Time Traveler...

Looking back.... an interesting thing to ponder while you quilt. At this particular place in my life..it all seems to be about time. Not the lack of, nor the excess of..and especially not the changing of, as in normal to daylight savings. More about the concept of time. And maybe if things really do or don't exist simulatiously in time and space.
So much is implied in our lives. That we go forward; movement and time. Or we stand still, and not move, but there is movement anyway as time flows around us. And the idea that looking back, or wishing to go back is somehow better than what lies ahead or at hand. There must be such a thing as time. I suppose it is just that we call it "that"...time. The earth turns, the daylight and the seasons change accordingly, and things progress with their growth. That we are here, calling this event time seems optional.

I have such a hard time grasping this thing called time. It has perplexed me endlessly over the years. Being a lover of most things of age, I have wondered "how can this thing exist and yet the hands and eyes and mind that conceived it and made are so long gone"? It seems almost wrong to have the daily life of a person, in the form of a quilt, in our hands and never to have known anything about the person.

My sister, who wanders in and out of my life, has begun the "dig", as it were, for the family lineage. Almost daily now, since she's back, time had been marching to a much louder drummer. She has stirred up the cousins to become drummers. I had rather liked marching to the drummer I was hearing..and trust me, he took alot of coffee breaks. I find the geneology interesting, but always comes the "time" tune. What I most would like to know of the people she seeks, is their story. All their stories. There are so many of us here on this place called earth, in various shapes, sizes and forms. What possible difference does any one of us make? Probably very little, and maybe only to the extent it unfolds satifactorily for us.
And I wonder if maybe what is important, that I can do for you, and that you can do for me, or anyone, is to be a witness to their existance. To hold in time and space the sum and total of their "being". That in the vastness of "time", some one else knew that I had dreams and built castles in the air, and occasionally put foundations under them.

The photograph is of my mother. It was taken about 1948 in WI. She was a young, beautiful woman of 33. She was the only daughter with 3 older brothers. She married my father in 1935 at the age of 20. They had me in 1940, lost a baby boy in 1945, and had my sister in 1947.
I have few memories of my mother looking like this, but sadder still to me is that I don't know very many of her stories. I had little time to get to know her as a woman. She died when I was 27, and she was 52. She was no longer young, she was only beautiful then to people who loved her. Most of her stories didn't get told. There are few witnesses to her life.

So maybe it's not an accident that I make quilts, not a random chance happening. Maybe it started that way, and maybe I am telling my stories, piece by piece, as they unfold. Oh yes, one knows soooo much more at 64 than at 27.