The log cabin block I've done a hundred times finally taught me something
I been sewing log cabin blocks since I was maybe nine years old, sitting at my grandmother's machine with a footstool so I could reach the pedal. Thought I knew everything there was to know about it. Strip, strip, strip, go around and around.
Then Tuesday I was piecing one for a new quilt and the light came on at my kitchen table, of all places. I had laid out this coral fabric from a dress my mama wore to church in the sixties, and I put it next to this dull brown from a pair of work pants my daddy had, and something in me just stopped. All these years I been cutting my strips even and square and neat. And my grandmother never did that. She eyeballed everything. That's why her corners never quite met and folks loved them anyway.
I had to sit back in my chair and laugh at myself. Sixty years I've been making these blocks and I'm just now hearing what she was telling me all along. She wasn't sloppy, y'all. She was free.
I ripped out that block and started over, let the strips run a little crooked on purpose. The Lord's sense of humor, me learning my own craft back to front at 63. Finished it and it feels like her hand is in it too. That's the best a quilt ever feels.
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This got to me, the part about the coral next to the brown. I work with old paper and I know that exact stop. A page you've handled fifty times suddenly sits differently against another page and you can't put your finger on why, but you know you're looking at something you didn't put there on purpose.
I think the hundred times matter more than the light. You can't have the moment without all the repetition before it. The routine is what makes you ready to see it.
Ah, you've hit the nail on the head there and I'd say it twice. I carve the same hare over and over, fifty odd versions of the one animal, and people ask me why wouldn't I move on. But it's the repetition that does it. Your hands know the path so well they stop thinking, and then the head's free to actually see what's in front of it. You can't have the light without the hundred times before it, sure you can't.
There's a version of that hare I pulled a couple years back where the black just landed perfectly against the paper, and I'd done near the same block thirty times before and never noticed the space it was sitting in. Same ink, same press, same everything. But the years of doing it meant I was finally ready to cop on. That's the quiet magic of it, I think. The craft keeps the appointment and one day the meaning shows up to meet you. Lovely way you put it about the routine making you ready. That's the whole game.
That black landing perfect on the paper, I can almost see it. It's the same thing as the brown my daddy wore standing up next to that coral. Neither one of them changed a bit, but put side by side and they ain't the same cloth they was on their own. Fifty odd hares, honey, that's a body's worth of love in one animal. I bet every one of them taught you something, even the ones you'd call mistakes. Now I'm curious, do you keep them all, or do the older ones go out into the world?
Old paper, now that's a cousin to what we do. A page's got its own weight and its own history in it, just like cloth does. You're right that you don't put it there on purpose. It just shows up when it's ready.
And yes, baby, the hundred times matter more than the light. I been telling young folks that for years, that you can't have the sudden thing without the slow thing underneath it. The Lord works in repetition too, I reckon. You get ready by doing, not by waiting. I thank you for this.