Cut into my grandmother's church dress today and sat there a good while before I could make the first cut
My granddaughter brought me a box last month, things she found cleaning out her mama's closet. In it was my grandmother's church dress. Navy, little covered buttons down the front, worn thin at the elbows. She passed in 1979 and that dress has been folded in a cedar chest since before my youngest was born.
I laid it on the table this morning meaning to take the back panel for a quilt I'm building. Memory quilt, for my great-grandbaby due in November. I got the scissors in my hand and then I just stood there. Couldn't do it. Went and made coffee instead, came back, sat down.
Finally I did cut it. Took a deep breath and went slow. And honey, that navy sits right up against a red print I pulled from my own old housecoat like they were made for each other. The Lord puts things together like that sometimes.
Now listen, I know some of you would've kept the dress whole and hung it in a frame, and I'm not saying that's wrong. But cloth was made to be used. My grandmother wore that dress to praise the Lord every Sunday for years, and now a piece of it's going to wrap a baby that won't be born till fall. That feels like the dress finishing what it started.
Any of you ever cut into something you weren't sure you had the right to cut? I'd like to hear it.
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The sitting with the scissors part is the whole thing, na. I've had a version of that with old houses. I sketch buildings that are about to be pulled down, and sometimes I'll get there and just stand on the road for ten minutes before I can open the book, because starting means admitting it's going. The cloth still being in the box one more morning costs nothing. Cutting makes it real.
I think your grandmother would have liked knowing the navy was going into something a baby will be wrapped in. That's a long way for a dress to travel. Do you know yet which panel of the quilt it'll be, or does the fabric decide that for you?
The ten minutes on the road before you open the book, yes. Same thing. I paint interiors sometimes, rooms that get emptied when someone dies, and there is always that moment at the door where I stand with the box of paint and think, well, this is it, once I start looking properly they are gone. Funny that looking is what keeps them.
And you're right that the dress is not lost by being cut. Cloth in a cedar chest is not cloth anymore, it is a museum. A quilt is still a use. I would say the opposite of what the scissors feel like.
"Cloth in a cedar chest is not cloth anymore, it is a museum." Honey, I'm gone have to write that one down and pin it by my machine. You said it better than I could.
And that's the truth of it, what you said about the looking. Once you start looking properly they gone, but the looking is what keeps them. My grandmother been gone since 1979 and I can still see her in that dress, the way she'd smooth the front of it down before she sat. That's not in the cedar chest. That's in me, and now it's gone be in a quilt for a baby who'll never know her. She'll just sleep under her.
I did cut it, once I sat with it long enough. Took the back panel like I planned. The little covered buttons I couldn't part with, so those gone go in the border somewhere. Feels right that way.
You painting those emptied rooms, mm. I bet you know exactly what I mean about the door.
Standing on the road with the book shut, that's it exactly. Some things you got to let sit with you before you can put your hand to them, and anybody who rushes you through that part don't understand what's being done.
It's the center medallion. Navy's dark enough that everything I set around it will read like it's circling something, and I want that. My grandmother wore that dress every first Sunday for years. If the baby's wrapped in it, then all of that keeps going. That dress traveled from her arms to mine to a child not even here yet. That's a long road, like you said.
Did you ever sketch a building and then find out they saved it after all? I wonder what that does to the drawing.