spinning my yarns

This week I'm working as an assistant to an artist friend as she prepares for an installation. My job is to hem the raw edges of printed banners and power-wash the silkscreens in an old warehouse bathroom with enormous windows propped up, the hard-hatted construction guys outside smoking and complaining of diarrhea from crappy Wawa coffee. On the way home I stop at Whole Foods, too cash-poor to buy much, and see what samples they've got out at the cheese counter. Hard French cheeses run through with dusty veins of mold, dank and aged.

And one time I was in that cave, one of a million on the limestone plateau of the Larzac, in the Languedoc (langue d'oc, as opposed to langue d'oil, precursor to the modern oui, differentiating the regions of the land by dialect, therefore "language of yes", or literally, "yes-tongue"), the southern French rock pocked and bubbled with holes. We were on someone's farm, a friend of a friend, drinking lemonade from small glasses on a rickety table outside, listening while they chattered fast and hard en francais, and then we walked inside, into what looked like a closet door and down a staircase. Down and down and down, like an optical illusion, because how could the next flight be this far down? and then down some more, and more, the steps worn stone now, and a single ancient electric line connecting a bare bulb or two, down and down, and then there we were, in the cave. A cheesemaking cave. The equipment still sat there, a hundred years old easily, and beyond that the ceilings vaulted out and up. Stalactites, stalagmites, I mean a real cave, drippy and cool, huge echoing chambers one after another interminably in the dark.

Did I mention the goats? It was a goat farm. Little mohair goats, running determinedly into the barn on their goaty hooves, two of them vying for top spot on a stack of hay bales. It was spring and there were babies, twins. Some had been rejected by their mothers and lay dwindling and tiny in the stalls, unhappy with the bottles of warm goat milk, surrogate rubber teats. I loved them, the babies and moms and the ones jumping on the hay and butting their horns together; I liked their creepy slit eyes and their ridiculous beautiful hair.

So it was part wool shop, this place, part of a collective where they sent out the mohair in bulk and got it back dyed and spun. Like a CSA, but of yarn. I touched every skein in the room before picking out an armload, each ball of which was marked MOHAIR DE FERMES DE FRANCE. There was an example sweater, red lace, and I was delirious with the possibilities and the shine of the soie, silk, spun into the fibers. Then we drove off in a rusty car to, I don't know, a concert held in an anarchist squat in some ruins, or we drank red table wine under a 60-watt light, or we wandered into someone's barn to play with the new puppies, wriggling and soft. And I'm knitting tonight in Philadelphia, broke and freckled, my cat asleep on the rug, watching CSI on the stolen internet. I'm knitting lace from the green French mohair, readying for winter, goats spun into scarves, people into stories, into memory and stone.