A few weeks ago, I went to the dentist (yes, that's really how this story starts. Bear with me - my voice feels a little scratchy after 30 days of quiet here).
And you know - it's the dentist. My dentist himself is very pleasant. We always have lovely conversations about books. (Or, at least as much as one can have a conversation with their mouth wide open and someone's hands inside it. Maybe it's more accurate that I do a lot of listening about books.) Last year he convinced me to read all of Julia Alvarez' books, which I can't believe I had made it 32 years without reading. Wasn't I an English and Women's Studies major in college? Yeah, it just seems wrong that they let me get by four years without reading her. She's amazing.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. In the dentist chair where I was fantasizing what I was going to do with the rest of my solo Mama time that afternoon (because going to the dentist does not count as "recharging Mama time", even with the charming book chat). And I remembered a flea market nearby. Ah, perfect. Sometimes I love just slowly wandering around the stalls at an indoor flear market alone - in the quiet, surrounded by my own thoughts and a whole lot of 'old things' - some of them quite lovely. And the rest - well, I can see past a few baseball cards.
And that is just about the longest way I could have told you - that I found this quilt there that day. There's never really any doubt when I find one of these, and it's reasonably priced, that it will come home with me. Despite the growing piles of old quilts around here ('that we can't even use!" Steve says, befuddled and humored. "But these ones are art!" I say, entirely serious).
It's actually a total cutter quilt. There's a big hole in the middle and the edges are really, really frayed. I have a few projects in mind for it that I'm excited about trying out. But...I'm not quite ready for the cutting yet. I want to stare at it just a little bit longer. Think about the woman who made it. The people it might have warmed. What their life was like. The artists who designed the fabric. What they were inspired by. And on and on. I want to study it, and dream about it, if you will.
And, I want to play Quilt Twister. "Left foot on yellow floral! Right hand on green plaid!" My children have such sweet tolerance for their crazy Mama. And I'm very grateful for that. And the flea market. And my dentist, too.
