My granddaughter put my quilt in a museum show and I sat in the car 20 minutes before I could go in
She sent me the email back in March and I read it four times standing up in the kitchen. One of my quilts is hanging in a museum show right now. Not a church hall, not the library, a museum. I have been sewing since I was seven years old on my grandmother's porch, and I could not make my legs walk me through that door.
So I sat in the car. Twenty minutes, engine off, watching folks go up the steps in their nice shoes.
When I finally got inside I walked right past it and had to come back around. And here's what got me. They had it under that low light with the little card on the wall, and my name typed out, and I stood there thinking about the back of it. The back of that quilt is ugly, honey. Seams going every which way, thread knots, a piece of Mama's church dress I had to patch in crooked because I cut it wrong. Nobody's ever going to see the back in that museum.
I don't know. I'm proud, I truly am. But I keep thinking about all the women who made beautiful things and never once got their name typed on a card. My grandmother never saw a museum except the one time we rode up to Birmingham.
Anyway. It's up through January if anybody's near there. I'll be back to see it again when my hands stop shaking lol.
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The sitting in the car part got me. I think every maker has a thing like that, some door you can't walk through right away even when it's the door you've been waiting on. I'm a ceramicist, and the first time a piece of mine went into a proper gallery I stood outside smoking and pretending to check my phone for like fifteen minutes. And the walking past it and coming back around, yes. You don't want to look at it straight on the first time, it's too much. That low light and the little card on the wall, that's the real thing, that's what separates it from the church hall. Fifty-something years at it and you still couldn't get your legs to move. That's not nerves, that's just how much it means. Congratulations, truly. She knew what she was doing sending you that email.
Fifteen minutes smoking and fake-checking your phone, honey that's the same twenty minutes, just with something to do with your hands. I know exactly what that was. You weren't stalling, you were letting your heart catch up to your body. Clay and cloth both, that's the thing, a piece sits in your own kitchen under a plain bulb for months and then somebody puts it on a wall and tells you it's art and everything in you wants to argue with them and cry at the same time.
I walked past mine twice before I could stand in front of it. The card had my grandmother's name on it, in with mine, "taught by." That's the part I couldn't look at straight on.
Fifty something years. Mm. I hope you're still throwing, baby. The hands know things we don't.