One Thing: Handmade Scarf

On a bright day at an outdoor craft fair, the scarf stood out. Hanging up on one side of a booth full of things that were nice but not quite my style, it was the colors that called out, the unexpected combination of bright and soft that held on.

Handmade chenille, the maker explained. She described the multiple layers of fabric laid one over the other, how she sewed them together in long stripes up the length of the material and then cut between the seams—each layer on both sides of the fabric except a single middle layer. Delicate work, such constructing and deconstructing, the softness a result of deliberate fraying. As she spoke it became clear that the colors in my hand were not random; the fabric had been a bright madras plaid. She showed me how different fabrics took on different characters, how each became a slightly different sort of chenille. We touched other scarves, saw and felt both their origins and their new state. I bought the scarf—it would be soft and bright around my neck.

On another bright fall day the scarf finds its way out of my drawer, promising warmth and softness. Brightness, however, is the primary goal. Some days call for colors that give off a little of their own light. Sometimes they are a reflection, sometimes a reminder, but either way it matters, choosing them—wrapping them around yourself and stepping out into the world.

The warmth, it turns out, matters as well. On this particular day I am starting to break loose from the grasp of a cold-turned-sinus-and-bronchial-infection. Wrapping tender exposed parts is a comfort, and brings a certain kind of warmth and freedom to the whole body. I had not thought about this when I put the scarf on, but it is welcome.

There is also, I think, another comfort wrapped into this scarf. It is linked to the way the maker described how she made it, the love she had for both the work and the finished piece. I carried these things home with the scarf. I don’t know exactly what it meant to her to make it, but I know that it meant a lot. And I know that I have made things—in joy, in hurt, in frustration, in excitement, in sorrow—that carry something of me with them out into the world. 

These are things I am sure of: how necessary it is to make something, how a thing slowly becomes more than itself, how a thing carries meaning from person to person—growing in a way, even while it never changes shape. How this works is less important. Seeing is enough.

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One Thing: Paperweight

Why does this make you catch your breath?

Is it the way it holds light,

or the way light curves around it?

Is it the heaviness of all that light in your hand?

Is it the fact that those bubbles are caught solid in time?

It is that, isn’t it—that fact of ethereal things, caught and still. The thought that all those mercurial, transparent, fleeting things you never get to look at long enough could rest, solid and weighty, in your hand. Alive with light.

If there is a word for that thing that makes you believe, for half a moment, that you could hold all those other things—every bubble you broke trying to catch, for instance, or every glowing moment that slipped away—in your hand and gaze into them as long as you want

you cannot think of it.

The word, too, must be encased in glass, and just out of reach.

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One Thing: The Sound of an Organ during Prayer

Maybe the holiness of the sound is simply a childhood association. But maybe not. All the notes have texture to them, somehow occupy a vertical space in the air. The lowest notes are thick enough to touch. Thick, and yet they reach deep into head and heart, and in grounding themselves in those places they provide grounding for all the restless things they find there. And in sound there is silence, and in the deep tremble of sound waves there is stillness. That can be miracle enough for a day.

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One Thing: The Color of the Sky

There are many things I love and miss about my childhood.

I wish I could re-create the surety I felt that the chrome window latches on the little triangular windows in my parents’ car doubled as water spigots. We must have been traveling. I must have been thirsty.

I wish I could get a handful of the suckers we were treated to after Suzuki festival concerts at Northrup Auditorium—they were rectangular, flat on one side and domed on the other—perfect for conforming to the roof of your mouth with only a little work. It was so hard to choose between butterscotch and orange. It still would be, unless I was in one of my lime moods.

I wish I could dance with a broom on the front porch, believing no one would see, because that is a wondrous freedom to feel. And to the neighbor boy who caught me—yes, that is exactly what I was doing. I lied to your face about it for years, claimed I was only sweeping, because I figured I could make my supreme dorkiness disappear if I denied it enough.

I wish I could lie in the grass or on the floor and daydream, with no hint of anxiety that I could/should/have to be doing something else.

I wish I could reclaim some of the hours I had long ago with paper and coloring books and crayons and markers—more daydreaming, plus endless paper worlds filled with color.

But when I was young, I thought the sky was blue. Every picture I colored had some variation of blue sky and white clouds, and only a small range of shades of blue, at that. And this makes me happy about the age I have gotten to: I have watched for many years, and I have seen the sky striped, dotted, scalloped. I have seen it gold, and wet-green, and purple, and salmon, and gray, and I have seen it pull the rest of the world into its light. Instead of always calling it blue, I have dared to name the color of the sky, myself. And because I dared, the sky has shown me endless worlds. Real ones. Just over our heads, all the time.

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One Thing: Refrigerator Poetry

Every once in a while something new shows up, almost an elves and shoemaker kind of thing. But with mixed results. This, I believe, is one of my favorites:

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