Laurabelle’s Blog

I didn’t know it then, but yesterday was Mountain Day. Mountain Day is a traditional holiday at Mount Holyoke College; on some beautiful fall day, students wake up and find out that it’s Mountain Day and classes have been cancelled. Traditionally one climbs Mount Holyoke, but whatever the activity, the holiday is always better for being a surprise. Even alumnae are so attached to the holiday that the Alumnae Association sends out emails every Mountain Day.

I didn’t know yesterday was Mountain Day, but I climbed a mountain anyway. Mount Holyoke hardly deserves that name, actually (it’s only 878 feet tall), but Jeff and I climbed the mountain, Mount Rainier. We neither started at the bottom nor reached the very top, but we climbed more than three times Mount Holyoke’s height.

Continue reading My mountain is bigger than yours

A friend and fellow alumna from MHC interviewed me today for an article she's writing for the Alumnae Quarterly, about students and alumnae with blogs. Apparently it's to be the cover story for either the fall or the spring issue.

I feel that I should attempt an explanation of why I chose to name my crafty-knitting-sewing-stuff category Huswifery. It’s not because I’m renouncing my feminist beliefs, it’s because of a wonderful poem by Edward Taylor, a seventeenth-century American Puritan. I know the poem because the Mount Holyoke Glee Club sang a setting of it that was written in the 1950′s and is very queer, eerie, delightful, and strangely perfect. The softly thrumming, winding melody deftly evokes the spinning and weaving analogies in the text.

Make me, O Lord, thy spinning wheel complete.
Thy Holy Word my distaff make for me.
Make mine affections thy swift flyers neat
And make my soul thy holy spool to be.
My conversation make to be thy reel
And reel thereon the yarn spun of thy wheel.

Make me thy loom then, knit therein this twine:
And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, wind quills:
Then weave the web thyself. The yarn is fine.
Thine ordinances make my fulling mills.
Then dye the same in heavenly colors choice,
All pinked with varnished flowers of paradise.

Then clothe therewith mine understanding, will,
Affections, judgment, conscience, memory
My words, and actions, that their shine may fill
My ways with glory and thee glorify.
Then mine apparel shall display before ye
That I am clothed in holy robes for glory.

Cathy Melhorn chose the song because of the feminine imagery, and indeed, I have a hard time imagining a man’s voice behind it. On the other hand, this essay about Huswifery speaks exclusively of a man, not a woman. Sadly, I seem to remember (perhaps too late) that weaving was once exclusively a man’s job, although women spun the thread. I know far too little about the history of textile crafts; I must do more research.