Yesterday I surprised myself and finished the French patchwork quilt I began in the New Year. For weeks I didn’t feel like working on it. Its vivid colours didn’t suit my mood as I tried to find my way through a tangle of hurt and damage. But yesterday I saw it on the chair by the sliding doors to the deck and thought, Oh, just finish it. I’d made a deep binding, the yellow, and somehow it needed something else, so I threaded my sharp wide-eyed sashiko needles with cobalt thread and embellished the binding with a running stitch that was half-trail, half-river. When a line ended, I punctuated it with a small shell button. There. Finished.
I had in mind a recipient when I began the quilt but this no longer seems possible. So yesterday, after I’d spread the textile out on my bed and after I’d snipped the basting threads out, the ones holding the layers together as I quilted the spirals and meandering lines that have become a default pattern, anyway, after I’d snipped the basting threads and smoothed the completed quilt, I pulled it over me and I read more of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, a book that suits my current mood and situation.
She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.
How true this feels, both as someone who was once a child and as someone who is now a mother. Under the bright quilt, I read and thought and then I got up to finish planting out the beans. I’d forgotten the cryptic squares, the deep blue ones with playful cats, and now I look at them as though they might carry a message from that foreign land.
“Those were splendid days. We didn’t know it then, of course, just how splendid they were. Children never do, I suppose.
...Theresa Kishkan 