SCRAPS AND SCROLLS
SCRAPS AND SCROLLS
Last week’s blog, posted October 12th, marked my mother’s earth arrival date 114 years ago. In many ways, she is more alive in me today than she was 24 years ago when her soul took flight from its earthly shell. I’m not conjuring her up. I don’t hear her voice. I can’t remember what it sounded like. I have cassette tapes of her singing, but no cassette player. Her impact lives mostly in the things she did with her hands. On some mystical level, she continues to live in me. My age no doubt helps me notice her wisdom seeds sprouting in my thought life and, I daresay, in those close to me. Her wisdom often seeds my writing.
I don’t look in the mirror and see her. But my husband, who knew her well (they were Friday fried fish-eating buds), occasionally declares that he sees her in me. My son, who was thirteen when she died, still reminisces about afterschool time with Grandma Pet and her antics. She lives on in them too.
Her hands, so different from mine, mark me most. Some things I do are so her. She journaled every day, and I have many of her journals. I could identify her handwriting and sentence structure at the drop of a hat. Once she wrote three hundred Bible verses on slips of paper, rolled each like a scroll, tied it with ribbon, and gave them to family and friends at a reunion. A collection of them holds a special place in my home. Examine my clothes and you’ll find a safety pin in most pieces; a habit I learned from her. She always kept a small bunch pinned somewhere on her clothing in case of an emergency. My pins remind me of her humble life, marred by difficulties, yet she survived and thrived because she was rooted in her universal truths.
During extended visits in her later years, scraps of fabric from my sewing projects became quilt tops in her hands. She left me with a love of sewing, and my family thinks I can repair, alter, or reconstruct anything. Piecing little bits of fabric together isn’t my knack, yet I recently finished a textile art project, and one day I will make a quilt from one of her tops. She never met a plant she didn’t love and could propagate anything. Today, plants fill my home and my son’s.
Why write about an old woman with smooth, velvety chocolate skin who died 24 years ago and happened to give birth to me, her twelfth child? Because across the distance of time, the threads she left in me have braided with my life experiences to create the me you get today. She lives on, and I wanted you to know me better through the lens of her.
This I know to be truth: my mother’s imprint on me is mine alone. Each of you has someone who lives on in you, shaping the inimitable person the world sees and loves. Who is it? Let their wisdom seeds keep sprouting in you.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT---James Baldwin, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they never failed to imitate them.”
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