Quilt

A little something about what I've learned from my grandmother, a quilter.

Love,

LLM

***

Quilter’s hands—a thimble on one finger, the soft tug of thread and needle through fabric, a careful hold on the quilter’s hoop, and, when the last stitch is made, a gentle smoothing over of the finished product as she inspects her work. I’ve not seen my grandmother quilt for nearly ten years, and yet these images of her are among the most powerful ones I have. They evoke stillness and peace, comfort and rest.

The nature of quilting is such that one takes fragments and makes them into a whole. The pieces, nothing in themselves, become something more, become art. In the knitting together, everything becomes important; no scrap is without purpose.

As a young girl I did not learn how to quilt from my grandmother, but I watched her piece together many quilts. I watched her choose the fabrics, the colors, the pattern and sew them into something new and glorious.

As a woman I am learning the art of metaphorical quilting. We Murphys are in the process of grieving. The thimble fell off, and the needle pierced the skin. Deep. Shaun’s death has left each of us feeling fragmented, torn. We are quilting this loss to our other ones. The Irish Chain is suddenly showing up in what was the Dresden Plate. The colors don’t match and the patterns make no sense. But we keep stitching anyway.

Every night I fall asleep under one of the quilts my grandma gave to me. It reminds me that the pieces do come together, that what is torn will be mended, that healing comes. That there is always another thing to be stitched.

How it Begins

Our theme for this week: Home

Weeds with shallow roots are the easiest to pull.

I learned this at a very young age, pulling weeds in my mother’s garden. She taught me how to dig around the long, deep-searching central spike of a dandelion plant, and that pulling up the small shallow roots of plants that haven’t grown very far down into the soil was easier than letting them go for another hour, another day, another week. She also taught me that sometimes the frailest looking plants are the most resilient. Field bindweed was her favorite example. A delicate, clinging vine with white blossoms that looked like morning glories, it was harder than hell to pull out of the garden. It was deceptively frail looking, but had a network of shallow, webbed roots underground that drove us crazy.

Whenever someone commented on how quickly my mother’s children were growing she would reply “they’re growing like weeds.” It was her way of acknowledging the rapidity of our change. And, I think, her hope that like the dandelions we were forever tearing up, we were putting down good strong roots.

These days, I’m feeling a little like the small weeds that keep getting turned over and pulled out before they have a chance to take hold. I’m packing my house to move for the 15^th time in seven years. I still have boxes I haven’t unpacked from my move last summer. After all, it seemed stupid to settle into something I knew was only temporary. Despite my Bohemian gypsy roots, I’m tired of packing up my possessions at the end of every nine months and shipping off to a different apartment.

Two weekends ago I went to Milwaukee. Ostensibly, I was there to retrieve a friend and bring her back to Minnesota for a wedding. I was happy to be of help to her, but I was even happier to be able to return to Wisconsin and see my family. I don't make it back to their house very often, and it was good to see them there. We spent a lot of time on their deck, watching the birds on the feeders, drinking beer, water, or coffee, and talking.

I went home because I desperately needed to see my parents, to feel some semblance of normality again. I went to be reminded of the fact that I am not rootless. If nothing else, I come from a definite place, and have definite people.

I am tired of living out of boxes, of packing and unpacking my entire life every twelve months. I'm rethinking my decision to re-apply to Ph.D. programs this year and am suddenly cognizant of a number of other things I want to do with my life. Many of these things (buying a house, becoming an Oblate, spending more time in Wisconsin, becoming a major gifts officer in a non-profit) are in direct conflict with spending the next five years pursuing a Ph.D. These realizations have put me more than a little off-balance and I needed to get some perspective on things.




One of the best and simultaneously most infuriating things about my parents is their uncanny ability to provide perspective. They are the most rooted people I know, both living just a few miles from their siblings and a few more from the houses where they grew up. They have a house and a dog. Three adult children making their own way in the world. Their roots run deep--less like the dandelion and more like those of the maple trees in their back yard. They are sturdy and pragmatic. Utterly and unexpectedly beautiful but able to take what nature throws at them. This was one of the occasions in which their rootedness was welcome. They asked me a number of questions about exactly what I want in the next few years, didn't contribute their own opinions, and encouraged many of the decisions I made. They commiserated about low-paying jobs and a poor economy and talked about the small pleasures of their own lives: 30,000 pounds of landscape block converted into a terraced garden; two of their three children at home for dinner; the hot weather finally breaking. Together we sat in the warm twilight and laughed about childhood antics, complained about our baseball team's losing streak, and slapped mosquitoes.

When I returned to Minnesota on Monday, I had no more answers than I had when I left. But those few hours we spent together nourished my own roots, reminded me that sometimes, even plants with shallow roots are tough enough to survive.

***

How It Begins

Here you are, twenty-two and waiting for your life to begin. And this is how it begins. You have no money and make stupid decisions with your credit card. You date and have sex and get your heart broken. Maybe break a few yourself. You might meet the person who makes you think that maybe bars and late nights aren't all they're cracked up to be. You might not. You'll pay down student loans and wonder if all that education was really worth it, if maybe you wouldn't be happier making copies and answering phones or fixing motors and wiping grease from your hands. And then you're thirty and perhaps you start to save for a house, hopefully you've started saving for retirement already. You could have a kid or two. Adopt a dog. Stop moving every twelve months. Plant a garden, even if it's just in a window box. You'll fight with your love about money and bills, whether or not to buy that new car. Get a promotion. Lose your job. And then your kids are growing and adolescent and hate you for reasons neither of you can explain. You buy a car, a motorcycle, maybe find an affair. Maybe just wake up at night next to the one you've always loved. Then the kids are gone, the dog has died and your hair is gray. You've stopped working one day, and then the next it's grandkids, and sleepless nights for no reason and suddenly jaw pain and a tingling in your left arm. But that's all still far away, almost light-years in fact. For now, it's just about a job and bills and sex and moving. Waiting for your life to begin.

Color

Our theme for this week: Color

My mother loves to garden. Her father loved to garden. When I went back to her house over the weekend the very first thing my mother did was take me on a garden tour.

I was glad to take it. I'm most often home during the winter months, when her gardens are covered by several inches of snow. The front, side, and very back gardens are exclusively for flowers. The garden that my father has recently redone for her is exclusively vegetables that she and Dad freeze for the winter.

My mother's gardens are lovely, striking, unique things. I love them because they are beautiful, certainly, but even more because they are extensions of my mother's personality. Anyone who looks at them can see her love of things beautiful and natural, her appreciation for things both tame and wild. Her practicality and thriftiness are apparent in her love for helping things grow.

An ode (of sorts) to my mother and her gardens.

***

My Mother's Garden

My mother's garden is a riot of color. Pink roses and white poppies. Orange tiger lilies growing next to green chili peppers and purple beets. The pink-cream flowers of late pea blossoms wind their way around the grey stone fountain. A yellow goldfinch splashes in the rusty water. My mother, a white bandanna over her wild brown hair, pulls up weeds and talks a blue streak. I worry about her hands, sliced open by weeds and stuck by brambles. Oh, Kelly she says, wiping them on her khaki shorts. We all bleed red.

escaping inwardly

Greetings, all.

For this post, I've wrestled with the role of reading: Why do I do it? What do I gain from it? What is the process? Every book places me in a different world, a different experience. But somehow it grounds me more firmly in this world and this experience of being human. Gift.

LLM

***

The room was filled with joyous, laughing people. They were celebrating: sharing a meal, reminiscing about the past two or three years, talking about what was next. Students were dressed to the nines—dresses and heels, ties and dress pants. Faculty and board members were not quite so formal; they were swept into the tide of excitement coming from the chattering students. Forks and knives clattered against plates, and wine glasses were filled and emptied.

And there I sat, my nose in a book. I didn’t mean for it to happen. The book—a monograph on music and Karl Barth—was just there: a friend was borrowing it from another friend and it was on our table. I absently picked it up, glanced through the opening pages and just started reading. No thought to the activity around me, the rudeness of this gesture. It was a book and therefore it needed to be perused.

“Lauren!” Betsy nearly shouted it. Her eyes were wide and she snatched the book from me. “What are you doing!?! We’re at dinner.”

As I said, it had not been intentional, but I had fallen into the text. That’s how it always happens. My life is pieced together with journeys into books. I slip into them and then emerge, somewhat surprised to find the world around me again, a world of plants and animals, of color, of people, of food and drink. A world that has dimension.

Reading provides me with an escape, a chance to get away and be elsewhere, a journey into someone else’s life. I have danced with Max and the Wild Things, flown with Milkman, observed grasshoppers with Mary Oliver, prayed with any number of theologians, and died with Madame Bovary. I’ve contemplated love with Mary Russell, been an old man with Eliot, and sobered up with Augusten Burroughs.

But the escape only works if I come back to my own life. These stories are folded into my own; they are not all I am, but they are parts of me. They have helped me be a child, a daughter, a woman, a friend, a theologian, a writer, an editor, and a person. Every book takes me beyond myself and, paradoxically, leads me deeper into myself. I do not read to run away; rather, in the departure from this world—of family members and friends, of grief and loneliness, of joy and hope—I enter more fully into it.