I have a bunch of notebooks under my worktop. I pulled one out to use the other day and saw illustrations Clare drew in the notebook. The first is of a dog-like creature wearing, is it clothes of a jester? and balancing a hat on its tail which is actually the head of a snake.
The creature has pointed teeth and sharp claws. This is not something I’d like to encounter anywhere at all. It’s a nightmare creature.
After my father’s mother died I somehow ended up with a rag rug she’d made. It was sturdy and I used it for years. At some point, after washing it a few times, it started unraveling and I put it in a box of things to mend. Now, I am not much of a seamstress and sometimes clothes that only need buttons go out of fashion before I get to mending them. This rag rug sat in the bottom of that box for a very long time.
This afternoon I had a few hours to organize my sewing things — I’d brought my other grandmother’s wooden sewing kit from my mother’s house a couple years ago and never got around to filling it. I figured that I might as well mend the items in the mending box while I was at it.
I saved the rag rug for last because I knew it needed a lot of repairs. Turning on a bright light to see where the seams had come loose, I looked at the rug closely for the first time in the forty years I’d owned it.
My grandma lived through the depression and the rug was obviously made out of strips of clothing, braided together. Then the braids were then sewn together making an approximately three by two foot oval. I also own a quilt she made that used scraps of clothing. She once sat with me telling me whose blouse this shape was from, whose dress that shape was from.
Back to the rug. The first area that needed mending included gray corduroy material. Could that have been from a pair of my father’s trousers when he was a young boy?
Another piece of material in this area was probably part of a blue polka-dotted dress. Grandma Patrick’s? Or maybe one of my aunt’s dresses? The tiny polka-dot pattern and the colors looked like something from the 30s or 40s.
Another piece of fabric looked like it might have been someone’s winter scarf or even a sweater, it was cream with red accents. There’s some light denim — a casual blouse? Grandpa’s shirt?
The least interesting piece of fabric is the most colorful, a maroon strip that was used to create a color contrast. I am thinking this might have been scrap drapery or upholstery material.
As I sat mending I listened to an audio book, wondering if Grandma Patrick sat in her front room and listened to the radio as she created the rug. I felt she was sitting next to me, and we were sewing the rug together. I wondered what we would talk about, as we sat next to each other sewing the same rug, 60 or 70 years apart.
These are the reasons I keep things that many people would have thrown out. I knew everyone of the people whose clothes were braided into that old rag rug.
When Dean and I were in Ireland in 1985 for our honeymoon we were slightly alarmed when approached at the ferry depot or train stations by aggressive people who were offering places to stay, but since we had no lodging set up, we often went with them. While they all turned out okay, the accommodations were sup-par but often memorable.
One such “B&B” was in Rosslare where we needed a place to stay one night before taking the ferry to France. The accommodation was on a farm, if I recall correctly, and the family we stayed with had many children. The husband was brutish — Dean suspected he beat his wife because, I think, she had a black eye.
The wife was mute — I think she could hear, but she could not speak. I remember asking her about a particular herb in her garden and she was frustrated that she could not tell me. She had no paper on which to write the name, but we had some playing cards and so she wrote verbeena on a joker card. I suspect it was lemon verbena and I must have asked her because of the smell. Although comparing the dried plant to photos of verbena online make me doubt my suspicions. I am going to now say it was probably lemon balm and not lemon verbena.
I found the card and a clipping of the plant in a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn when we were in the process of a book purge. I am glad I checked because otherwise I may have forgotten her. I hope Dean was wrong about her husband beating her.
Clutch Cargo Lips 