Sheep and flowers
Today: Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.
Issue No. 525
My Winter Scarf
Amy Chu
My Winter Scarf
by Amy Chu
Three years ago, I visited Lila’s Mountain Farm to learn more about sheep. At the end of my visit, Mary, the shepherd, bestowed on me three skeins of brown wool yarn, a bucket of manure, a peony root, and two tufts of raw wool. I tucked away the yarn, and purchased more from a craft store. I wanted to practice before making something special from Mary’s yarn, something I’d wear forever, something reliable and warm, which would remind me of that fall day.
Lila’s Mountain Farm is a working farm and I viewed the invitation to visit as an extension of friendship and goodwill. Mary later told me that she had recently turned away a documentarian who wanted to shoot footage of her sheep. But she had welcomed me because I worked with her trusted friend from the Social Prescription Pilot Program in the Berkshires. Perhaps she sensed I had good intentions when I told her I wanted to learn about the sheep for a story that I was developing.
I wrote the story, but I never showed it to Mary. I had made nothing useful from her generosity, writing instead a road-trip buddy comedy set in Ireland. The sheep in the story plays a role, but a cartoonish one. My project, I worried, was not beautiful or earnest like the warm autumn day she had opened her farm to me. I never even finished the practice scarf. The yarn that Mary had given me sat in the back of my closet, inside a burlap bag collecting dust.
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