Stitch by stitch, I’m excavating my ancestry.
Carrie May was my grandmother. She died when I was four, and I have only one memory of her—a flash of standing in the kitchen, looking up at her. No words, just a feeling. From photos, I know she was tall and stately, a woman of privilege and order. My mother said she was strict.
I don’t know her laugh. I don’t know how she loved or how she moved through her days. I have no idea if she was a “soft” grandmother or one with hard edges. I wonder what she was like with her friends—was she the life of the party, the one others counted on, or perhaps the keeper of traditions?
I do know she made quilts—appliqué quilts, the kind with impossibly tiny stitches. She had to be able to turn under those minuscule edges and make perfect curves. Her hands had to be patient and disciplined.
Mine are not. I can’t imagine having the internal stillness it takes to sew with that kind of perfection.
These days, I’m working on a project I call Stitching for Tattered Times. I use old quilt pieces and embroider thoughts and resistance messages onto them. My stitches are funky and irregular, and I enjoy the messiness that results.
Stitching is my way of chronicling the madness of the world and reclaiming some measure of personal power. I do it to say: “I see what’s coming apart. I know some of what is needed to put it back together. I call on us all to balance reality and hope.”
Now I am stitching onto a piece of Carrie May’s quilt.
I’ve done this before—stitched onto other women’s work, tuning into the ghosts of makers I’ll never meet. I invent their life stories and imagine how they lived. I wonder about their joys and sorrows. But this time it’s different. This time, the woman’s work beneath my needle is blood. My grandmother.
I originally found her handwork in a locked trunk. When I pried it open, there it was—just the quilt top, perfectly stitched but never made into a useable quilt. Alongside it lay an old tuxedo and a hoop slip, relics of a more formal, restrained time.
Though my sister and I both worked to finish the quilt, it eventually became one of those heirlooms no one really wants. So, I cut it up.
Now, I hold one fragment of that quilt in my hands. On it, I’m stitching a line from a Bob Dylan song I’ve long loved: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” It fits the space on the quilt piece, but more than that—it fits the moment we are in. A call to look, to pay attention to what’s true, to what’s shifting in the air.
As I stitch the words onto her quilt, something passes through me—a current, a recognition. I feel the weight of her silence and the outline of her heart. Maybe it isn’t about knowing the details of her life, but feeling the echo of her.
Her needle beneath my needle. Her thread beneath my thread. It is there, whether I knew her or not. Whether she was soft or severe. Whether she would recognize me at all. I feel her in the pull of the needle, in the decision where to stitch next, in the way the fabric resists the needle and then yields to it’s sharpness.
There is comfort in that, and peace, and something like surrender.
For so long I’ve lived in opposition—in “no, not that.” I’ve built myself through refusal, resisting the patterns that hemmed in the ancestor women before me. Resisting parenting the way I was parented. Resisting almost everything that was conventional.
But with her quilt piece in my lap, I feel the fight loosen.
When I think about the tattered world we live in—the falling of democracy, climate disruption, loneliness, and injustice—my habitual reaction is to resist or rage. Now I wonder if resistance is not only fury, but sometimes just a softening. Sometimes it’s the quiet work of not guarding my inner light.
I wonder what my world would be like if I responded with softening.
I want to do my part to stitch a world that will hold. I want to stay inside the unraveling and to stay in the sometimes quiet and sometimes loud conversation between what is and what is possible.
Her hands, once steady over this cloth, feel close.
And here I am, needle in hand, listening.
Stitch by stitch, I follow what wants to be carried forward.
