She's Come Undone

(My hulking 8 harness floor loom, before recent dissection)

Twenty three years ago I committed to changing my life & my location, both rather drastically. From a type A+ job in Maryland to momentarily unemployed in the Caribbean, that's how we rolled back then.  

We weren't relying on some carefully amassed pile of assets either. Instead, we took the leap with the hope that our diverse-bordering-on-bizarre catalog of 'skills' would save us from what I'm sure most viewed as a foolhardy bout of arrested development.  

Plan would be too strong a word to describe the warm fuzzy dreamy images I had of the new life ahead. You might be conjuring images of some tourism-related idyllic pursuit such as captaining a sailboat or maybe producing underwater documentaries, or something similar. Not me. I was setting my sights on something much, much weirder. 

I wanted a career as a professional weaver...in paradise. I'll let that sink in a moment. 

I started weaving before I turned 13, & I've had two looms in all those years. I ordered the one above in kit form when we decided to move to St Croix. It came in five huge boxes & although I'm not mechanical, I am determined, & that gave me the steam to get through several days of sanding & oiling parts, counting pieces, studying instructions, & eventually successfully building the loom. 

The little house we rented was surrounded by bush & could be pretty sweltery.    Weaving on a floor loom is a fully aerobic process--throwing the shuttle & stomping on the treadles. No sugarcoating it, it was just so blame HOT. Too hot, in fact. I stuck it out for a year or so, ordering custom labels to sew into the wearables & upholstery I created under the 'Caribbean Handwovens' moniker. I sold the home decor items I wove & stitched through an interior design shop, & the wearables through another shop. One of my tapestries, a close up of a cactus bloom, was displayed prominently at Government House during a show for the local environmental association. After a couple years had passed, I was forced to face facts--that the gap between the income & effort was too great to warrant continuing. 

The loom was still the centerpiece (read 'pain in the arse') of every move from rental to rental. Each time a different friend would draw the short straw & be chosen to ride in the open truck with the loom, ensuring it would stay put around tight corners or through sudden stops. Risking life & limb for loom, they survived the twists & turns around the goat hills of the north shore, being squashed going up & down steep inclines...you get the picture. They did it because they were my friends & knew how much the loom meant to me. I've been weaving since I was 12, after all. Oh, & generally there was some food or liquor bribe involved. 

When I bought my happy little house in 2008, a big deciding factor was the big 2nd bedroom with lots of windows showcasing green or blue views, & a vaulted ceiling--the perfect venue for the loom I thought...until closing & moving day, when the final 'loom nanny' friend helped carry the loom from the moving truck, only to realize the bedroom doors were narrower than normal & the loom wouldn't go through. So from May 27, 2008 until now, gigantor the loom lived in the living room, taking up space, forcing awkward furniture arrangements & radiating the reflected guilt that comes when you abandon one life's avocation for another. 

Last week when I started dismantling & cleaning it, supposedly in prep for the move to the originally targeted sunny corner of the 2nd bedroom, I remembered how it felt, those first weeks after we moved to St Croix.  The satiny feel of the cloth beam, worn perfectly smooth by all the yardage that had passed over it reminded me that it wasn't always so.  I had departed from my normal state of rushing to complete whatever I was excited about to slow, deliberate sanding & oiling of the raw wood parts. I remember watching hummingbirds & bananaquits harassing the red hibiscus the landlord had planted around the cottage. I remembered carefully placing all the parts in order on the terrazzo floor so I would have a better chance of remembering them all. I remembered reading, rereading, & then reading the instructions again, just to be sure I was assembling the massive machine correctly (and to procrastinate just a little longer about the overwhelming task). And I remember the absolute shock of joy when, after a couple of weeks' work, I saw the finally assembled, fully working machine I had evidently built, despite myself.