The quilt was already in Ellen’s car. Jon sat in our car with the window open. Ellen and I, bundled up in winter coats and facemasks, stood in the parking lot of the little library, an old graveyard on one side and a farmer’s field behind it, talking.
I’d been trying to get my November Snow quilt to Ellen since before Christmas. But Covid scares and frozen driveways kept it from happening. Now we were back to meeting in a small Vermont town halfway between our houses.
Ellen has been buying my art for years, but we started getting to know her and her husband John just before the pandemic in 2020. We’ve kept in touch, going from having dinner together to Zoom to lunches outside.
Finally, the cold got to me to be too much for me. We made plans with Ellen to get together on Zoom again soon and headed home.
Back in my studio, I finished what I began this morning after my sewing machine was working again. I looked at my Shibori Hankie quilt so far, now about 37″ square and waited for it to tell me what comes next.
But nothing came.
This quilt is happening slowly and feels so tied to the cold weather we’ve been having. It made me think of something my friend Carol Conklin wrote to me just yesterday…
“Winter is another world, amazing things happen… Sometimes winter is like suspended time to me, water stopped in waves and ripples built up in graceful layers and the snow in fields capturing the patterns of the wind and holding that design.”
The sun was almost down, and the cold was seeping in through the floorboards. So I gathered my computer, phone, empty teacups, and turned my heat and lights off. Then I bowed to my studio, thanking it as I do every evening, and Fate and I went into the house for the night.
