Last night I started reading “Goodbye My Island” to my youngest (a welcome respite from Harry Potter). The book was written by a friend of my mother’s from our years in Nome. It is a story about the population of Native Alaskans who, for generations, spent their winters hunting and gathering on a small rocky island in the Bering Sea called King Island. The entire community would relocate to Nome (for them a veritable metropolis of 3000 people) in the summer months, where they fished and sold their ivory carvings to tourists.
By the late 70’s early 80’s, Nome with it’s greater amenities, available public schooling, and unfortunate collection of drinking establishments, became such a draw or a trap for King Islanders that they collectively ceased their age old migration pattern. King Island’s hunting village was abandoned as was a way of life few of us can even vaguely relate to.
I grew up with these King Island children. They were in my girls scout troop. They were my next door neighbors. I played their games in the vacant lot on 3rd street, and watched them fist fight kids from Shishmaref after school.
It was not until I began reading “Goodbye My Island” last night that it ever occured to me what a bizarre collision of worlds went on in my childhood home. I, like most of the white kids I grew up with, moved to this isolated frozen landscape from a big warm city in the lower 48. Cooie, Love, Bubba and the many other King Islanders I knew were saying goodbye to their roadless, windswept, tight knit community, to live in the bustling, dirty, crowded, city of Nome.
crazed quilter
When I first formed the picture for this quilt in my mind it was colored in the austere tones of December, black branches on a grey sky. Somehow I ended up with this riot of color, flame branches and lemon cloudlets against an impossibly blue view. I’m not necessarily disappointed, I am just baffled how I got here. I look at the cloth heaped on my cutting table, (from which I drew my palette) and see further reinforcement of my original intent. A pile of mostly greys and blacks with just a few swatches of blue, pink, red, yellow, meant for accent. It is almost as if I get drunk on the color layout process. I am so stimulated by the way a blue shifts with a red beside it that I grow giddy and irrational. Only when the last swatches of color are ironed in place do I stop spinning and begin to realize just what I’ve created. It’s like I’m the Victor Frankenstein of the quilting world.
from a car window
I drove up to Salem today (in the fine company of my sister and my nephew) and hung my artwork at Latte Play, a coffee shop near downtown Salem. The drive was smooth and (as many who take that route can attest to) remarkably straight, the sun was out, the conversation was vigorous, the walls of the coffee shop were painted the right color and took nails or screws with equal ease and sturdiness, the coffee was delicious, the responses of observing patrons were enthusiastic. All in all, it was a good day to be an artist.
sewing circles
Winter break is over. Today my family returned to school and work leaving me alone in my studio, to iron, snip, stitch, contemplate, and make small talk with the dog and the radio (one only listens, one only talks). I remember this day last year, the remarkable quiet of my house, the unfinished, uncertain quilt I was to resume work on, the prospect of sitting for the day, these were all daunting, depressing realities. Maybe its my swinging moods, a day with less cloud cover, my new studio window, or hopefully, possibly me growing more comfortable in my artist skin, but today those same things ring like small bright bells in a welcoming entry way. Comforting to think that these circles I’m sewing, that often leave me imagining myself in an endless loop around an unchanging track, may actually be shifting slowly outward into something new.
Ancient Language
My daily walks have gotten more dangerous lately, as I find myself constantly craning my neck back, not looking in the direction I’m traveling, but rather up at the winter branches. What is it in the fine curved and jagged lines of branches on sky that pulls at me? Perhaps that chaos of line and shape is the Mother Tongue, the first written language. Imagine an ancient, laying on their back in a field of some now extinct dry grass, looking up and finding forms, patterns, the beginnings of messages, imagine that aha moment, them gouging those shapes in the earth with a stick. What can YOU read in the trees?
a homecoming
Today I ironed and sewed for the first time in a week. I felt that same release and satisfaction I get from a hot bath or a long hike.
expectations
Last night my youngest put a spoon under her pillow, wore her jammies inside out, and flushed an ice cube down the toilet. In short, she did everything within her power to conjure snow during the night. This morning, oh miracle, she woke to snow. Sadly, it was not enough to close schools. There was great wailing and gnashing of teeth, which the school district either ignored or did not hear (though I doubt that). The great snow makers in the sky were also apparently oblivious to her pleas. I pointed this out to her, that all her efforts of crying would not bring snow or cancel school but she was on a trajectory, one she’s been on often recently, a tearful, moaning, pitiful storm that can only be waited out.
I’ve been reliving it all day, asking myself if there was another way to handle the situation, if there are hidden aspects I should confront, where it comes from... Then it dawned on me. My daughter is an exaggerated reflection of me. I am generating my own storm these days, reacting to events beyond my control with that stomping stubborn determination that so baffles me in my daughter. We are the same.