My Mom’s Knitting Bag is Still Filled with Her Last Project
I remember how she embroidered colorful chrysanthemums on a coarse burgundy fabric, binding its parts together with yellow cross stitches echoing the heart of the flowers before fastening them to cherry wood handles. I’ve stored the bag in a transparent box hoping I’d use the leftover wool or mouliné to revisit earlier steps.
I was ten when my father died. My mom, aunts, and cousins seemed to be wearing the night at the same time. A widowed cousin had to make a living embroidering linen sheets and table cloths, a task imparted to nunneries. They often visited us, each carrying a bag brimming with ongoing creations and needles for crocheting, knitting, petit point, or embroidery.
No past nor future was mentioned, only the clicking of needles or scissors’ snips were heard. At times silence was broken by the difficulties in finding a certain silk thread in a matching color. They consulted the latest issues of Mani Di Fata filled with patterns and ideas. I knew then I would become a professional.
* * * * *
Last Night I Saw Mom at a Party
She wore a brightly-colored dress but her head was covered by a pharaonic double veil; the first in silk gauze was visible over her temples underneath the black velvet. I kept watching her from afar and couldn’t understand this headdress a la Tutankhamun! Unlike her mom who never left the house without a hat and gloves, she seldom used her black lace veil during mass. When I approached her, she disappeared towards the restrooms and came out in a black spindle dress, her hair pulled back in a low bun a la Farah Diba. Stunned, I wanted to ask her, Where did you find such beautiful clothes? I’d like to go shopping with you! But people kept cutting in before I could utter a word, and with her usual stern expression, she joined other guests at the dinner table. I opted for resting in the living room that was suddenly crowded with babies and several ladies flocked around them with doting expressions. Before I could get up from the sofa, a plump baby landed on my lap! I didn’t know what to do with him. I put him in a nearby stroller and placed a soft beanie cushion under his head, oblivious of what was going on around me, all the while thinking of mom’s stunning transformation and kept wondering why I could never find anything decent to wear.
* * *
Aren’t Healthy People Unaware of Their Heartbeats?
Or at least that’s what I’ve been told. And since I’ve sunk within the miasma of malady’s quicksand, I bow to every single cell in my body in my quest to regain control of my movements.
I must be getting better because I’ve become oblivious of my heartbeat. At times, a residual flutter, like a whiff of wind, alerts me. A cardiologist friend refused pain medicine on his death bed because he wanted to be aware of every single pulse.
Like a child learning motions anew, I try to get back to my tai chi routine despite the rust in my joints in dire need of lubrication. For a long time, I’ve been a sixteen-year old hiding in a maturing body only to find myself trapped in a ninety-year old woman’s carapace.
I’ve learned everything about autoimmune lingo and its treatments’ side effects. What a way to maintain a daily dialogue with our body by being more than ever conscious of the role of each part.
Poets oftentimes converse with their alter egos. Machado would have been familiar with such an exchange, “Converso con el hombre que siempre va conmigo,” and hoped it would lead to God. And what of the network of impassioned soliloquies Fernando Pessoa maintained with his seventy-five heteronyms?
A healthy body is silent.