Oheory is, we make our destinies like blind men chug paint at a wall; we never uand nor evehe marks we leave behind us. But not too much of the grandly actal abstract expressionist about my life, I trust; oh, no. I always try to live on the best possible terms with my unscious a my right hand know what my left is doing and, fresh every m, scrutinise my dreams. Abandon, therefore, or rather, destruct the blind-a painter metaphor; take it apart, formalise it, put it back together again, strive for something a touch more hard-edged, iional, altogether less arty, for I do believe we all have the right to choose.
In patchwork, a ed household art ed, obviously, because my sex excelled in it -- well, there you are; thats the way its been, isnt it? Not that I have anything against fi, mind; heless, it took a hundred years for fiists to catch up with the kind of brilliant abstra that any ordinary housewife used to be able to put together in only a year, five years, ten years, without making a song and dance about it.
However, in patchwork, an infinitely flexible yet harmonious overall design is kept in the head and worked out in whatever material happens to turn up in the ragbag: party frocks, sackcloth, pieces of wedding-dress, of shroud, of bandage, dress shirts etc. Things that have been worn out or torn, remnants, bits and pieces left over from making blouses. One may appliqué upon ones patchwork birds, fruit and flowers that have been clipped out of glazed tz left over from c armchairs or making curtains, and do all manner of things with this and that.
The final design is indeed modified by the availability of materials; but not, necessarily, much.
For the paper patterns from which she snipped ular regles and hexagons of cloth, the thrifty housewife often used up old love letters.
With all patchwork, you must start in the middle and work outward, even on the kind they call "crazy patchwork", which is made by feather-stitg together arbitrary shapes scissored out at the makers whim.
Patience is a great quality in the maker of patchwork.
The more I think about it, the more I like this metaphor. You really make this image work for its living; it synthesises perfectly both the miscellany of experiend the use we make of it.
Born and bred as I was in the Protestant north w-class tradition, I am also pleased with the metaphors overtones of thrift and hard work.
Patchwood.
Somewhere along my thirtieth year to heaven -- a decade ago now I was in the Greyhound Bus Station in Houston, Texas, with a man I was then married to. He gave me an Ameri of small denomination (he used to carry about all our money for us because he did not trust me with it). Individual partments in a large vending mae in this bus station tained various cellophane-ed sandwiches, biscuits and dy bars. There was a partment with two peaches in it, rough-cheeked Dixie Reds that looked like Victorian pincushions. One peach was big. The other peach was small. I stiously selected the smaller peach.
"Why did you do that?" asked the man to whom I was married.
"Somebody else might want the big peach," I said.
"Whats that to you?" he said.
I date my moral deterioration from this point.
No; holy. Dont you see, from this peach story, how I was brought up? It wasnt -- truly it wasnt -- that I didnt think I deserved the big peach. Far from it. What it was, was that all my basic training, all my intern