The far and the near: a craft room in progress

​My craft room does not photograph the way I wish it did.

That is not to say it isn’t charming. Parts of it are very charming. Up close, it can look almost exactly like the room I carry around in my imagination: a basket of papers, a bit of lace, a little red gingham, a doll face behind glass, pens standing up in cups like flowers, a wooden table by the window, old things and useful things living together like they have known each other for years.

Up close, it is a nest.

From farther back, it is more honest.

From farther back, we can see the in-between stage. The stacks. The boxes. The rolling carts. The projects that have not found their permanent homes yet. The things I have brought down from high places because I am tired of owning lovely supplies I can’t reach. (Hayleigh and Brenda have actually brought those down. Full disclosure.) The room is becoming more useful, but maybe not exactly more photogenic.

I keep thinking about Thomas Wolfe’s short story “The Far and the Near.” I loved teaching that story. In it, a train engineer spends years passing a little house on his route. He sees a woman and her child from the train, and they become, in his mind, almost a symbol of goodness and beauty at home. Then, after he retires, he visits them. And what was lovely from far away is not lovely up close.

My craft room is almost the opposite. The close-ups are beautiful. The far away view still has a little bit of work to do.

One basket can look like a poem. One shelf can look like memory. One little cup of pens can look like possibility. But stepped back, all those little poems are still waiting to become a chapter.

That is where I am right now.

I am trying to make this room usable without forcing it to lose its romance. I am trying to bring things down where I can reach them, sort them, touch them, use them, and love them – instead of keeping them tucked away in places that make the room look neater, but my life less possible.

There is a difference between a room arranged for a photograph and a room arranged for a life.

I am a retired English teacher, a junk journalist, a doll keeper, and afghan namer, and a memory keeper. Wow! That sounds a little grand, but it is also fairly accurate, I have spent most of my life loving words …and old paper …and pretty scraps …and family stories …and objects that still seem to have a little breath left in them.

That exact concoction is this room.

It is not just craft supplies. It is old books and calendars. It is lace and old baskets and buttons and beads. It is dolls that remind me of my childhood and motherhood —- and my mother‘s childhood. It is notebooks waiting for truthful words. It is paper waiting to be cut and glued into something that feels like a page from life itself. It is yarn becoming an afghan for someone I love. Right now I spend most of my time working on an afghan for Adrienne. She knows I’m making it, so I can say that much. I usually like to make surprises. Yarn in progress has its own kind of hope. It is row after row of intention. I think it is warmth before it is finished.

And maybe that is what this whole room is: Warmth before it is finished.

My craft room in progress is a funny thing. It can look messier at the exact moment it is becoming more useful. It can look less finished at the exact moment it is becoming more alive. So this is not the grand tour. This is the “during.” This is both the close-up and the longshot. This is the nest still being feathered. Maybe that is a good enough place to begin. Around here, beauty does not always arrive polished. Most of the time it comes in a basket, with a lot of lace hanging out, waiting for life to notice….

Still Green

​There comes a point when a woman gets tired of standing over her own life with a grade book. I have spent so much of my life, trying to improve myself that I am just plain tired of it.

For years, self improvement was nearly an annual summer ritual for me. A new book, a new plan, a new little burst of hope that this might be the one summer that finally turned me into the woman I meant to be. And maybe some of it did me good. I am sure it did. But I can also see now that a lot of it came from the feeling that who I already was simply was not quite enough.

That is a weary way to live.

So when I see one of these prompts about what kind of woman I am cultivating this season and what seeds I need to plant, I understand the point, but I have to smile. I am not much of a gardener. I never have been. I like flowers, fine, but I would much rather cook, read, crochet, cut paper, glue, paint a room, or straighten up a drawer than fool with a flower bed. So if I answer the question at all, I have to translate it into language that fits my own life.

And what I keep coming back to is this: I do not want to spend the rest of my life being my own improvement project.

I would still like to be lovely. I would still like to be kind. I would still like to have some sparkle left on me. But the plain truth is, I am tired. My body does not do what it wants done. My energy does not rise to meet the day the way I wish it would. And after all these years, I am no longer convinced that the answer is to keep supervising myself.

Maybe what I need in this season is not more self improvement. Maybe it is more mercy.

I know there are things I have watered that never did me one bit of good – regret, loneliness, old heartaches, disappointment, and that mean little voice that always seems to think criticism is the same thing as help. But not everything painful in me is a flaw; some of it is grief. Some of it is awareness. Some of it is simply the sorrow of living long enough to know what I have lost.

So maybe this woman I am cultivating now is not a dazzling woman, not a reinvented woman, not a woman who has finally fixed herself. Maybe she is just a woman who is trying to be gentle with herself. A woman who would still like to be kind, truthful, and open to beauty. A woman who wants less scolding and more grace. A woman who is tired of treating herself like one more thing around the house that needs repair.

I may not want to grow a plant. However, I would like to keep alive whatever in me that's still green. For now, I believe mercy may be enough.

Miracle Workers

A special kind of happiness exists in seeing order begin to return to a house.

Over the past couple of months, Brenda and Hayleigh have been helping me methodically work through my house, and I cannot tell you what a difference it has made. And not just to the house – It has made a remarkable difference in me. These two have cleaned, sorted, carried, shifted, arranged, and steadily helped me reclaim rooms and corners— things that had become too hard for me to manage alone.

Now I need to say this: I love organization. Always have. In my day, I was an organizing fanatic. My house didn’t always show it, but I could straighten, sort, arrange, and temporarily improve my home with the best of them. Lately, I have not had mobility or spunk to do what needs to be done. And just as importantly, I have not had enough room. Space IS the final frontier, and space has been one of the greatest gifts Brenda and Hayleigh have given me. They have created room to breathe. By carrying things downstairs to be stashed, by moving one category out so another one can move in, by making room for the house to function again, they have made it possible for things to look more as I think they should. The china is a perfect example. There was no earthly way those china closets, cupboards, and shelves were ever going to look pretty and sensible. Easter, Halloween, and Christmas were all trying to live in the same real estate. No wonder it all felt crowded. No wonder the shelves were defeated and sad. Once Brenda and Hayleigh began making magic, giving things a proper home, the China could finally begin to look like China again instead of a traffic jam with gravy boats.

And these two have a gift for organization. They enjoy it, they understand it, and they are good at it. They can walk into a room and begin to see order where other people only see a problem. That is a real gift, and I admire it very much.

I have known Brenda a very, very long time. She was one of my first students when I began teaching. I remember well a pretty, little blonde girl who sat by the window in my classroom. So there’s something especially sweet about having her in my life all these years later, helping me in this season of it. And now to also have her granddaughter Hayleigh here feels like one of those unexpected, full-circle blessings that life sometimes gives us.

These two have meant so much to me, and the spirit they bring with them really shines. They come in this house cheerful. They work so hard. They make quick decisions. They laugh. They keep going. Three hours with them each week passes faster than anything possible, and yet by the end of it something real, almost magical, has happened every single time.These pictures tell a good bit of the story. Trying to find places in the drama, craft things get sorted into tubs. Shelves begin to make sense again. Rooms feel lighter and more usable; however, the pictures do not quite show the relief or the encouragement of it. The companionship of having good women helping me bring order back to my world sparkles as the real star of the show.

This fabulous grandmother-granddaughter duo has been a real blessing to me, and I am so grateful.

First knight…

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I think a lot about whether a person needs to give up or a person needs to fight. I have often thought that one of my favorite scenes in any movie is in First Knight when Sean Connery looks so defeated. He looks so beaten; he kneels and says words of surrender, concession, defeat. Then suddenly King Arthur rises up. He raises his sword to the sky, and he encourages his people to “Fight! Fight! and never surrender.” Oh, that Sean Connery moment, that beautiful Scottish accent on King Arthur (by the way, I love that.) I subconsciously believe that was the way to live—- never say die. Never surrender. For much of life that is true. Having perseverance in the face of disaster, illness, hard times— all of this is important. We cannot be sitting around giving up all the time, but there’s something deeper that I know I missed in that process.

Giving up has sounded dramatic to me at times, as if it ought to come with a great tearing loose, decisive release, a brave and shining moment of laying down everything… But most of the time, for me, it has not looked like that at all. Most of the time, surrender has looked small. It has looked reluctant. It has looked like loss. It has looked like circling the same hard thought again and again until finally, I’m tired of carrying it. It has looked nothing like triumph and more like loosening my grip by degrees.

Lately I have been seeing that one of the hardest things for me to surrender has not just been my deep sorrow itself, but my argument with God about it. If God did not do the thing I begged him to do, then somewhere in me, I decided I would not thank him for anything else either. I would not call anything mercy. I would not even give him credit when something gentle or good arrived at my door. It feels too much like letting go of my case against him. It feels disloyal to my grief. That is hard to admit, but it is true.

And that bitterness, too, is something I need to lay down. I need to lay down my refusal to notice mercy. I need to lay down my fear that gratitude will betray my grief. I don’t need to understand everything before I can receive anything good.

I am not saying everything makes sense to me. It does not. I am not saying I have tied suffering up neatly and called it resolved. I have not. I am only beginning to see that sorrow and gratitude may not be enemies after all. That what seems like unanswered prayer is real, and so is what looks like a small mercy. That love can still be true, even when answers are not.

Maybe surrender is not saying I understand. Maybe it is only saying I am willing to stop clutching what I cannot solve. Maybe it is holy ground to grieve what was not given and still give thanks for what was. It may be that part of surrender is learning to receive small mercies without feeling disloyal to my sorrow.

Dear Lord,

I lay down my refusal to notice mercy. I lay down my fear that gratitude will betray my grief. I lay down my need to understand everything before I can receive anything good. Teach me to receive small mercies without feeling disloyal to my sorrow, and please teach me that love can still be true even when answers are not.

Amen.

A quilt that folded time

I have been working on a quilt project, but it feels like more than a project. It feels like I’m touching time.  This was an autograph quilt from 1932, signed by women in my family and community, plus one man: my grandfather, George Gerald Miller, Senior. When those women and my granddad signed it, many were young—- about the age of some of our granddaughters. When I knew these wonderful women, they were the older ones of my childhood, the ones I loved, the ones whose names were familiar in our kitchens and our churches and all of our family talks. The quilt was created by our grandmother, Ma, Iona Marguerite Miller.

And now I am about the age that they were then; that’s hard to take; that’s impossible to believe, but I am. That is what moves me so much. It feels as if time has folded, like fabric, until the very corners of it touch.

My cousin Susan inherited this quilt when our grandmother passed away in 1976. Susan had kept it tucked away in a trunk for years, and she finally decided it was time to bring it out and share it. She said something profound that stayed with me: sometimes the parts are greater than the whole.

The first crunch of scissors in fabric hurt my heart a little; there was something powerful about the quilt as one piece. But she was right, too. Hidden away in a trunk, it was not being seen.. Shared out, it might begin to live again.

So we cut it apart.

Wow. That sounds harsher than it felt; it was not destruction. It was a way of giving the quilt back to the family in pieces so that it could be framed, displayed, remembered, and cherished. I think that was a wonderfully unselfish thing for my cousin Susan to do.

Our very most important core family blocks were divided with care. Susan kept our grandmother Iona‘s block, which was especially fitting since her daughter was named after Ma. Susan‘s mother, Opal, had made two blocks, so Susan kept one and gave one to her other daughter. Paula’s mother, Elizabeth, had also made two, and Paula gave those to her daughters. When we divided the remainder, Amanda Miller’s block landed in my stack, but Paula will soon have that block so that she has one to keep for herself. I kept the block signed by my grandfather George Gerald Miller, Senior. He was the only man on that quilt. Since my father was George Gerald Miller, Junior, that one felt especially right in my hands. Now these pieces are framed and beautiful, no longer folded away in the darkness. They are out where they can speak. Paula and Susan both made gorgeous quilt pictures for their daughters. We have given a few blocks away to  a few cousins and friends.

And this is not quite the end of the story. Soon these quilt blocks that are left, I hope, will be wrapped in tissue, accompanied by a poem or a short note, and tucked into cherry-printed mailers that look as though they were made for quilt scraps and family history. Some blocks already know where they belong. Others await investigation on the Internet, on family sites, on Find a Grave, or on many other sources. I designated a pretty butterfly- themed journal to this quest. Other blocks may have to be claimed. I like that thought – that after all these years, the names may still find their way home.

What stays with me most is this feeling that time is not always a straight line. Sometimes it folds like fabric; sometimes the corners touch. Sometimes a young woman signing her name in 1932 feels suddenly near to that older woman I once loved, and she seems impossibly close to the woman I am now.

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All that from a quilt. A little cloth. A handful of names. And almost a century folded into one pair of hands.Thank you, Susan..