Time and Tapestry

 Time feels different during this Covid-19 year. One week and then month runs into another. With restrictions on in-person interactions, days are similar. I've filled much of my time at home with family history. The names, dates, and events take me back in time. Our ancestors and their stories are part of me. 

In her essay "The Threads of Time" author Kate Morton articulated thoughts that have floated through my mind and heart during this unique year. 

These imprints from another time, events that had happened to the people I knew now, but long before I knew them, fascinated me. They trailed invisible threads that tied me to the past and a grandfather I would never meet, but who lived vividly within scenes inside my head. Now I am a grown-up, my mind filled with decades of memories, … enough time has passed that when I tell these stories I smell the red volcanic soil and feel the vicious subtropical sun on my face and hear the echo of whip birds in the towering canopy, and I feel a swirling homesickness that will not settle. Homesickness, not for a place, but for a time that can never be revisited, except in memory. …

 

And so, time passes and gathers and concertinas and repeats. It loops back upon itself so that people from long ago appear in the dreams of people now; they lurk dormant in one set of genes after another only to stage a reappearance down the line. We are all time travellers, carrying with us from the past the experiences that shaped us. …

 

It seems to me that there is an old spinning wheel inside each of us, an industrious woman at its helm who takes the raw wool of experience and spins it blindly into strands of thread. At least, that’s what I imagine. Some of the threads are smooth, while others remain knotty no matter how many times they’re worked over; some gleam, some don’t. My childhood on Tamborine Mountain, my family and their stories, the houses where I’ve lived: these are my threads, and they knit together to make up the tapestry of my life…”

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"Tapestry of my life" brings to mind something Orson Scott Card wrote in "Red Prophet." Alvin is speaking with Becca, a weaver. Becca's daughter has decided to move away from her mother. 

“And you let your own daughter go?”

“Just like one of my ancestors sat at her old loom and let her daughter go, across the ocean to this land, her with a new loom and her watchful father beside her, yes, I let her go.” … 

“Alvin tried to imagine Becca’s mother, and her grandmother, and the women before that, all in a line, he tried to imagine how many there’d be, all of them working their spinning wheels, winding out threads from the spindle, yarn all raw and white, which would just go somewhere, go on and disappear somewhere until it broke. Or maybe when it broke they held the whole thing, a whole human life, in their hands, and then tossed it upward until it was caught by a passing wind, and then dropped down and got snagged up in somebody’s loom. A life afloat on the wind, then caught and woven into the cloth of humanity; born at some arbitrary time, then struggling to find its way into the fabric, weaving into the strength of it.

            “And as he imagined this, he also imagined that he understood something about that fabric. About the way it grew stronger the more tightly woven in each thread became. The ones that skipped about over the top of the cloth, dipping into the weft only now and then, they added little to the strength, though much to the color, of the cloth. While some whose color hardly showed at all, they were deeply wound among the threads, holding all together. There was goodness in those hidden binding threads. Forever from then on, Alvin would see some quiet man or woman, little noticed and hardly thought of by others, who nevertheless went a-weaving through the life of village, town, or city, binding up, holding on, and Alvin would silently salute such folk, and do them homage in his heart, because he knew how their lives kept the cloth strong, the weave tight.”

I think of the tapestry of my life - represented here by the picture of Joe in front of the beautiful tapestry of the curtains in our North Street, Worthington, Ohio home.

images - Joe Spring 1979

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