Tag: vyshyvanka

redux: quotidian lines: is it too late?

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Note: this was posted 4 years ago today. And today? I am working to finish the extended work of fiction alluded to in the last section of this. It’s become a novel and the red threads run through it like rivers of connection. (And this year’s garlic is planted.)

rushnyk

1.

I meant to plant the garlic earlier. It’s usually in the ground and mulched with maple leaves by this point in the fall. But this year? Time raced, as it sometimes does, and I held on for dear life as we prepared for John’s surgery in October, clearing paths through the house so he would be able to use a walker from one room to the next. Instead of digging over the garlic bed, I was reading about wound care, making sure we had everything we needed for the months to come. But the other day there was a clear space in the day and I dug the bed. I went out in the rain an hour ago to dig the furrows and plant the cloves of Metechi (my favourite, originally from the Republic of Georgia or maybe Kazakhstan, though ours came from a farmers’ market in Lytton about 5 years ago), Music (from Peter Haas), and Red Russian, strewing the furrows first with kelp meal and bone meal, and tucking the cloves in with fish compost from Salish Soils.  Is it too late? I don’t think so. The fall has been quite mild, though on Monday when I drove out for a swim, there was a dusting of new snow on the mountain and few delicate flakes falling from the sky at the top of the Sakinaw hill.

2.

Yesterday we went to Sechelt for a medical appointment and physiotherapy for John. While I was waiting for him, my hands were exploring the texture of the poppies on my shirt, a vyshyvanka I bought in Kosiv, in Western Ukraine, last fall. This embroidery is hand-done. I bought two shirts on that trip, one with geometric embroidery (machine-done), and this one, with brilliant red poppies strewn across the chest and sleeves. As my fingers traced the shape of one flower, I felt a jolt, a small electric volta, like the moment in the sonnet when everything shifts, when the argument or thesis presented in the first part resolves itself in the second. It is the hinge, the fulcrum. Could the shirt with poppies be my own fulcrum?

3.

I’ve begun a new extended piece of writing, fiction (I think), and I’ve been wondering about how to move between what I know and what I need to find out. I need a device, a strand to follow, to allow me to make sense of material, some of which is historical, some contemporary. (I think of the time brackets, or volta brackets, in music, when a passage is played two or more times, but with different endings.) I need a strand, a length of red embroidery thread to lead me into the early 20th century in Western Ukraine and back again. In my trunk of textiles, I have 4 lengths of rushnyk, the ritual cloths you see in Orthodox churches, wrapped around bread, given at weddings; they are coded, richly symbolic. When distant relatives came to our Carpathian hotel last fall to meet me, they brought champagne and a beautiful rushnyk, chocolate and photographs. Is it too late to learn how to read these cloths, how to run my hands along the borders of stars and berries, sheaves of wheat? One source implies the cloths can be a link between the living and the dead, those who stayed and those who left. Is it too late?

to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build

theresakishkan10 Comments

vyshyvanka

Some days, days when trouble looms, literally (a huge telecommunication tower is scheduled to be built across the highway from our property, which is troubling in itself, but the chosen location, a corner of property adjacent to the entrance to the Iris Griffith Field Studies and Interpretive Centre, named for a woman who would be horrified at this development, makes clear the lack of respect our regional district and the owners of the property have for the environmental values so many of us hold dear), some days I sit at my desk and imagine myself elsewhere. This morning it’s Lviv, a city I loved when I visited two years ago, and where part of the writing I’m currently working on is set. I don’t actually know what the writing will become. Fiction, mostly. Mostly it’s a dialogue at this point, a series of questions and answers. Attempts at answers. But as I write, I know a few things I’m moving towards. One of them is textiles and how they are repositories of memory and history. Is it a surprise to learn that text and textile share a root?

from Latin textus “style or texture of a work,” literally “thing woven,” from past participle stem of texere “to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build,” from PIE root teks- “to weave, to fabricate, to make; make wicker or wattle framework.”

In Ukraine, I was drawn to the beautiful rushnyk we saw everywhere, the ritual cloth embroidered or woven with red thread, the colour of life. In churches, they draped the ikons. When we arrived at villages, we were met with bread, salt, and horilka, the bread wrapped in rushnyk. When the family members who learned I’d visited their village (but somehow missed them) came to visit us at a hotel in the Carpathian Mountains, they brought me a piece of Bukovynian rushnyk.  I bought some textiles to bring home but of course I wish I’d bought more. I gave my sons (because Angelica was with us in Ukraine and she bought some of her own) and their families a piece of rushnyk each for Christmas in 2019.

I read somewhere that rushnyk were important in a symbolic way in the building of houses, where they were used to raise final beams.

Suffixed form *teks-ōn-, weaver, maker of wattle for house walls, builder (possibly contaminated with *teks-tōr, builder) tectonic; architect from Greek tektōn, carpenter, builder.

They protected hearths and harvests, they were used to wrap newborns, they contained images of sacred fertility and family gatherings. Some days I wear my heart on my sleeve. I wear bright poppies on a shirt, a vyshyvanka, made in the small city of Kosiv, and I think of the woman who stitched them, unknown to me, a granddaughter who returned in search of family history and who found living relatives, and who found a living language of red embroidery and weaving she wants to understand.

What’s going on across the highway has its own language. Public consultation. Technological necessity. A lot of baffle-gab, quite honestly. What wasn’t heard was the sound of children’s voices, the ones we hear on spring days when buses bring classes to nature school and kids learn about wetlands, plant communities, and biodiversity. After the pandemic, buses will pass under the shadow of an enormous tower, higher than the highest trees, a structure utterly out of its element, but somehow deemed appropriate by both the telecommunications giant responsible and the property owners who have given their permission (though for years they have promoted their resort business as a nature sanctuary). It hurts my heart, the one on my sleeve and the one that beat so hard in the night that I couldn’t sleep.

rushnyk

In the work I am currently finding my way into, one of the characters curates a small museum of these textiles, and by coincidence, or not, she is related to to the character who is trying to learn more about her family story. If I keep my head low, listening, my eyes on the cloths I chose in Kosiv, maybe I will learn something of the language essential to understanding a story hidden in red thread.