(This is the start of something I am writing Just trying it out for now.)

I am mesmerized by the action of a yarn swift. I wind wool, cotton, and cashmere hanks into cakes, often just for the feeling of the strands between my fingers. I luxuriate in the rhythm I create turning the handle of the winder, and the spinning, spinning, spinning of the swift. This movement weaves a thread from my hands, back through the hands of countless women down the centuries, bonds me to them, defines my place in the lineage, ignites my center. Isn’t it obvious, then, why sewing, knitting, weaving, and spinning words are so widely used to refer to connection, to bonds, to the continuity of things? Women hold things together.  We bind, we tie, we fix, we gather. We spread the balm on the wounds, and we share the knowledge of it with the women who will come after us. We guard and carry the histories, the meaning. When I wind wool I feel those women, my own women, in my bones.  

When the time comes, many years from now, if I am lucky, I want to be remembered for the things few people know about me. I think about my mother and the fact that everything that made her extraordinary to me is just odd, unremarkable, or quietly quirky to everyone else. To be honest, I would love to be remembered as quietly quirky but “quiet” is not a descriptor with which I have often been associated. I have been thinking about Mama a lot the past few days, as I finally got a legacy plant–my cutting is over 90 years old–to bring a bloom for the first time in many, many years. It is a night-blooming cereus, shown above, which has the annoying habit of only blooming, you guessed it, at night. And not just any night…well, yes, that’s the trouble, absolutely any night, but just that one night and then pfft…gone. Easy to miss if you like to go to bed before 10. But it bloomed this week and I was there to watch it! That is what got me thinking about flowers, death, the beauty of the unremarkable, and how I would like to be remembered, which goes something like:

“She could be brought to tears by the shape of a piece of pottery, the scent of her garden herbs, or a perfectly cooked piece of tuna, and cried often when the food was superb. She could spend hours reading a poem or finish a novel in just a day, and feel equally strengthened by the magic and beauty of either. She loved her teachers so much she became one, and hoped every day to inspire that love in just one student. She felt profanity had its place, and used it accordingly, but with respect, and made sure to enunciate, like a lady. She liked wine, and a fire in the fireplace and her cats, who were saintly in her eyes. And once, with memories of her mother in her heart, she stayed up all night to watch a flower bloom.”

So if anyone who is likely to be there to eulogize me is reading this, please write this down or print it or something because it is far better than the public truth of me and the likely “She was a beloved teacher who was really into wine and cats and said “fuck” a lot.”

Cheers.