One spring morning, under the trembling white blooms of our kiwi vine— supported by an old ladder, just in line with the seen-better-days porch railing—
I glimpsed, as though deep into a cave, the woven edges of a wren’s nest. No doubt you guess the rest. For the rest of the season, we gave
those tiny, vociferous birds a very wide berth, moved our chairs, well knowing the worth of a space without words,
of resonant emptiness, hidden under a fragrant curtain while the outcome is uncertain, in intent endeavors, bidden and unbidden.
Monday now, and your birthday. We talked yesterday, bright joy for me in an April snowstorm.
Your package arrived weeks ago, you told me. Worried about lockdowns, I mailed it a month early.
All over our small city, those who venture out now cover their faces with masks.
I used to think of masked balls, or Halloween. Now, highway men and worse, The Masque of the Red Death,
my early assiduous reading of Poe, horror of plague, woe, the colors of crow.
Yet joy is ascendant, leaps like that spritely spotted cow who jumps over the moon.
I’m here, you’re here. We’ll talk again soon. Meanwhile, for you,
who always meets me where I am, never asks that I put on a false face,
I am making a mask of the softest cloth to send to you, just
a bright, little scrap of current ingenuity and hope. Just in case.
Leslie Schultz
Recently, Tim asked me to make him a mask. We found instructions online, thanks to the tiny but incomparable shop on St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, Treadle Yard Goods. From their website, and inspired by their initiative to make masks for healthcare workers, as well as friends and family, we found a pattern at a site called Sew Good dedicated to making and donating quality handmade items. (I have included the link so the pattern is available to you.)
Usually, I sew by hand, but I knew that I couldn’t manuver a sliver-sharp quilting needle through denim in tiny stitches (too painful!). Some years ago, my friend, Corrine Heiberg, had given me her beloved Elna sewing machine. This past winter, by chance, I found a place to have it reconditioned, but given my timidity with machines and technology, I had not yet moved forward on my intention of becoming comfortable using it.
This past week, with Tim standing by for technical and moral support, I have now successfully wound bobbins, threaded top and bottom threads, and (yes! I see the metaphor!) adjusted tensions. I found some much-laundered cloth–a denim kitchen apron retired from service due to a frayed neck strap that I had always meant to replace, and some soft flannel from pajamas that had been put out to pasture. My only deficit in terms of materials was elastic. There, too, Corrine came to the rescue. I re-purposed the elastic from some Aeroflot eye shades she sent my way. This elastic is thin and soft and a discreet black, but it looks strong enough to hold.
Here is the prototype with a dashing model. Who? Perhaps Spiderman?
Encouraged by the first one, yesterday I made two more, one for Karla, one for me.
Effective? So they say, and I think they do signal reassuring safety to others.
Meanwhile, I am thinking, now that the trusty Elna and I have become friends, of other projects I might attempt this year. (Quilts! Quilts! Quilts!)
Wishing you a safe and lighthearted day, whatever you are doing on this Monday,
The anomalous beauty of the larch fascinates me. It is a conifer but not an evergreen. Its heart wood is salmon-pink. It is the hardest of the soft woods, and its small cones resemble roses or lilies. And the larch is very long-lived compared to our human span, often 600 years old, with documented trees standing a thousand years. Larches are most striking in October but I like to think of them now, in spring, spinning nutrients from the soil into fresh green needles, soft pink cones filled with seed.
It’s not a word you hear very often, or did, even back when I was a kid. I must have learned it first from those Archie comic books, to me baffling, unfunny, but riveting as a preview of life down the road in high school.
Well, I was a young fool. High school was nothing like that. No Jughead, hanger-on with his inexplicable serrated hat, or grim Miss Grundy embodying Monday, or sassy and glossy Veronica Lodge with her sleek moneyed sneer. No kind but clueless lovelorn Betty who was perpetually blind to her own beauty.
Especially no irrepressible Archie, all geeked-out freckles and tomato-red hair but with some real spark or flare of talent, like skinny Mick Jagger without the strut or sexual glare. Still, Archie fronted a band, had a car, and that was enough to make him a star. Just a paper construct. Never met one like him.
After college, though, I was briefly married to a red-haired guy, Jeff, who imitated Ry Cooder by playing slide guitar. He had a rusty yellow car that turned over and over but usually died in the driveway. There was too much to fix, I guess. And there I was, inside the house, a lovelorn bride who secretly cried, who tried to be kind, tried to steer toward a happy ending over the bumpy road of his manic ups and downs.
We could never get to a higher gear. I left after he claimed to be addicted to me. He could not metabolize his fear, and later, his father told me, he simply slid off the rails on an excess of something poisonous, just as pernicious as sugar.
