In Which The Family Farm Goes Alpaca

Pucci and Riana's fiber



On the morning that we moved to Michigan, I got the news. My Grandpa had died, peacefully, in the night. I had been able to say goodbye to him in the summer, and I had sensed then that it was goodbye. I rejoiced that he was with his Saviour. But for myself, my heart was sore. I would not be able to make it to the funeral, and I felt the ties to my extended family being torn away. How long would it be before the farm was sold, before all the things that kept us together had gone? This was one of the last times we would be together, aunts, uncles and cousins, and I was missing it.

But God is so good. Sometimes life holds sorrows we cannot imagine. Sometimes it holds special surprises.

My Grandma with Diamond

My uncle and aunt decided to start at an alpaca farm at Grandma's. The farm would be a real farm again! A fiber farm. Wow. It couldn't get much better than that!, I thought. But it did.

The alpacas have been bought, but are living at another farm right now until our farm is made ready. So my aunt was surprised to get this year's shearing. She wrote me.... would you like to spin it for us to sell?

Ummm...... would I? Does the phrase "briar patch" come to mind?

So here we are, with approximately 23 lbs of the most beautiful alpaca you can imagine.

Nice soft place to sprawl!

Here we are, and I will get a wheel to spin it
.

I will spin threads, yarns, ties to the farm where my grandfathers and mothers sweated and bled and laughed and wept for almost two hundred years, and where I have sweated and laughed and dropped my own tears. I will spin threads, yarns, that will hold me a little closer to my family in spite of all the miles between us. So sweet.


my cousin Lisa with Earliglow, our first cria. She is named after the first berries Grandpa grew back when the farm was a strawberry farm.