When I think about all the things I’ve made (there must be hundreds, thousands), I go off course (as with that parenthetical, and this one) because I can’t settle on where to take this sentence, end this thought.
By “made” I mean constructed, built, brought into being via needle and thread, embroidery floss, hoop, yarn and hook, canvas and brush, oils, acrylics, watercolors, sanded paper and pastels, sewing machines, scissors, fabric, beads, looms, buttons, white glue, mortar, concrete, draw knives, logs, seeds and tubers and bulbs, saplings, cuttings, mulch, clay pots, broken china, this womb, classes and jobs and neighborhoods (where friendships bud and bloom), paper, pen, keyboard and words.
With words I’ve built poems, moments, emotions, scenes, stories, landscapes, towns, farms and congregations. I’ve built people from scratch, borrowing fragments from real lives (the broken-veined nose of an old farmer who drank too much, an eyelid that refuses to open from a George Carlin comedic routine, hands and forearms dusted with flower and the knobby knuckles of a grandmother, anger from an aunt’s husband, pathetic self-pity from myself), and patched them into singular beings. I’ve transplanted a beating heart into the breast of the ocean, given swells and breakers a pulse, drowned a dolphin with six-pack carrier plastic, and shared the imagined life of a rock.
With broken china I’ve built benches and bird baths, embedded horseshoes and bedsprings between concrete rubble and marble chessboards to create patios, sidewalks and planters. Gardens emerged from cuttings and mulch—red bud saplings bloomed cyrise through my Februarys, Aprils and Mays. Flags of iris waved, hollyhocks spired to the house eaves, pink roses fell in cascades from the Trees of Heavenly Light along the road to the creek while corkscrew willow curved paths skyward from the muck of the mosaic’d pond.
The sofa in Grandma Due’s Borger, Texas apartment is where I sat as she taught me to thread a needle, embroider the fur on a kitten and french-knot the centers of daisies. The sofa at Grandma Ivy’s is where she showed me how to loop yarn around a finger to cross my palm for tension and maneuver a metal hook in and out of a chain stitch with single, double, and triple crochets. The sofa in the first house Al and I shared is where I taught myself to knit from book.
Nine years later, he taught me how to straddle a log, lean out as far as arms could reach, snug a draw knife’s sharpened edge into bark at an angle—and pull. Long curls of bark peeled away. Callouses toughened my butt as I slid back along those logs. There were 800 of them. I didn’t work alone. His dad, his brothers, our nine year old son, neighbors—pitched in and peeled. Eventually, we hired help. Eventually, we started bolting logs together. Eventually, we had a lodgepole pine home two stories tall and heated with burning love.
From this womb, three babies had their beginnings. (Passive construction is the only way I know how to describe my part in their becoming. I provided fertile territory for seeds to take root and thrive.)
Friendships sprang up across the hills and valleys of this life.
How do I take credit for these? I can’t.
I can’t take credit for any creation listed above. Oh, I did become a tool, I suppose, for continuing with a craft. Maybe a bit more than a tool. Maybe a partner … and still a partner … with Grandmothers—Emma and Elsie—with Mama, Daddy, my children (and theirs), friends, lovers, lovers, friends. But the things—all the things—wouldn’t be, would not have become without the hands-on help and direction of others.
So many others.
My children wouldn’t be who they are if it weren’t for who they were to begin with, that mysterious spark of life, that mix of Al and me. My friends wouldn’t be my friends if they didn’t find some redeemable quality in me, if they didn’t have patience with my stubborn side and often moody disposition.
Even these words strewn across the screen wouldn’t amount to much if there weren’t a reader—a partner—taking them in. Like a teeter-totter needs counterweight for the ride to be real, for the rise and the fall to occur, story (or whatever you may want to call this) needs audience. Eyes and minds to decipher what in blue blazes the words may be intended to say. I use the word “may” because the meaning, the base material out of which this construct began, has frayed. Broken threads all over the place. Repairs and alterations are in order. Or not. It could be I’ve built something here. It could be … but … I’m pretty sure it’s not art.
from crafts « WordPress.com Tag Feed http://ift.tt/1zKn4aA
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment