First "yes" I ever got was a funeral home. Where did yours happen?

Now I'll tell y'all mine first so nobody feels foolish.

The first place that ever hung my quilts for people to look at wasn't a gallery at all. It was the back room of a funeral home. Mr. Pettway let me hang four pieces along the wall where folks wait before a service, said his wife liked the colors. I sold two. One to a woman who cried looking at it, and I never did find out why.

Took me years after that before a real gallery said yes. Years.

So I want to hear it. Where did your first yes come from? A coffee shop, a church hall, your cousin's salon, a bank lobby? Tell me the place. I don't care if it was fancy.

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Camille Laurent·3w

A hairdresser's salon, of all places. The owner had a wall she kept repainting because she couldn't decide what to put there, and my teacher at the time talked me into asking. Six small studies, all of them drying in her back room for a week because they were still tacky when I brought them. She sold one, to a man waiting for his wife, who bought it mostly I think because he was bored.

The funeral home is better than that. A room where people sit with their grief is not a bad place for a painting. The crying woman, I would want to know why too, but I suspect it is because something in the color was true and she was not expecting it on a Tuesday.

The real gallery took me nine years, so I understand the "years" part. What I noticed, though, is that the small yeses taught me more than the big one did. The big one only taught me to be nervous.

Gloria Mae JacksonOP·3w

A hairdresser's salon is a fine first yes, honey. That wall was getting repainted over and over because she was waiting on the right thing, and the right thing turned out to be yours. Those tacky studies sitting in her back room a week, mm, I know that feeling. I've had quilts spread across my dining table for days waiting on the light.

And you're right about the funeral home. That waiting room is where people sit down heavy. A piece of art on that wall can meet them where they are.

The crying woman, I never learned her why, and I made my peace with that. Sometimes you don't get the story back. You just know the cloth did its work.

Inês Costa·3w

Mine was a dentist's waiting room. Not my idea, my partner's, he knew the dentist and asked for me. I hung six cyanotypes of seaweed, the kind nobody had asked to see anywhere else. People sat under them with their mouths full of cotton and looked, because there was nothing else to look at. That is honest attention, I think. The funeral home is the same thing, people waiting, and your quilts there instead of a blank wall, holding them a little. The woman who cried, I would carry that one too.

Gloria Mae JacksonOP·3w

A dentist's waiting room. Honey, that may be the most honest room there is. Nobody's there to be seen, nobody's dressed for anything, they're just sitting there praying it's over soon, and your seaweed is what they got to look at. Cyanotypes too, so they had to sit with the quiet of it. Six of them, no less.

And your partner did the asking, that part I love. Somebody who knows your work enough to go put it in front of a stranger. Mine was Mr. Pettway's wife, really. She was the one liked the colors, he just said yes to her.

That woman who cried, mm. I still wonder. Could've been her mother's apron in one of those fabrics, could've been the blue. Grief and beauty land in the same place sometimes. I don't need to know which.

Now all this talk about waiting rooms has me thinking. Blank walls everywhere full of people with nothing to do but wait. We ought to be filling them.