A Sabbath Life by Kathleen Hirsch

Author:Kathleen Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466894891
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Ritual

BOLTS OF AMISH RED, blue, and green cotton swamp the length of the dining-room table. Two weeks ago on a trip to the library, I found myself detouring into the adult art-book section again. I wanted the books on Amish quilts and Navaho weaving. I envisioned them lying open around the house, inspiring me at odd hours of the day.

I am being drawn to images again. It is as if I need them to awaken something in me, as if I need to step outside the world of words to gain access to the deeper, less polished and less articulate core. Silence, with guiding eminences.

I found what I wanted and checked them out, then headed directly for the fabric store. Making something, I decided, constructing my own images in a pocket of the day when I was able to find silence, might do the trick.

In one brief impulsive hour, I’d embarked on a crib quilt for my brother’s new son.

Now, once I put the baby to sleep, I come down to my glorious disorder of fabrics and threads. I pull up a chair, cut and sketch and read. My husband comes home to find me poring over the animal motifs of northwest Native American women, or the Hand of Friendship templates of the Quaker women of Pennsylvania.

I really have no idea why I am doing this.

I haven’t a clue what it is that moves me so about these traditional forms, or what I am looking for in them that isn’t satisfied by the other ample opportunities for creativity that exist in my life. The last thing I need is another project.

One day in early October, my friend Peyton comes over for tea. While we are waiting for the water to boil, she wanders into the dining room. One look at my table and she wheels around and comes to lean in the doorway.

“You need to come with me to my workshop,” she announces.

Peyton does “definite” very well. A Wellesley graduate, she spent years in the financial world. When her second son was born four years ago, she left to pursue her first passion, which is painting.

I look into her direct, not infrequently urgent, brown eyes. Their expression is rendered even more urgent this afternoon by her freshly blunt cut, ruler-straight brown hair.

“What would I do?” I ask with a dismissive shrug.

“You just need to come,” she repeats in her firmest voice.

The next week I find myself in a narrow side street in the industrial outskirts of Cambridge. The rents are cheap and studio space plentiful here. At a dead end, following Peyton’s instructions, I park next to a set of train tracks. She is there waiting, and this time she is smiling.

“Come on,” she says. Then after a pause, “Are you ready?”

I shrug.

“You’re going to love it.”

She leads me across a blacktop toward what I consider a fairly questionable exterior staircase, attached to an equally questionable-looking warehouse. I can’t imagine that it has been touched with an eye to maintenance since the leather industry died here seventy-five years ago.

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