adventure fidfam: a new heirloom for christmas

for the last few months nana, my mom, has been acting particularly mysterious--all i knew is that when we didn't see her on our regular mwf riverside days she was overwhelmingly busy with a secret "project." one afternoon my dad accidentally mentioned they were meeting aunt edy for dinner and then so desperately pleaded with me not to ask any more questions lest he be cerimonously crucified for ruining the suprise. but i was not expecting this gorgeous heirloom that my mother had been crafting with my aunt edy and had enlisted generations of women to contribute. . .

it started sometime earlier this year when my mother had shown me a stack of handkerchiefs tucked (like many women who have been lucky to inherit such intricate intimacies) at the back of her top dresser drawer. the collection struck me as an ecclectic and deeply personal narrative of my foremothers--from the embellished A that my grandmother Alta had carried in her frail hands to colorfully crocheted butterflies that i imagine my mother carried as a young teenager to souvenier hankies that featured the flora and fauna of "little america." it reminds me now of joan didion's narrative in where i was from--which coincidentally michael's family gave me for christmas--didon describes a quilt hanging in a room in her home:

a quilt made by my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Anthony Reese on a wagon journey during which she buried oen child, gave birth to another. . . and took turns driving a yoke of oxen, a span of mules. . . In this quilt of Elizabeth Reese's were more stiches than I had ever seen in a quilt, a blinding and pointless compaction of stitches, and it occured to me as I hung it that she must have finished it one day in the middle of hte crossing, somwehre in the wilderness of her own grief and illness, and just kept on stitching.

it reminds me of that because i imagine these handkerchiefs as quiet, personal witnesses to that life in that little box house in yankton, south dakota. they wiped tears, were held in prayer, and felt in embrace. looking around my old bedroom where my mother has a hanging her most cherished quilts i suggested she quilt them--it seemed the logical thing to do and something that only my mother with her patience and precision could do. i forgot about that conversation and that moment until christmas eve. not only had she quilted some forty handkerchiefs--but she had made a multi-generational heirloom. she enlisted the help of michael's mother, grandmother, my father's mother and sister to contirbute handkerchiefs and track down names and stories. my father and her sister, my aunt edy, were enlisted--my father to help in the oragami-like fashion in which she was determined not to cut a single piece of that history and instead creatively stitch, layer, artfully fold the pieces together; my aunt to tap into her quilter's network and track down the best batting and sealing for the silk (the same one she used to make my wedding dress) and enlist yet another quilter and her 20 foot quilting machine. . . the pictures and these words seem flimsy compared to the endeavor here, but then that's what makes it an heirloom--it's a living history that continues to tell its story...