Spinster

I came home this evening to my rabbit, Asphodel, having a long extra tail of loose fur. On the phone to my eldest son just then, I shrieked and rang off, terrified that this was some effect of the possibly uncaught mouse. In the event, his backside was only shedding and he had been grooming himself (although he was not happy with my help at that task.)

I removed more just now, and was reminded on how when I was in Ireland doing fieldwork for my thesis, I collected stray wool off of fences and bog-cotton wherever it occured, and hand-spun it (sans spindle or wheel) in the evenings after the same child above was asleep, talking in the lounge with my hosts at various places.

I learnt spinning on a drop-spindle, that most ancient of implements, but fibres can literally be spun by hand, and in my sewing box is yet a fair (tapestry) size skein of wool from those long ago days. It just seemed natural among the sea birds and clochans of the West of Ireland, when I was a young woman.

When I took up spinning on a wheel it came as the most natural thing in the world. A old folk-memory arose, perhaps due to the brown Hebridean wool I was using. It knitted up beautifully, waterfast in the grease. This homely activity, then and now, brought the old hard traditional life of the Blasket Islands to mind. They were inhabited until the 1950s by an Irish speaking population, at the veriest edge of modernity, but it was a precarious life, in no way romantic, except to one like your humble servant.

Beannachta De'