Friday, July 25, 2008

My Grandmother’s Rug


In the old attic pushed back in a corner was a cedar chest packed with my mother’s memories of her mother who had died too early at age 42 before I was born. As she lay dying my grandmother hooked rugs in her sickbed set up in the living room of the old farmhouse.  My mother, newly married and teaching would visit on weekends bringing rug patterns drawn on burlap. Grandmother lovingly hooked a rug for each of her daughters, for her husband, her own mother.   She died before the last rug was finished.  The cedar chest held that last rug along with the unused yarn. 

 

That’s what I remember.  The cedar chest with the unused yarn, an old doll, some clothes…  I saw my mother cry one summer day when she discovered we children playing with the balls of yarn.  She always intended to finish hooking the rug for the mother she loved.

 

Life moved quickly for my mother in less that six years she was dealing with seven children yet she still kept the rug in the old chest.  Years past.  My siblings and I left home.  My parents sold the farm and built a home in Montana.  On a day long after my own children had grown and gone my mother handed me that old rug with the tangled yarn saying,  “Here you work with yarn you’ll finish it.”

 

I took it away thinking to throw it out… mother would never know.  I didn’t want it that old rug.  I had other things to do.  I took it away to give my mother some peace around it.

 

When I got it home I couldn’t bring myself to toss it out.  It stayed in my closed until one day I found a hooking needle and untangled the yarn into nice neat balls.  Then I began the work my grandmother had left behind.  As I worked next to her rows I began to see this grandmother I had never known.  Each stitch was precisely placed.  Every stitch was perfect.  In her last days she had hooked her love and her life into her work.  Did she sense an unknown granddaughter would one day know her love?

 

In my California home I worked on that rug all one rainy afternoon.  My daughter came over asking what I was doing and joined in; she working one end of the rug I the other.  As fate would have it my mother came to visit.  She now in her eighties was delighted to see us finishing the rug she kept all those years.  She found a needle and sat down to work with us telling us stories of her mother.  There we were three generations of women working together to finish my grandmother’s rug.

 

In the end the rug became the work of four generations of women.  I made a backing for it embroidering our names, the year my grandmother died, 1941 and the year we completed it, 1998.  Fifty-seven years.  My grandmother’s work was finished.  She had passed her love down the generations.

 

Jesse

 

 

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1 comment:

A Week's Worth of Women said...

Wonderful...so much love and wisdom it makes my heart full.