Voice

"This here quilt," she repeated, in her own voice. "This here quilt," she read, with punch, and the audacity to know when and where to repeat it. "This here quilt," she said, is full of pain. Or at least that's what she realized in the course of the poem, a response to a quilt block selected by Bathtub Collective member Gabriela for inclusion in the Teaching Gallery as a part of our collaboration with Lawrence High School sophomores.

This month, we began our Writers in the Schools (WITS) program, and, whenever we could, we spent time with Shannon Draper-Gard's 3rd and 6th hour literature students. Though I was only able to visit her 3rd hour once this month (thesis, you know), several of the collective members visited on two or three or four occasions to discuss the art and corresponding literature they had chosen for display in the teaching gallery, or to lead them in discussions of imagery, personification, or alliteration, or to lead a writing exercise. Last week, I sat with several of the students as they worked on their poetry anthologies for the unit. They were asked to find poems online that exemplified literary devices, such as simile, metaphor, and narrative. And they wrote their own poems in response to one of the art pieces we had chosen.

Today, Amy and I listened to them read their poems as they stood by the art that had inspired them. Though many of them were too shy to read, and several agreed only if their teacher would read it for them, those that did read stunned me.

I didn't write poetry in high school, didn't write anything creative but journal entries (and those could hardly be called creative), so I admit to being quite ignorant to the creative writing abilities of sixteen year olds. But one by one they read their poems about lost dogs, long roads, family portrait sessions, oak trees, and a quilt.

Two of the young ladies responded to the quilt: a section of probably 1" squares about one-foot long and five inches tall. It reminded me of Jedsen's mother and the way she likes patterns from the 30s--small patterns and varied patterns. The quilt block was not color-shaded like those that hang on the walls of Amish restaurants. There were no shapes. Just squares. It was simple but spoke for a larger use, one that keeps us warm, keeps us together, keeps us connected to our histories. And that, that is what "this here quilt" built up to. It began as it should have in the mind of a sixteen year old girl: what is so important about this ugly, ratty quilt on the back of the couch? She explained that every time her body brushed it (her line was striking--much better than I'm telling it here), her mother would go into "this here quilt...." Every time. Why? And then she understood. Her mother had been wrapped in that quilt when she was dying, dead. "This here quilt" was everything.

So I think of the artifacts in my family and what my mother treasures. Honestly, everything. The couch with its stuffing spilling from cat claws. The cabinet I bought at a garage sale for $35 when I was sixteen. My bedroom, preserved as I left it except without a bed.

When I got home from campus today and opened my apartment door, I stepped on a flat envelope on the rug inside. It was a photo mailer from my mother, and the postperson (who usually crumples--crumples--my mail into the vertical box at the base of the stairs) had slipped it under the door. I slipped out the contents as I sat on the couch, one hand to my ear talking to Jedsen on the phone, and on top was a faded green business envelope, the kind with the plastic-covered opening for displaying the company's address and the square where the stamp should be demanding "Put Stamp Here." In my mother's crisp handwriting, it read "Kari's golden hair," and beside it, a happy face sticker that said "Thinking of You." Behind the plastic of the envelope, a cluster of golden strands: mine, from age 4 1/2 (so says my father's more ragged note on the back).

 
My mother sent me my hair.

We have been at odds since I moved away for college in Manhattan 4 1/2 years ago, mostly due to the man in my life and the way I have changed since him. I am not the daughter she once had, and she has consistently reminded me of that. Two weeks ago, I finally sent her a letter, a 1500 word letter explaining how I felt about Jedsen, life, her, and what I wanted out of our relationship. We talked on the phone a week later, and a day after that I got a letter she had written me in return before she had finished reading my letter. We have made no strides. It's I want this, and I can't do that. We are not broken but cracked.

But what does this packet of my hair, now twenty years old, mean? With no letter, which I expected, to explain, how am I to take it? Has she given up on me? Or is she trying to remind me of who I once was, someone, I believe, I still largely am? "This here golden hair," what does it mean?