Thank you Laura Purdie Salas for hosting Poetry Friday this week. Stop by and read her music inspired verse.
I have always liked making things and my mother encouraged me to sew.
She left the Singer on the dining room table for me to use when I wanted. She’d be downstairs cooking in our family’s restaurant kitchen and I could always find her if I needed help. Her birthday was last month.
I don’t spend much time sewing now. But I am about to finish a small quilted wall hanging, the size of a extra large place mat, with wonky stripes inspired by the amazing quilting artist Maria Shell. It’s free form “modern quilting” with no rigid rules, like a free verse poem.
Without my mother’s encouragement I probably would have never learned to sew. I sometimes wonder if sewing has become a frivolous activity in the 21st century. But I know it isn’t.
The man who owned the fabric store where I grew up was a Holocaust survivor. His wife, an expert seamstress, used to help me pick out fabric. I’d look at bolts of fabric for hours and they were always patient and kind to me.
Thirty later I saw Mr. S again. He was elderly and his wife had recently passed away. It was touching to see him again. He told me that they hid together for many months, as teenagers, in a cave in the woods near Warsaw to escape the Nazis. With needle and thread Mrs. S sewed warm clothing with cloth that he stole during night time excursions to town. Her sewing helped keep them warm. My teachers or parents never taught me about the Holocaust, unfortunately, even as I had Jewish friends in school.
To end, I’ll share a haiku I wrote this morning inspired my the amaryllis blooming in my kitchen, four flowers blooming north, south, east and west.
a lighthouse casting four beacons!
Who keeps the lights on?