or would wake up at 4 AM with thoughts spinning in my mind about what could we do to get more people spending money in the shop, or how could we cheaply advertise, or why people weren’t coming in or were coming in for hours and hours of free assistance with yarn and tools and patterns that they didn’t buy at our shop. That was worse. This is not worse than the months I spent doing that. This is change. We have a direction, and we are changing to suit it.

I mean… I get that people are sad we are closing. I get they are going to miss the couches and the coffee and the conversation. I’m going to miss that, too. I get that they are going to be lost for a while, changed, different with no place to go and be with like-minded people in the middle of the afternoon if they want to. That’s one of my favorite aspects of our little shop. A place they can just drop into, where everybody knows their name. I really do grok their loss, and I’m sorry for them. But in spite of the lamenting we’ve been hearing – and I apologize if anyone reading this feels I’m devaluing their feelings by saying this, but… it’s just simply not worse for you than it is for us. Was this yarn store your dream? Did you come here six days a week to volunteer your time to carve out a safe space full of yarny goodness, easily shared knowledge, and relaxed atmosphere? Did you sacrifice your weekends with family, watching your god-daughter grow up from a toddler to a little girl, friends birthday parties? Did you skip family dinners or work when you were sick or turn doing fun things down just because you couldn’t fit them into your already packed schedule? And even though these are all sacrifices, did you do it willingly and with an open heart because you and your friends had a dream and by Flying Spaghetti Monster you were going to beggar yourself to see it happen? We did. And we did it with love in our hearts because we wanted to make this work. So don’t behave as if closing the yarn shop is worse for you than it is for us. Because it’s not.

OK, ending the bitchery part of this – wow, didn’t even know I was going to spew all that out! Is anyone even still reading this far, or did I piss everyone off?! But hey, look on the bright side; apparently I’ve been holding this in for a few days, so maybe I’ll be nicer to people at work today! Hurray!

So. Moving on.

Where do we go from here?

Obviously we’re going to be selling online. Sharon will be doing all of the website work, processing of orders, and mailing yarn. I will by dying all of our line of yarn, and what was just sock and lace will be branching out into worsted and sport. I’ve been a veritable dyeing machine the last three weeks. I can’t wait for the relaunch of the website so I can show you everything I’ve done (although you can see some sneak peeks here and here). Tim has been renovating our house like a renovating mo-fo, turning our dining room into a dye bar so that I can do this at home. This has also affected the kitchen, and I’m sure I’ll do a blog post about that in the future (this is already getting long enough).

And although I have had exactly zero time to do anything for it yet, I’ll be selling stuff on Etsy as HaldeCraft (what, back so soon? I told you I didn’t have anything there yet). I will be selling ceramics, soaps (soap club, y’all! Soap mailed directly to you and you don’t even have to think about it! Not like I’m looking at you, Denise and TW!), and probably some framed photographs.

I don’t feel like I’m at a crossroads. I feel like I have one road in back of me and that there are three branching off in front of me. The road to the far left is paved, straight, no hills, and easily walked. However, it involves getting a JOB at a COMPANY where I wear nice clothes and answer phones all day and cry in the shower before going to work because I never have enough time for crafting. The middle road is gravel, slightly bumpy, there are a few hills and some twists. It involves getting a part-time JOB at a COMPANY and pretending that I care about what I’m doing while I devote every other spare second to crafting, still giving up parts of my life like social activities. The road to the right is barely even a cowpath; it is covered in branches and I can’t see through the trees for more than a few feet. It involves trying to make crafting my job and I have no idea how that’s going to work out. But guess which path I’m moving towards?

I had a dream about my dad last night. Nothing major; he was taking a bath and kept moving from tub to tub in this weird house that apparently had, like, seventeen bathrooms. And I kept following, cleaning up after him, picking up candles and books he left behind and trying to figure out what to do with them (oddly, NOT AT ALL UNLIKE UNPACKING ALL THESE BOXES, which I’ve been doing after work this week, to clean and make room for things). Now, I love my dad more than anything. I am who I am because of his influence. But when he died, he had about 750 hours of vacation time that he’d never taken, because he believed in putting the JOB first. He had books he hadn’t written, unfinished stories, and regrets for things he never took the time to do. And I don’t want to be like that. I want to regret things not working out, rather than regret never trying them. The Magic Eight Ball seems to be telling me that now would be a good time to try something new. Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Seize the future.

Let me say first that nobody (that I know of) has been diagnosed with cancer, has been hit by a bus, had a horrible miscarriage, or any other such badness.

But for those of you who are regulars at our yarn store, or have been cheering from the sidelines, we have some news about some changes. I will wait while you go read that, if you want. doo dee dooo….. la la la la la…. doo dee doo…. back yet? Never left? Want me to just tell you in a nutshell, or recap if you just read it and your mind has gone blank? Hanks Yarn and Fiber is changing to a new business model that involves being online and no longer having a bricks-and-mortar storefront.

I have so much I want to say.

This is hard. The first few weeks I expect to be walking around the house trying to talk to Sharon, maybe even shouting out to her like she might be in the other room. It’ll be like when you can’t remember where you put your coffee cup, and you walk around with a sense of loss and irritation at yourself. The thought that I won’t see Nugget taking her brave steps across the floor of the yarn shop is like a knife in my heart; so is the thought of not seeing Little K push the little red rocking chair around. I love those kids SO!HARD! And that’s crazy, because y’all know what a bitter and black place my heart is. It’ll be hard because I feel like a failure. I feel like I am stupid and useless and have wasted the last three years on something that didn’t work.

This is easy. I’m going to get to do a part of the job I love – dyeing yarn – all the time. Maybe even in my PJs. I am reassured by my loving family that I am not a failure; that if anything, the economy has failed me. That Ginger and Sharon and I were strong and amazing for moving forward with our dreams, and if I was brave enough to do that three years ago I am surely just as brave now. This is not a failure. This is a re-imagining of our dream, set to fit the horrible status of the US economy. We won’t have the enormous rent hanging over our heads like a guillotine, and that will make things easier for us. Also, I can find a part-time job (file this under “maybe easy, maybe hard”) and get a paycheck, thus ensuring that our new kittens will not suddenly be made homeless.

This is the worst thing ever in the history of worst things. I am a failure. I should be put in front of a firing squad. Wait – actually? Yeah. Smack me. My father dying was worse than this. If I got through that I can get through this. We are given burdens in this life; also shoulders.

This is ultimately going to be OK. We are going to be able to reach heights with our lines of things online that we just couldn’t do in a shop setting, because of all the overhead. And the people who love us, love hanging out with us – that won’t stop. My time is easily bought for cold beer, cute pets, Satchel’s, Sweet Dreams, and Yum Cupcakery. And also easily bought just for being able to hang out with you. So… call me! After July 1st, my dance card is pretty fucking free!

And you know what? A lot of the reason I haven’t been blogging about personal things is that I’ve wanted to share my fears with you for such a long time. And I couldn’t. We thought we might save the storefront. We though we might be able to swing it; maybe move, maybe downsize… but we didn’t know. And I’ve been so confused and worried and wanting to talk to you, but … didn’t want to start rumors about the yarn shop that would make people think we’ve closed and thus make things worse. So it’s been easier to not say anything at all, rather than try to be fluffy. I’m looking forward to blogging more, to letting more of my heart out on these pages.

I hope you’ll stick around – both here, and on our online shop. I hope you’ll still like me. Because I love you – HARD!

I didn’t want to walk this morning. I wound up walking, just only for about 40 minutes, tops. I tried to tell myself that it was because I’d overslept (by ten minutes). I tried to tell myself that it was because it looked like it might rain. I tried to tell myself it was because it was cold (only 44 degrees F, and I’ve walked in colder).

I tried not to think that the real reason I didn’t want to walk was because of the three rapes that happened earlier this week, just over a mile from my house.

As women, I think we’re constantly on guard. Even if we don’t tell ourselves that we are. But how aware are you when you walk around…? I? Am always aware of who is around me, even if I pretend not to notice them. I’m always flicking my eyes here and there when walking through a seemingly empty parking lot. Carrying my key wedged between my fingers in such a way that if I have to punch or stab, I will leave a motherfucking mark. I always size up people coming towards me when I’m walking Bridgett in the morning – especially if they don’t look like joggers, or aren’t walking a dog of their own. I am always on guard.

And I am aware, every single morning, that I am a small female walking a harmless dog and that I am alone. Thankfully Bridgett does look fierce (not that I think if someone wanted to, they’d let her stop them) … even though we all know she’s a big softy at heart.

And I can’t be one of those people who lets fear run their lives. Sure, healthy respect for danger is a good thing. And if you’re one of those people who never leaves the house because they’re afraid of what might happen… well, I’m sorry for you. I understand where you’re coming from. But I can’t live like that.

So this morning I told myself it was the grey fog. The dark clouds. The cold. The weather was the reason I didn’t want to walk.

And then, albeit not for long, I walked anyway.

And that’s really what I needed; time off from work to clean my house and my mind. Time to restore my mental health, hit that mental reset button.

Don’t get me wrong – especially if you’re one of my customers, or friendstomers – I love what we do with all my heart and I do not want to be doing anything else. But life, since September, has been crushingly heavy. I am stressed out all.the.time; always worried – more than usual, and let me tell you that “usual” is already  “an awful fucking lot” anyway – about money, about income, about lack of income, about how the shop is doing, about how classes are going, about whether all the construction around us will kill the shop, about the health of my pets, about my own health… and it seems like the more I worry and fuss, the less I take care of myself. And the less I take care of myself, the less I can see that I’m not taking care of myself, because I always tend to put myself behind everything else anyway. It’s sad when you can lie to yourself and say that lighting some incense, playing Farmville, and drinking coffee is “taking care of oneself”. Sure, that’s fun – and part of taking care of oneself is having fun – but it’s not priming the pump that produces the volume of energy that I regularly give out to others during a typical day. I need other things for that, things that I haven’t been doing because it’s easy to tell myself I’m too busy or that I can’t afford it.

So I needed a few days off, especially before Sharon goes on vacation and I have some long days at the shop ahead of me, to reset my head. I got some acupuncture. I got some chiropractic work. I have more of both of those things planned. I spent some time with family. I cleaned up around the house. I threw some shit out. I did some laundry and didn’t fold it and tried not to berate myself for not folding it when it really was just fine sitting on the dresser in a heap anyway. I knit some, although more for classes and shop knitting than for personal reasons. I looked at flowers. I went for walks. I did some self-evaluation.

The end result? I need to take better care of myself. I need to find some ways to put myself first. I need to keep pressing that mental reset button.

I wish you could walk with me in the mornings. I’d like to show you my Gainesville, tell you about the Gainesville that exists in my head. Have I ever told you I dream about this town? The town in my dreams is just a little bit different than Gainesville. The streets are a little bit longer… or shorter (or more curved, or have businesses instead of houses, or visa-versa), houses have moved around. In my dreams, and in my morning walks, my imagination whispers me stories, secrets about these streets. In my head, I hear the Cowboy Junkies – That house there is haunted, that door’s a portal to hell; this street holds its secrets very well.

Sometimes I just make up stories about the people who live in the houses I pass; ideas based on things they leave outside or bumper stickers on cars or things I hear through windows as I pass. But sometimes there’s a full-fledged fictional character that pops into my mind from the pages of my unwritten urban fantasies.

The first house I want to tell you a story about is based on one right up against the park. It’s behind another house – they share a driveway – and it’s nestled on two sides by the park. It must be so lovely to have that view! In my city, this is Free’s house. Free’s parents bought the house when they moved to the city in the mid-sixties. It’s a rambling farmhouse, framed on two sides by the park. While not technically a commune, there were always people in and out of the house; sometimes down on their luck and sometimes not. Either way, they always helped out with chores around the property. Shirtless long-haired men fed the somewhat free-range chickens (descendants of which were seen around the park for years and years afterward) and strong-minded women in billowy cotton skirts could often be found on the roof with a hammer and replacement shingles. Half-naked happy children played around the small pond hidden by the house. Free was an only child but had a good twenty brothers and sisters of the spirit. In her teen-age years, she and her father would bury her mother between the pond and the ancient Live Oak, after cancer took all it could from her. Free’s father still lives there too, and together they run an all-night breakfast and burger joint downtown called The Reality Kitchen. They open late at night and close early in the morning, don’t have nearly the number of drunken college students wandering through as you might think, and they never kick anyone out no matter how desperate, unclean, or indigent they might appear. Free’s father knows that you just never know, should never judge; the most frightening and dirtiest of men may be a king inside.

The next house I have a story about is the dusky pink Victorian apartments. The building is owned by Maddie McGuire, who also owns and runs Molly McGuire’s downtown. The same odd clientele that can always be found in the back room of the dark pub gifted the apartments to Maddie in return for a favor. The people who need to live there seem to always find the place, even though it’s not advertised by anything more than a small sign in the office window. It’s a large, almost block-long building built in the late 1800′s for lodging of men who worked the rail line. Creaky pines line the front walk, and paving stones broken by pine roots run from the sidewalk up to the five front doors. The building is three stories tall, and has fifteen small apartments. Piper has lived there since moving to the city, and while his night job is a taxi driver, he also doubles as a handyman at the apartments. He fights loneliness and his not-so-hidden sorrows by taking most of his meals down at the pub. His life begins to change, though, once he meets someone else new to town; Sophia.

Sophia, or Sophe, lives in the House of Women. This is a rambling old house a few blocks between the apartments and the park and currently has six strange and unusual women housed under its eaves. Sophe came to town after an identity-changing cross-country run away from her demons. She misses the temperature of the Pacific Northwest but not the fists of the man she’s running from. If it was one thing her father and husband both taught her to do, though, it was make a mean drink; so she was able to find both a job tending bar at Molly’s and a place to live through a friend of Maddie’s. She doesn’t know it, but the back-room regulars at Molly’s are keeping their eyes on her. They have plans for her and Piper both.

Lastly here I am subjecting you to my favorite house. I don’t have any stories about this house, other than I dream about what it might be to live there. Three stories, brownish-gray wooden shingle siding except for a red brick addition on one side, white trim, wide front porch, portal window on the second floor… it puts me in the mind of a seaside cliff house. I see it and feel northeasters, hear the cry of gulls, smell salty air. I love that house.

And now as I round the corner and come up my street, I think about why I want to tell you all these things in the morning. Why am I so damn chatty and open in the morning? I hate mornings! I’ve spent most of my life wanting to be a Night Owl. I loved the night as a child, being the only one up while my parents were sleeping. Then as a teen and early twenty-something, I thought night what I was supposed to prefer. But it turns out I just liked being alone! WHO KNEW?!?!?! It might be time, at 40, to admit that I am a morning person. Morning is when my imagination is at it’s best. Morning is when I am most vulnerable, most open to sharing secrets. (Not that I have secrets; I just have things I don’t tell you.) Each step closer to home is another brick in the wall around my heart. Another, as the song goes, nail in my heart. (I want to be good, is that not enough?) Each step closer to to home is another moment when my imagination pulls its turtle shell over its head and hibernates. Another moment closer to being torn between the shackles of my obligations and the enjoyment of the life path my feet are on.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it for most of the day. Did she get out? Was anyone injured? It looked like the kind of fire that probably took someone’s life. It looked… violent. Angry. Frightening.

So of course I wanted a photo of it. Voyeuristic? Sure, a bit. But I’m reminded of a story my mom told me, about the house next door, when we lived in Baltimore, catching on fire. And the only thing she could think to do was photograph it, because that helped her process what was going on. And since – and you might not know this if you don’t know my mom – I pretty much am a carbon copy of her, I did take a photograph.

And then of course, I wanted to post the photo in my Photo-of-the-Day album. I’m trying to keep those photos as yarn-free as possible; I started doing the project again because while I love yarn (obviously) I am around yarn 24 hours a day, and I really need one thing in my day that isn’t about knitting. But this is an awfully personal photograph for the family involved. So post it? Or not? After much chewing over it, I decided to post it.

Here’s why: this is affecting me on a number of levels. Although it might sound like it, I’m really not trying to make the actual fire all about me – for fucks sake, I slept through the whole 2 AM event! – but I think the repercussions of this are going to be felt through my neighborhood for a long time, and I’m going to be blogging about that as it happens, so I want a starting point. A place to reference. A place to come back to.

In no particular order, here’s what’s on my mind…

It’s the only wooden house on our block. Every other house, I think (there’s more wooden houses over on 8th) is like mine – cinder block. In looking at it (and granted, I’m not a professional), and in chatting with the neighbors, we all think they’re going to have to raze the house and rebuild. That there’s no way to just… renovate this. And razing and rebuilding takes a long time; there will be long days of loud noises, big trucks blocking our already small street. I’m sure there will be days the entire ‘hood will want the noise of rebuilding to be over, and yet feel guilty for thinking that because of the magnitude of her loss.

I want to get a second smoke detector for our house. And get new batteries for the one.

I can’t imagine the fear of waking up to the sound of breaking glass. Apparently that’s what woke her – she thought someone was breaking in, and grabbed a flashlight. Opened the door from the bedroom and found the whole house in flames. She couldn’t get out the door, but broke a window and got she and her two grandchildren out alive. I would like to think that I would be able to think that fast in a crisis, that I wouldn’t panic. But when I try to imagine it, all I can think of is the fear.

Her daughter lives down at the other end of the block. She’d been watching her grandchildren that night. I can’t fathom the guilt that she must feel, for something like this happening– guilt of it happening it all, coupled with relief that she saved their lives. How do you cope with that? Which direction does your heart go?

Everything was ruined. Everything. Of course my first thought of loss goes to family photos, heirlooms, antiques, books; things that can’t be replaced. But when you say everything, that also means living the next few weeks wearing clothes donated by strangers (I’m going through my closets now for things that I don’t wear but look new, as a few other women on the block have already done; one has already bought her new clothes and a gift certificate so that she can buy more). She’s staying with her daughter right now, but… will she be able to stay there for the duration of building a new house? Will she even want to move back into it– she’d just gone through her savings, renovating the 60-year old house slowly over the last couple of years. Everything. Shoes. Socks. Jeans. PJs. Towels. Shampoo. Camera. Favorite coffee mug. Dishes. Pots and pans. DVDs. Music. Everything gone, and she has to start over. Do you look at that like a million tiny losses, a million tiny cuts to your soul? Or do you shrug it off and move forward, looking ahead to rebuilding your life? Is there a middle ground in there somewhere?

OK; I need to quit typing and start getting ready for work. I’m sitting here at my computer, with my coffee mug, getting ready to go into my shower and then dry off with my towels and get into my clothes. I have it lucky. I have things we take for granted every day. But all of that could change, for any of us, at any moment.

Zen and the Art of the only book I’ve not been able to finish reading, twice

There are so many places I could have gone with this title.

Zen and the Art of Being a Pretentions AssNubbin

Zen and the Art of Stabbing Out My Own Eyes

Zen and the Art of Pointless Repeated Rambling Oh God Make It Stop

Zen and the Art of This is the Book That Never Ends, It Just Goes on and on My Friends

So the other thing in addition to this that’s been making me think a lot of where I was in my early 20’s is that I’ve been trying to reread a book I was reading then, which I could never finish.

I would read about 20 pages, and stop. And think. Think about quality. Think about relationships. Think about how thinking can make you crazy. Think about how smart I must have looked, a hot young thing in her early twenties, reading such a heady book—and a dog-eared copy at that (thank you, Friends of the Library Book Sale). I would think about how brilliant and impassioned my friends were, for they had all read this book and they all had Great Thoughts and Important Things to Say, and my lord weren’t we all just the shit?! We would smoke pot and drink cheap beer and stay up until 3 in the morning debating Great World Issues like politics and religion and sexuality and how Society Was Evil for Putting Labels on Everything and basically how we were all going to Make a Change If We Could Ever Get Our Stoned Asses Off the Couch (and if you did get off the couch, could you please get the rest of us some chips, thanks).

But I could never finish the book. I told myself it was because it was too intense. It was too deep, that I wasn’t ready for it yet, that maybe I needed certain life experiences before My Soul Would Be Ready for Knowledge.

Now I realize, after trying to read it again, that it’s full of insufferable prattling, and I couldn’t finish reading it because it was just So Ungodly Awful.

I apologize now, if this is your favorite book; if you read it and it changed your life or opened new vistas for you or if you actually bought a motorcycle and drove across the country with a beat-up copy of it in your back pocket at all times. Obviously you are more spiritually enlightened than I am, and I bow in your shadow, Pretentious McCrazypants.

I bought the book on tape, thinking that maybe it would be better, HAHAHAHA wrong. And this is so funny I have to blog it: I was walking the dog the other morning, listening to the portion I had downloaded, and the author is going on and on (and on) about how Quality is neither in the mind nor in the object, and my eyes were glazing over… and then there was a pause in the “action” and the narrator said, “Chapter 22.” Yes, I had downloaded Part Two. And apparently I listened to 45 minutes before I figured that out. HAHAHAHAHAH! I rock.

I downloaded Part One, listened to about an hour, and gave up in frustration. Clearly my brain has not grown philosophically enough to appreciate this book.

Posted by Lorena on 03/07 at 10:53 AM in Personal,  Navel Gazing

(Original comments are after the cut…)

Comments:

I’m not even sure I know which book you’re talking about, so I’m sure I haven’t read it. And I’m really OK with that.

Posted by Finn on March 07, 2008 at 12:05 PM | #

OK, I looked it up. And could not even finish reading the description of it. *yawn*

Posted by Finn on March 07, 2008 at 12:08 PM | #

I’ve attempted like 5 times, approximately every 5 years. I am totally with you. Good if you want to put yourself to sleep.

Posted by Squidwidget on March 07, 2008 at 03:10 PM | #

A boyfriend in the past tried to convince me it was the best book ever. I *think* I read it. But I clearly have forgotten about it.

*double yawn*

Posted by jacquieblackman on March 07, 2008 at 04:46 PM | #

Hmmm. Zen and the art of forgetfullness. All I remember about it was the description of the road right under your eyes when riding. And that is a sort of scary thing if you’re looking, as a passenger, at 70 or so mph. We hope the driver isn’t looking quite that closely. I guess I missed the main zen point of the book, which might be the point. All I can say about motorcycles is, Thank goodness bike week ends today and I can venture out again to the shopping center across from biker heaven, an impossible place to go for the past week or 10 days. And I still haven’t seen coleslaw wrestling. And the bar that had pudding wrestling closed last month. I almost missed the sound of their bands playing so loud I could hear them 4 miles away. What a loss to the community. That’s what motorcycles mean to me. It’s zen, baby, yeah.

Posted by alicesenior on March 09, 2008 at 09:12 AM | #

Y’all don’t know how glad I am that it’s not just me not being able to read the book.

Posted by Lorena on March 12, 2008 at 11:06 PM | #