Heartsease

One of my favorite ways to occupy what little free time I have is to indulge my passion for fiber arts.  It is a thread uniting the women in my family, connecting us with each other as well as generations past. One of my prize possessions was a Lone Star quilt my great grandmother pieced and quilted when she was in her late seventies. Every piece was a good spot she could salvage from clothing to worn to mend, in her world nothing was wasted including words. Her quilting is done in tiny, even stitches; the kind of stitches every quilter would cheerfully give their eye teeth to achieve. When I run my finger down a length of her exquisite stitching I am touching her, sharing with her a moment in time.  In the late twenties, the Indianapolis Star did a feature article on her and her quilt art; the fragile and yellowed pages contain the only picture we have of her in her later years.  In my own right, I am an award winning seamstress and fiber artist as was my mother and grandmother.  My sister in law and niece have brought home their own trophies while my daughters are content to enjoy the fruits of our labors; regardless of which end of the spindle we are on, the love of visible fibers binds us to the invisible ones which have woven the story of our lives.  While I finish my Masters and PhD my spinning wheel, loom, and sewing machine wait patiently for me; the memories they hold and the ones they will help me to create biding their time.

As a child I wore very few store bought clothes, my mother, grandmother, and aunts made nearly every garment we wore.  Livestock feed still came in patterned, cotton, fifty  and one hundred pound sacks in the late fifties and early sixties.  My aunt would send a snippet of fabric, tucked carefully into my uncles worn leather wallet, with him on his weekly Saturday morning trips to the feed store at Amo. His job was to sort through the stacks of feed sacks until he found four bags of feed matching the pattern of the patch he held in his callused hand.  Four feed sacks were enough for my aunt to make herself, my sister, and I matching dresses. Every farmer who came to the mill was charged with the same task so these rawboned, men with sunburned necks and work roughened hands, talked about corn prices,  fat hogs, and tractor breakdowns, as they helped each other find each of their wives treasured patterns.  They took a quiet pride in their wives frugalness and industriousness. They would nod their heads and remark  they remembered helping so and so find that particular design when they saw his wife or daughters wearing a new dress to church.  My aunt upholstered my childhood rocker in a quilt she had made for me from the scraps of our feed store wardrobe. Long after I had outgrown my rocking chair I would sit next to it touching each square, remembering the garment made and and often the occasion I wore it.  That chair was a book without words yet so rich in stories –my stories, it makes my heart ache  my chair burned in the fire.

My stepmother has my great grandmother’s lone star quilt, it was one of my dad’s treasures, one of the few things he had from his family. I’m grateful Betty kept the quilt as it was spared from the flames but  I am going to ask her if I may have it  now.  I yearn for the physical connection to my past, to my family’s stories, the old quilt holds. More than anything else I want to feel great grandma Medsker’s stitches and run my hands over the quilt smoothing it out as she, my grandmother, and my dad did for so many years. Fire is a refiner, it burns away the dross,  allowing you the freedom to understand what’s truly important to you. What you mourn losing tells far more about you than your unscathed possessions ever did.   My chair and it’s stories, keepsake clothing made by four generations of my family’s women, the kitschy crafts my little bears and grandbears made, these are the things it grieves me to have lost because each was made by hands I love; hands which have made me who I am and in touching what they made  I  touch them,  connecting  with them in a way only the heart understands.  Grandma Medsker’s quilt is my mentor  as I create stories without words for my bears and grandbears to remember us by.

Photograph from designsbyloftcreations.com