Never look a gift sheep in the mouth
(Originally published January 2024)
Gift etiquette can be complicated.
It’s hard to know how much to spend on a coworker’s shower gift, what to get for the person who has everything, or how long you have to keep an ugly knickknack on display before you can throw it away and tell the giver your cat broke it.
About 15 years ago, I learned something about gift etiquette that has stayed with me.
One Saturday morning, Mark’s brother Tom showed up at our house carrying a jumbo clear trash bag stuffed full of sheep’s wool.
“Here you go,” he said, dropping it on the kitchen floor.
I hesitate to call this the best day ever, as that would diminish the day I sat next to Marisa Tomei in a Shelburne restaurant and also my wedding day, but as a hand spinner and knitter who is passionate—almost fanatic—about wool, this day was pretty special.
“When I’m indulging in the tactile and olfactory ecstasy of handling raw fleece, my pupils turn to tiny sheep shapes.”
“You got this just for me?” I said, choking up a bit.
“Kind of,” Tom said, shrugging. “I found it on the side of the road on my way back from Vergennes. I don’t know what it is, but it looked like the bags of crap you always have lying around, so I figured you might want it.”
How sweet.
Now, I enjoy commercially processed wool fiber as much as the next spinner; it’s clean, smooth, and ready to spin. However, I’m more drawn to raw wool, the fleece that has been shorn off the sheep but not yet washed or prepped. A raw fleece, having been attached to a sheep for the past year, is dirty, stinky, greasy with lanolin, and peppered with straw and bits of dung. It takes countless hours to clean it, prep it, spin it, and knit it into a fully handmade item.
If you think that sounds like a good time, you are correct.
When I’m indulging in the tactile and olfactory ecstasy of handling raw fleece, my pupils turn to tiny sheep shapes. I want to roll in it like Scrooge McDuck in a pile of money. And this wool was much softer, with more delicately crimped locks, than the fibers I normally worked with. I couldn’t get over it.
“Look at how fine that crimp is,” I kept saying to Mark, who was so overwhelmed by the fineness of the crimp he could not keep looking at it.
I suspected it might be merino, the ultimate in luxury wool. A bag this size—well over 10 pounds—would cost a fortune. How could I have gotten so lucky?
How, indeed? Hm.
It made no sense. No one would have purposely thrown a bag of expensive fleece into a ditch. Maybe it had fallen off a truck. If so, the owner was probably looking for it.
Then again, I told myself, there was no way of knowing who had lost that wool. Clearly, the universe (and Tom) had bestowed it upon me so I could make beautiful things with it.
I was just about to bury my face in the fleece when I saw it: a slip of paper peeking out of the bag.
Oh, no.
On it were notes, including the word “merino” (I guess I know my crimps). And below that were the two things I didn’t want to see: the owner’s name and phone number.
Look, I reasoned, was it my fault she hadn’t secured her fleece properly? Did she even know it was missing? Didn’t I deserve a huge bag of free merino? Was I morally obligated to let her know I had it?
I didn’t like my answers, which were, in order: no, maybe, not necessarily and, dammit, yes.
I burst into tears.
I called the number, hoping the owner would be so delighted with my honesty that she would tell me to keep the fleece. As expected, she was delighted. But not enough to call us even. She showed up a half-hour later.
As it turns out, the bag—one of many—had flown out of her truck on the way to the fiber mill where the fleece was to be spun. She needed that bag to make the mill’s minimum order weight.
To end a brief but bitter tug-of-war when I handed her the bag but could not force my fingers to let go of it, she promised she’d reward me with some of the new yarn. (Alas, I never heard from her again.)
This incident, though tragic, offers a lesson in etiquette to anyone who finds something valuable lying on the roadside and decides to give it away: for the sake of your recipient’s conscience, be sure to destroy any identifying information first.
