For 12 of my 25 years as a lawyer, I worked for the federal government. I knew it was time to leave that employment when I unwrapped a Dove Dark Chocolate Promise about eight years ago. This was way before Dove converted to its current practice of printing breezy sentiments on the foil wrappers, affirmations like YOU’VE GOT THIS! No, this was in the glory days of chocolate wrappers, when would-be philosophers dispensed pithy advice that actually solved problems and offered food for thought.
Where is this going? you may be wondering. I will tell you. One day, I unwrapped a piece of dark chocolate and read this statement:
Love many, trust few, and always paddle your own canoe.
And I cried.
With figurative paddle in hand, I resigned my federal job, bid farewell to health insurance that can be best described as “bonkers,” made a final contribution to my Thrift Savings Plan (a name that connotes a certain Yankee frugality), and plunged into self-employment. After a period of calling my own office line to make sure that the phones actually worked, I began to get business, and even more business, and as I stand at my desk right now, I can tell you yet another dirty little secret: I am a happy lawyer. I love what I do. And I absolutely adore my boss.
But I really missed something from federal employment.
Federal holidays.
Especially the B-sides of federal holidays, like Columbus Day and Presidents Day, those days when it takes a beat to figure out exactly why there has been no mail delivery and why the bank is closed.
In the early days of self-employment, I worked on these holidays, and then I realized that working on Columbus Day was really overrated.
Which explains Monday.
When I woke up on Monday, I decided to do exactly what I wanted to do. Perhaps that type of blanket statement works for you, but it never works for me. Monday was no exception. I cannot say that I wanted to do battle with certain invasive hellions that have taken root in my front yard — I’m looking at you, creeping fig and spider plant! — but for three hours, I did. So I made up for it with lunch at a local chicken salad purveyor, a restaurant that I refer to not by its own name but by my name for it: Estrogen Surge.
Men tend to fear and avoid Estrogen Surge, for it is a world of women. There is even a sign in the women’s restroom to the effect that if a man has accompanied you, there is a star in his crown in heaven. Chris, a man who loves women, has eaten there exactly once, and even though he insisted on eating outside, he looked spooked. But I tell Chris that if something happens to me, he needs to eat every. single. lunch at Estrogen Surge, for there is a 40:1 female to male ratio.
He tells me that he hopes nothing happens to me.
In a nearby store after lunch, I had one of those encounters that I do not think went exactly as planned. I was standing in line when a woman in yoga pants walked up hauling a screaming young girl under one arm and her purchase under the other. I gathered from the young girl’s screams and the mother’s referring to herself in the third person that the young lady, when let loose, would wander off — a state of affairs that made mommy very, very unhappy.
So there I was, an innocent bystander rather quickly losing all hearing in my left ear, when the mother decided to involve me.
Look at that pretty purse!, she said, in a decidedly loud and sing-song mother voice. And the child replied, That is an ugly purse. To which the mother said, You don’t mean that. It’s a very pretty hot pink purse. Which prompted this from the child: It’s the ugliest purse and the ugliest lady that I have ever seen. And then she really screamed.
(I did not, kind reader. I wanted to.)
In defense of the purse, the mother was right. It is a very pretty hot pink purse, small and cheerful with fuzzy orange and blue medallions on it. In defense of the child, when I was her age, my father took me to buy new shoes. As dad tells it, when the salesman leaned down to measure my feet, I offered this observation: That is the fattest man I ever saw. Dad tells me that as the man glared, I practically shrunk into him, trying hard to be absorbed into his left leg. I still remember that feeling.
Paybacks are hell, especially when they are 45 years in the making.
Anyway, after winning the dubious honor of Being the Ugliest Lady with the Ugliest Purse that That Young Girl Had Ever Seen, I figured that it really was time to head home and do exactly what I wanted to do.
I pulled out the quilt that I have been working on lately. Here is a photograph of a corner of it:
This type of fabric is called “toile,” pronounced “twall” — a word that rhymes with “y’all.” (I offer the pronunciation because after years of reading about it, I went on an embarrassing streak of saying it all wrong.) It is both the French word for cloth and a type of fabric that features repeating medallions or prints, often pastoral scenes.
I am crazy about toile, y’all, and the fabrics you see above are fabrics throughout my house — in blinds, pillows, tablecloths, slipcovers, napkins, place mats, you name it. These squares and strips are leftovers of projects, lovingly saved and tucked away, some for many years. The circus toile running down the left side was the fabric for the blinds and bedding in my daughter’s nursery. She is now 18. The orange squares are the dining room blinds I made in 2000, when we moved into our current home. The black and white strip on the left remains from the new shades that I made for our bedroom after I redecorated it following a particularly difficult year.
I am making this quilt, and it overwhelms me. It is literally the fabric of my home, of my life.
I have been surprised by something else that this quilt makes me think about.
I recently tried to read a book called “Hillbilly Elegy,” written by an Ivy League law school grad who is the grandson of Scot-Irish stock who moved from Appalachia into the mid-west for a better life. The Economist called it one of the most important books of the year, so with that recommendation, I picked it up.
I did not finish it, for the simple reason that it told some of the same stories that my own grandfather told to me, but in less engaging terms. My grandfather — the one who looked like Winnie the Pooh, right down to the too-short red velour shirt that barely covered his belly — was Scot-Irish stock who was reared by his grandparents in Robbins, Tennessee. He spoke of Robbins all the time, yet I never visited the mythical place. (If you do not know where Robbins is, there is no reason to: It is in Eastern Tennessee, a community whose 2010 census count numbered 287 residents.)
Listening to him, I grew up convinced that everyone had an Uncle Tack, an Aunt Flonnie and an Aunt Flossie (the twins), a gold coin paying off a death at the coal mines, a bottle of Jack Daniels for medicinal purposes. I heard stories of his grandmother, who was my mother’s namesake and the town undertaker. I learned that there were many ways to prepare squirrel. As a child, I remember the level of pride in his stories. I did not understand until later the abject poverty of growing up in Appalachia during the Great Depression. To be fair, my grandfather did not speak of it.
About a decade ago, my mother gave me one of his grandmother’s quilts. It is an odd and uneven assortment of strips, a collection of old flour sacks and dresses and garments and God knows what. It shows its age, and even beyond the fact that it is very old, it shows signs of having had a very hard life. At first, I treated it as a museum piece, which is a kind way of saying that I stuck it in a closet to keep it out of the light, and I forgot about it. But around Christmas a few years, I opened the closet and it hit me on the head, using gravity to make a desperate bid for freedom. Here was a quilt that had made it one hundred years. Certainly it could make it a few more. So I tossed it on the couch, where it remains.
It is odd to feel kinship with a woman you have never met, but in making this quilt, I have. I have such an imperfect understanding of the power of memory, of the heft of time. I did not know what it meant to dig out a scrap of fabric and see myself as if from above, sitting on the floor, quite possibly on a federal holiday years ago, and stitching the original creation. I remembered a nursery, a new home, many family dinners, a fresh start. With these memories, I also imagined her — my grandfather’s grandmother, a woman that everyone described as incredibly strong — having a pleasurable deluge of memory as she cut apart an old dress, a worn shirt, a singed apron. I had mistaken the quilt — in all of its unevenness and mismatched glory — for a purely utilitarian creation. I never imagined it as a thing of beauty in a life that offered few creature comforts. I never imagined it as treasure. I was wrong.
I am wrong about so many things these days. But I am right about a few: federal holidays, the prettiness of pink purses, the power of small children to say the wrong thing, the pleasure of paddling one’s own canoe. I lift my oar overhead, and I salute you.
ALC