Spinning

My grandmother’s hands, veined with the labour

of children, milking cows, kneading

bread, and pulling Seneca root

nimbly finger the wool.

She has warmed nine younger siblings

with her knitting. Now, she and three

sisters are the last to remember.

She twists the unspun wool into the spinning wool.

My hands, chafed with the work of canoes, children,

and changing the oil, eagerly card the wool.

The secret, she says, is in the carding.

If you’re a good carder, then the wool

will wear much better.

I card the wool. Flecks of dust and hay and dung

hang on. Like her five babies, four of them dead,

like the memories that won’t let go.

She feeds the spinning wheel

while I card the wool.

The travails of the Depression, dusty poverty,

and caring for many children,

not all of them her own, have shaped

her slippered, arthritic foot, which now

deftly pumps the pedal. At the age

of thirteen she went away to work. More

bread, more laundry, and more cows,

she helped to make the ends meet back home.

Don’t hold too much, she explains, fingering the wool,

it goes on better a little at a time.

You try, she tells me, and my clumsy, sweaty hands

palm the wool. It goes on in clumps.

Don’t hold the wool too tight,

this part will join that part

if you feed it through your thumb and fingers like this.

Her brother Bud built her first spinning wheel

from a bicycle wheel. He brought it home

for her when she was twenty-two.

Grandma’s nimble fingers were in demand

when she worked that wheel. Her wool

was known in the district and people paid

for well-spun wool.

My fingers curl under in an inherited gesture.

Grandma’s brown hands guide my pale hands; we

make the ends meet. The ball of wool grows larger.

The unspun wool meets the spun wool.