Let's Stomp on Some Wool

Winter’s coming!  Not tomorrow or anything, but the time has come to really start getting ready.  My host mother has been pickling tomatoes and garlic, bottling juice, and putting other foods away for the winter.  Even as school begins again, I have been drafted into the preparations.  Two weeks ago, with a bucket in hand, I went out into the yard to collect hazelnuts.  My family has about 10 hazelnut trees in the yard.  To get all the nuts, I had to go around to each tree, and shake it as hard as I could, then gather up all the nuts that had fallen on the ground.

They also have a bunch of apple trees around the yard, and when it came time to climb up the ladder to get the high up apples, guess who got the call.  My host father set the ladder and I slowly climbed as high as I could.  With his guidance, I reached all around, plucking ripe apples and passing them on down to him.  I was maybe only six feet up, but those branches were not the sturdiest things in the world and there were probably some close calls.  That would have been a fun call to the PC Medical Officer on duty. “Hello, Nate, how are you?”  “Me?  Oh, I’m fine, except, well, I just fell out of a tree.”

A few days ago, it became time to re-stuff the mattresses, blankets and pillows with wool.  So my host mother came home from the bazaar with bags and bags of wool.  This is wool that she carefully compared and evaluated before buying.  She knows her wool.  But the wool isn’t ready right away.  It’s dirty, and has stuff in it from the sheep hanging out in the pasture and rolling in who knows what.  So we have to clean the wool.  This involves soaking the wool in wash bins, and stomping on it like grapes for wine.  This became my job, and after getting over the initial cold-water shock, it was a lot of fun. 

While I was stomping, we had some great conversations about doing this sort of work at home versus leaving it to factories versus artificial materials.  Does it really make a difference?  In a country such as Azerbaijan, where infrastructure is hazy, than it certainly does matter, and I understand completely why people do this sort of work at home.  I’d grow my own food and make my own mattresses, too.  And I genuinely think that a bit more of this would do the US some good as well.  It’s become so easy to just drive over to Walmart or Target to get whatever we need (in bulk!), we forget some of the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment and knowledge of a job done well with quality goods that comes from house work.  Sometimes I get tired of the amount of work that hast to be done around here just to get by, but at the end of the day, there’s something to this way of life.  Slow food movements and the like are definitely more attractive now.  With that, here’s a picture of me stomping on wool.