On the evening of 11 September, with my partner away for the night, I found myself suddenly calmed and quietened by the simple act of cutting up squares. You see, the day, already brimming with so much sadness, was made more sad for me by a passage from a book I was reading at breakfast; this book simply, but powerfully, made me so miss my father [3000 miles away] and the landscape I'll always call 'home'.
With the day passing, and me, alone, trying still to hold the cloud of melancholy and homesickness at bay, I found myself pulling out this thrift-suit quilt project* (after clicking on the link, you'll need to flip ahead a few pages before you get to it)* which I had begun months ago. As cutting progressed, and the simple act of placing the squares got underway, I felt my tension headache ease, and my sadness--if not dissipate--be something I now quietly understood and accepted. My mood, in fact, slowly turned into excitement as I realized I needed, in my next return home to my parents' place, to find a suitable old suit/coat/shirt of my dad's to incorporate into this blanket. And maybe, my mind raced, my partner could also find something of his father's--or his grandfathers'--that we could also incorporate into the quilt and it could then, each night, wrap and cover us in our fathers' and grandfathers' warmth.
I experienced that evening, as I have experienced many other times, the calm of creation, at work.
And still, people wonder why we do what we do? Why we are willing to make endless loops with string, why we are willing to cut out square after square, make stitch after stitch. If only they knew....
*The thriftstore suit-quilt idea comes from Martha Stewart's Good Things from Tag Sales and Flea Markets.
PS: A book meme to come next! [I've received my first-ever tag from Olga, and can't wait to share my favourite (and not-so-favourite) reads with you--]
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