Stitching a life by-hand

I'm a sentimental old woman, stuffed with feelings as old as bare feet on rough mango tree bark, and dark, silent rides next to Dad as we both started our mornings headed out of the valley while everyone still slept. By this time daddy was long kuli, deaf from a broken blood vessel in his brain from the loud and body-jarring vibration of the bulldozers he drove for many years. Our drives took me to one of several bus stops miles town-side of our Kuli'ou'ou Valley home -- Campbell Avenue in Waikiki, King Street if we were running late -- where I'd wait for the HRT (Now called 'The Bus' it was Honolulu Rapid Transit back in my day.) and ride the rest of the way to Kapalama where another bus would take me and dozens of Hawaiian kids to the heights. Kamehameha Schools. 

Those sweet and sentimental journeys linger, all these years, and chum like the breath of trees with clouds other times and other people which show up in dreams to confuse the life I'm trying to live today. Being sentimental and a wanderer creates a story held with pins, and hand-stitched together when a current event brushes up on something from the long ago.  

Since Christmas Pete and I watched and re-watched a 1987 classic film. A version of opera based in Brooklynn, New York. It'd been nearly that long (1987) since I last watched it. What a sweet and surprising treat it was to sit, watch and listen to a story masterfully stitched together about family, love in all its messy and passionate expressions, as a year of confusion, illusion, deceit and drama drew to its close. We were not alone in our quest to watch and savor the film. 23 people waited for me to return it to the library so they can watch it. The movie? Moonstruck. 

The script was written by New York City-born, Irish-American playwright, John Patrick Shanley about a widowed, 37-year-old, Italian-American woman who falls in love with her fiancé's estranged, hot-tempered younger brother. 

It's a love story, a family's drama rich with the accents and flavors of Italian-American Brooklynn in the 80's; and an opera gloriously come together by an Irish playwright who grew up watching his Italian neighbors talking about sex, wearing fantastic clothes, enjoying fabulous meals -- everything he never had. A playwright getting nowhere at the time, Shanley shifted gears and wrote a movie. 

Moonstruck 'received six nominations at the 60th Academy Awards including for the Best Picture, winning three; Best Actress (for Cher), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress (for Olympia Dukakis). -  Wikipedia

 Movies like books are stories and as Ursula Le Guin said, " 'Story is our nearest and dearest way of understanding our lives and finding our way onward.' 

Pete and I are preparing to move again. Our stay at Camp Bamboo was originally a temporary situation, a stop on the way to a promise of something else; something more permanent. We were waiting for that something else to firm up and in the meantime we had to have somewhere to keep living. Safety pins are like that, good at holding things together for a while. 

Yesterday, between the winter rains, we drove to that 'something else' place and walked the land. 

The land is still too wet for us to drive the big ass yellow truck hitched to our vardo, but we are taking the steps we know how to do to move from here to there. The process is familiar, we have moved thirty times (I counted those moves instead of sheep) in our life together. But the story becomes more complex as we age, become grandparents and need to remember how young we humans are as beings on a green planet filled with far older and wiser teachers. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer's essay about Serviceberries is a story to need often. Among the richness of her message I love this idea; The Serviceberries don't horde their abundance. To survive they call to the birds (and the humans) and say, "Come my relatives." Come and feast on me. Since the ten foot tall trees don't get around much, they must depend upon their relationship to the birds and humans to spread their future. The birds gobble the fat ripe berries and digest them leaving splats of ready-for-to-grow seeds that spread the wealth. Kimmerer says it much better than I can, so go here to listen to her tell the story. But, I feast on her words to feed the hope genes within me as Pete and I play like Serviceberries looking for a next place to be planted.

While I work at the keys in the dark of morning, Pete sleeps. A pot of butternut squash, purple cabbage, onions and rice soup is sitting on the burner. It will be breakfast. I've been up awhile, cooking between writing making a meal in the tiny kitchen when I have energy and the weather allows. Too cold or damp this old cook waits. 

There is something very important to learn about living a hand-stitched life. Or maybe there are at least two things to know about this kind of living: A hand-stich can be as lasting as you make it; stitch small and with a backstroke it will withstand a powerful tug; stitch big in a running stitch you can replace the stitch easily and start again. But first, a hand-stitch does have to be learned. A needle won't thread itself, and the point will go 'somewhere.' What purpose do the stitches serve?

Hand-stitching is a meditation and a practical art. Permanence? Like the little pig who built his house of brick instead of sticks or straw? Not so much. 

Once upon a time I lived in a house made of wood, I left to make a life in a house of bricks. Both houses grew me into the old woman I am today living in a house built of wood and metal on wheels made of rubber. 

Our friend who is welcoming us to her land made a comment as Pete and I talked with her over the phone. We were talking about the challenges of a nomadic life. She could relate to the moveable life, having the experience as a young mother. But at this stage she said, "I need roots, even if they're shallow ones." She added that without them she doesn't do well in her community. We're having this conversation with someone with compassion. She is a credit to her namesake: Hope. 

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of human people today live lives in shelters made neither of wood, brick or permanency. Those who live with permanency too often horde that sense of abundance, afraid to share because there might come a time they need all that everything. Based on scarcity, this market economy must believe -- and act as if -- there's not enough. 

I finished stitching a quilt for my son and his family just about the time we began watching Moonstruck for the first time. Piecing together old pillow cases, and a length of new cloth I spent many weeks stitching -- both with my sewing machine and by-hand. This is a mo'o quilt, a blanket made by a storytelling grandmother. The stitches and the patterns that formed as I sat with the quilt includes so much more than a practical way to make two layers of cotton more durable, but, it does include that. 

Drawing on Ursula Le Guin's wisdom again:

"We are creatures of instinct, but not solely of instinct. More than any other animal we must learn to behave. In this perennial effort...Skill is knowing how to do something; wisdom is knowing when and why to do it, or to refrain from doing it. While stories may display skill aplenty, in technique or character or plot, what the best of them offer is wisdom. They hold a living reservoir of human possibilities, telling us what has worked before, what has failed, where meaning and purpose and joy might be found."