In recent weeks I have become a voracious reader. I’m not sure if the spring air and sun is making me atone for my sin of watching a trashy TV show while quilting all winter of if I’m just tired of working inside an ever-changing studio set up that has never quite met my needs.
I thought to revisit Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing recently because I never finished it. I’m moving soon though and it is already packed, and I’m not sure how to do nothing when I measure days by how much I make (today $0, yesterday a whopping $170). Since the upper classes call themselves “comfortable” in lieu of rich, I am curious what doing nothing means to someone who is uncomfortable most of the time, especially around the first of the month.
Having just devoured Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had, I know that time for writing is something that has to be bought. Even though I am writing now without apparent cost in the middle of the day, the cost of the writing will come due when the landlord deposits the check and I’m back down to zero.
All of the elders in my life (anyone older than 23) imply youth is meant to be wasted this way, going through something and barely making rent. In the future there will be something else to go through that is simultaneously more and less comfortable. Still, through all of this treading and sinking I am the happiest I have ever been. I am learning to appreciate this slow growth—even my faltering missteps are still taking me somewhere.
A quilt, a story
I just finished a quilt top that I have been working on for 8 months. It is improvised, naturally dyed, and dangerously cozy. Quilting is a practice through which I have ameliorated my perfectionism and learned to be patient. The first quilt I made held many lessons. The fabric speaks to a different time in my life, one where I bought fat quarters in northern Michigan with someone who has left my life. The intention too has altered. In the most painful realizations, I stopped short of a bed sized quilt because there would be no bed shared between us. The stitching also holds stories of travel to Maine and waking up too early in the heat of Columbus’ summer. Now it has a strawberry stain from a summer solstice picnic and a coffee stain from many long winter mornings spent reading.
This quilt is dyed with plants I grew and honored with my dyepot. So many lessons were learned: the proper time to mordant for deep tones, using a rotary cutter, intuitive measuring. This is a bed quilt for my partner and I, arriving just in time for us to move into a new house across town. The backing fabric is a cherry table cloth from Upcycle, poppy fabric I bought and made a skirt out of in high school when Joanne was teaching me to sew, a lobster fat quarter I bought in Maine last year while rushing in to get more red thread, and a moose pattern I saw at Walmart whilst regrettably buying a few more plastic bins for moving.
The batting is my previous mass-produced blanket which surprisingly is 100% cotton on the inside. It’s so thick to quilt through but it makes the quilt so snug and soothingly weighted. The task is now to make our quilt stitches two at a time over this whole landscape while continuing to sleep under it. This time I used safety pins instead of straight pins to live (less) dangerously.
Change is intense in these short spurts. Moving to a new environment requires packing up the old one. It’s easy to blink past this one year lease cycle and wonder where all the time went. Just looking through my camera roll for quilt progress pictures has made me realize how different everything is. Seasonal allergies and existential dust are making me emotional in strange ways.
According to the New Farmer’s Almanac, May is the time for surrender. I am surrendering myself to the work ahead of me; to the hours ahead packing, cleaning, stitching; to making sense of the region I live in, a land rich in natural wealth and beautiful resilience while still so cash poor; and to continuing my calling, sharing my gift of teaching with my communities.
For craft and Appalachia,