“I’m not being facetious or anything, but I think I’ve never said this before: for a dyed-in-the-wool feminist, you know a lot about traditional ‘women’s work’.” Gary had just asked me how a damask tablecloth should be washed and so I told him. (The key is pressing it after washing with a very hot iron while it’s still wet.)

Many women of my generation, eager to embrace a life unbound from traditional women’s roles, rejected those skills traditionally acquired by housewives. They chose career over homemaking, and actively avoided cookery and sewing and other domestic arts.

I went the other way.

I always assumed I would earn a living, but I also wanted to know how to do . . . everything.

I took classes, read manuals, and figured things out through experimentation and failure. Some skills became easy (baking and copper enamel) and some never reliably jelled (marmalade and plique a jour). In the mean time, I worked my way through undergraduate school in a record store, but also did direct delivery of junk mail, taught classes for Bellevue Art Museum and a community center, taught Art and English in private and public high schools, and worked in a quilting store. When members of my family picked up giardia, I studied parasites. When the black oystercatchers tantalized with their calls, I read about birds. Maybe the habit of research and education is the key. I can’t claim to be wise, but I am knowledgeable.

I know how to do a lot of things.

I know how to sew clothing, knit a sweater, crochet, embroider, and quilt. I have spun wool and the hair from our Afghan Hounds, batiked cotton and silk, woven rugs, felted oven mitts, and silkscreened t-shirts. The past year I baked bread each week without glancing at a recipe. I use a tortilla press to make tortillas and put freshly ground sesame seed in my enchilada sauce. I can bake a cherry pie and clafoutis, make yogurt and crumpets, and understand how kimchee is made. I have picked wild berries most people have never heard of and fished crawdads out of a creek. I planted gardens. I canned mincemeat using venison, peaches and pears and tomato sauce, made jams and jellies, pickles and chutney and marmalade. I know many ways to prepare fresh wild-caught salmon. I have mastered many of those essential womanly tasks that used to keep us alive.

I have also bound books, cast rings, fabricated pendants of copper and brass and sterling silver, raised a silver vessel from a flat disk, and wove sterling chain (because I found not afford gold). I enameled copper and sterling and recorded Sojourner Truth’s entire “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in cloisonné. I have written four novels, a novella, dozens of short stories, poems, essays, and evolving cookbook, and part of a manual about teaching high school students to write. I have four college degrees (in studio arts, teaching, and writing) and enough credits for a fifth. I took classes in Botany and Oceanography and Textiles. I know why wool will keep you warm even when it’s wet and why cotton is absorbent. I have hung sheetrock, but not ever again. I have milled raw lumber to construct a finished rosewood frame, built a drawer out of birdseye maple and genuine ebony, and constructed an ash and oak bench that never got its cushion. I have tiled counters, backsplashes, walls, and floors. I have made tile. I can paint a checkerboard floor freehand with a brush and walls without splattering myself in the process. I once sang and played guitar, danced badly, but never learned to type. (I might remember a G chord but can no longer pick out anything resembling music on my old guitar, and I remain a hunt-and-peck typist.) I was once President of the Cannon Beach Arts Association and of the Evergreen Afghan Hound Association. For a couple of decades I was a licensed field trial judge and served on the American Sighthound Field Association Board. I ran Hood to Coast several times, always first out of the second van and coached cross country for six years. I can point to only a couple of constellations, but I have a pretty good sense of direction. I can start a fire with only matches and tinder. I know what makes good tinder. Lost in the wilderness, I might yet live.

I have never been a “social” person, though I can fake that. I have presented teaching strategies to small groups and crowds of several hundred. I slip easily and without intention into teacher-mode, which is a performance, but I actually dislike crowds. Given the chance, I would have shod horses and built a house from the ground up. (I am sorry not to have built the house.)

I like knowing how things are done, so I learned to make and do a lot of things. As an editor, this makes me uniquely qualified to catch errors in descriptions of handicrafts. It means that in real life, I can make do. It’s because I am curious and want to know things. This is me bragging again.

Still, it’s Gary who mostly does the laundry.