A small poesy of blue flowers. For the first time I notice the shading of the petals, the way the light shines, from deep sky blue through horizon pale to white. Stitched by a gardener. A neat hand and an eye used to looking at flowers. An eye that knew a petal is never a block of colour, it is a kaleidoscope, a shimmer, a sublimation, deepening, fading. Rich and pale.
Trailing sweet peas in shades of rose and mauve. Dark stems and vibrant leaves. Over and over stitched buds, proud, bulbous, ripe for picking.
Hours of patience and quiet attention. Hours of memories and daydreams and health worries and ageing and wondering what the children are doing now and self-reminding they’re not children anymore. And where did all those years go? And is it too early to start dinner? The days are so long now, hours spent or killed, flowering on linen.
The deepest blue is a May sky, through a grey window, when I’m ashamed to say I silently said, “It’s a good day to die”.
Not out loud, not allowed to say, “it’s ok, you can go now”. But maybe she heard my thoughts anyway. Because that was the day, she went away. The hours holding her hand, a daughter mothering, soothing, thumb palm-stroking, holding on as a way of letting go. And outside May was blooming white in the trees and the sky was blue. I had nothing to say.
~ / ~
Shades of green, the simplest, and long my favourite. An ivy trail. Double-stitched stems, green and brown tight-shading as a painter would mix his hues. Spectral leaves, old and bold edged bright and sage-veined, young growth on paler shoots fern edged, lime veined, bright with hope. A simple square. Another moment: the first time I asked: can I have this one? She didn’t think it was one of her best.
~ / ~
Favourites are fickle things, shaped by time and space. Now I most love a larger square, with a roundel made of expanded heart-shaped wreathlets. Not hearts at all…just sprigs of flowers lain and spread and mirrored. Another place where the artist’s eye she would never have claimed is given expression. There’s symmetry in each vignette, darker petalled daisy-style flowers and lighter ones…each choice of thread mirrored, as is the greening of the leaves. Stylised. Shades of pink, from blushing to dust. Then alternately shades of blue, from midnight to dawn. An equilibrium of male and female, of light and blood.
The circle just happens to fit the round of the old wrought table in my kitchen and turns a piece of ill-painted iron into cottage charm. The corners hang where they will with their own circlets, like something from a bridesmaid’s crown. The pink and the blue carry a memory of a garden, laid out formally, lobelia and salvias and alyssum…white and red and blue. Hands rough and scarred and digging more readily in the earth than kneading pastry for pie, though she did that too.
~ / ~
I remember her smile. I remember apple pie and jam tarts. And Saturday nights and dancing. And forest walks and river paddling.
I remember her voice, the lilt always stronger across the miles of telephone lines. She worked assembling bits of telephones. The diaphragms. She brought one home and dismantled our phone to show me where it went and had only the vaguest idea how it worked.
~ / ~
I remember emptying drawers and ottomans and cupboards and a brother’s surprise. I want these. There is always so much stuff and so many awkward moments of you both admitting that you really don’t want so very much of it. And the knowledge that treasures are worthless. I was willed most of the jewellery (such as it was), but I wanted the table-cloths.
Sometimes we need to know that the hands that first held us in the world and steered us on from there, were capable of other things, that the minds that seemed only ever practical and maybe not so well trained, or ever inspired, were skillful of eye and craftly in execution. Sometimes we need to be reminded of what we never knew…never really looked close enough to see…
I knew that in her later years, Mam embroidered. I bought her clothes and threads. I remembered that it was something she used to do when I was small. She tried to teach me, but I am clumsy and my eye sees differently, and with my impatience in learning and hers in teaching we never met across a linen cloth.
But then I remember poems in cards and words I spun and her delight in childish verse.
A sadness is a missed meeting of arts, but a joy is the exchanging of them. She sewed and I span.
I know she’d be pleased that I lay her cloths, not only my favourites but also the ones I haven’t yet examined closely enough, I lay them in random sequences. One covers my kitchen table. Another the side-stand, old-worn-wood, but a useful size, beside my reading-writing chair. I kept them out of sentiment, but daily I look on them and only now begin to truly see the beauty – the skill, the art, the eye.
She would be pleased I kept them simply because she sewed them, but she would smile her warm welsh smile all the wider to know that sentiment isn’t why I use them. The closer I look, the more I appreciate the work. Art and craft and family and memory and love. There is an advert on tv at the moment that claims you don’t buy a home, you build one. I beg to differ. I think that you don’t build a home, you weave one. Sew one. Stitching together the threads of the past into your present.
