“You will see some strips of brown and green.”

Yesterday, after a night of rain, I had my first swim of the season at the local pool. On Monday morning I swam in the lake and spent the rest of the day trying to get warm again. I thought it was time to give up the lake swims until next May, though today is going to be quite warm so I think I’ll wait until the afternoon and head down to dip my toes and see what happens. If the colour of my morning lake swims is green–swimming between two groups of cedars, the water reflecting their deep forest green–, the pool is blue. The lane I like best is the one closest to the window and when I swim the backstroke, I can see the sky by just turning my head a little. The water isn’t alive, not like the lake, but it’s warm and I’m lucky to have a pool so close. We live in quite a remote area but are only 10 minutes from the local high school; the pool is below the school, built when the original high school burned down in the 1970s and there wasn’t a water source for the firefighters to use to put it out. Now there’s the pool.

When we came home from the swim, John built a fire in the woodstove to take the chill off the air and I spent some time quilting. Two springs ago, I pieced together a big quilt top, trying to make a visual representation of some thinking I was doing about strength and memory.

I was remembering the work of framing our kitchen, the first part of our house; we were complete neophytes but John read the building code carefully, asked a lot of questions, and he figured out what we needed to do. I was there to nail, to lift, to dream my way into the future, which was decades long. We began building in the summer of 1981. We’ve lived here for more than 40 years.

It doesn’t usually take me this long to finish a quilt. I pieced this one in 2022 and took a while to figure out how to back it. The photo at the top of this post is what I finally chose, piecing together two panels of cotton I’d wrapped around pvc pipe, tying tightly with hemp string (which doesn’t slip), and then dyeing with indigo. It doesn’t usually take me this long but this is a big quilt and I decided to use sashiko thread to quilt freehand spirals and trails to hold the layers together, punctuated with the occasional shell button. So I don’t know where I’m going when I begin a spiral. I just follow the thread and think and somehow that’s taking a long time. I didn’t work on the quilt from May until now because it was too hot to sit with something heavy on my lap. But now these cool mornings are exactly right. I come into the kitchen from my study (which I don’t heat), pull the basket over to the rocking chair, and sit by the woodstove for an hour or so to stitch. I am remembering how John drew the plans for the kitchen, figured out how much wood we’d need, cut the framing studs, and how we nailed everything together, how we lifted the walls into place. My quilt remembers too. In a long essay I wrote over the past year, there’s a section about this.

I wanted to remember the framing of the walls with their window-spaces and openings for doors. Wanted the lintels, the places for the sills, the thresholds. I built the quilt top by sewing long strips together to serve as the studs framing the walls, I separated them with horizontal bands of beige linen to stand in for top-plates, and I used a lot of blue cotton because our plates are blue, our table linens are mostly blue, our ceiling is white, sponged with clear blue clouds, and out of every window, there is sky, some of it open and some of latticed with the Douglas firs that have grown to huge heights during our residence here. You will see some strips of brown and green. You will see some red and a coral pink, because I couldn’t “see” the finished structure as we were building it but kept asking, Will there be window sills for geraniums, a view to roses and honeysuckle?

Here’s the quilt top in 2022, hung on the clothesline so I could see it whole and decide how I wanted to finish it.

I’m about 3/4 finished now, the spirals and trails working their way to the edges. Maybe this is the winter we’ll sleep under the memory of building our kitchen, more than 40 years ago, the lintels still strong, the Douglas firs a little shocked by a hot summer but as sturdy as ever just beyond the window.