Making Rugs

I go to Beaver for a day. Back to the place I was born and grew up and where our family home stands empty and alone since the deaths of my father and sweet stepmother. I go with my saintly sister, who lived here fulltime to care for my aging parents the last six years of their lives.

We drive down Main Street because Genene has told me the incredible news, Beaver has a stoplight! I must see it for myself, test myself on the stopping and waiting at the Post Office corner just to see that the lights go from red to green to red just like they do everywhere else.

We drive by my father's house on 600 East just to see. The dozen or so apple trees in the yard are a riot of pink and white blossoms, promising a harvest of plenty in a few months. If it doesn't freeze again. It has snowed on us this late May day all the way from Kanosh. Oh, Dad, you would love to see these trees so beautifully blooming. Even in the snow.

Our destination today is to the home of an old friend. He has offered to help me learn to make rugs. We traipse through the snow with my basket of colors sewn into strips an inch and a half wide. Downstairs into the basement we go where the loom is waiting for us. This is not just any loom. This is a memory of my childhood. For many years this loom stood in a room in our church basement waiting, strings strung, for any ward member who wanted to bring their leftover fabric to make rugs. Some of my earliest memories are of playing at my mother's feet as she passed the shuttle back and forth, pounded the rows of fabric together, and produced swaths of color that lessened the winter cold of the linoleum floor in my bedroom, or softened my standing at the sink to wash dishes.

I am amazed as I see the loom that it is much smaller than my child eyes remember.

I choose a stiff yellow fabric to begin. We wrap three or four shuttles with the long strips, choose a deep green for an accent stripe and we begin. It's simple really, with just a bit of instruction I get the hang of moving the two pedals up and down that switch the strings above or below so the weaving occurs. Pound, pound, pound with the bar between each pass of the shuttle and the stiff yellow fabric begins to take rug shape. Oh, it is beautiful. I learn to place a stretcher bar across the top of the work so the width of the rug stays even. I realize the pedal needs to be down on the side I start the shuttle from. I work blisters on three fingers of my right hand by the pounding and the muscle in my forearm begins to ache. No matter, the rug takes shape.

In a couple of hours I have completed the first rug. A break for a late lunch and I begin the second one. Pink and blue for this one. The lightness of the fabric makes the rug not so thick. More delicate. A rug, delicate?

As the afternoon wears on I make mistakes, breaking strings with the stretcher bar that takes all of us to fix so the rug holds together. I see my sister solve problems to make something work just like Dad used to do. A gift I admire. Solving problems.

By late afternoon I have made two rugs that are curled around the loom underneath. A rug always needs to stay on the loom to hold a starting place for the next one. We will return in a couple of weeks to work again. But today, we must leave to get home before dark. The snow has turned to driving rain all the way home to Provo. But I am filled with thinking about making things with my hands, turning leftover fabric into useful things of beauty, and memories of home.

About Us

Fourteen years ago Zach made me a grandmother. What a gift! He has been followed by three siblings and five cousins on our side of the family, the youngest of which is three years old. I find each one of them delightful, observant, and interesting.
When Zach was little I read to him (as I had read to his mother and his uncle before him) because my mother had read to me. As an adult I found the Strickland Gilliland poem which concludes
          "You may have tangible wealth untold;
           Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
          Richer than I you can never be---
          I had a mother who read to me."
I find that sentiment to be true, having first discovered the world, ancient and modern, with its nooks and crannies,  beauties and promises by listening to my mother read aloud.
So, when Zach was four years old we wrote our first book together. It was Zachie-Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and he played all the parts. He liked that, so we wrote another. That led, over the years, to writing first books with the next six grandchildren when each one turned five. This spring we are taking the pictures for Elsa's book. She has dictated the text to me and the princess costume she will wear in the pictures already hangs in my sewing room. Only one more grandchild to go. That book will develop next year when Liesel is close to five. But we'll talk about it a lot before that and read lots of other books on the way.
When Zach was 10 he asked to write a "real" book. He wanted it to be about children in World War II Germany. I told him, as any good writing teacher would, that he should write about things he knows.
"You know about Germany, Bamma, and I know about being a kid. We can do it together."
I thought that was a pretty good argument so we set about collaborating on Grapevines. His elementary school librarian asked for a copy of the book to put in their library and children in that school are still reading it.
Then Zach moved to England for six months with his family and became fascinated by things medieval. So he proposed we write Bluestone, a book about a boy who goes on the Crusades. I had lived in Jerusalem for three years, so, Zach brought his England interest and I supplied the Jerusalem information.
Zach now writes well on his own, but we still find it fun to develop plot and characters together, so we are writing The Six Towers, a sci-fi book set in the near future where great things are required of young people in developing a new world. We worked together several hours this week and are nearing the end of chapter three. I like best when we bounce ideas back and forth, "What if. . . ?" or "How about . . . ?" Zach's ideas are increasingly mature and well thought out. We'll see what happens next.

Beginnings

This week I went to my first LDStorymakers Conference in Salt Lake City. I would like to have taken Zach with me, but they still make 14-year-old-boys go to school. I would like to have had him sitting by me learning what I was learning but with his 21st Century ears and understanding instead of my much older ones.
This way he has to rely on my memory and my notetaking neither of which is as good as his.
The first thing I told him was that we were encouraged to have our books on social media so we could alert the world to what we are doing. Zach of course knows all about social media. He had created a website, put us on email, registered for Facebook and for Twitter before I could say "Bob'syeruncle!" or "Wait for me!' Both of which make about the same amount of sense.
Zach and I have been writing books together since he was four and he posed for pictures for Zachie-Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Zach was a courageous Joseph, a super Pharoah, and excellent as all 11 brothers. We collaborated on other books--Peter Pan, Grapevines (which follows the journey of two young people from World War II Germany to California), Bluestone (about a boy who goes from England to Jerusalem in the Crusade with Richard the Lionheart), and now The Six Towers where young people are taught to create new countries out of a devastated African continent.
We'll tell you more about that as we go along.
In the meantime Zach and I will write together every Tuesday during lunch hour and use our social media to connect with you. We hope you'll enjoy it as we go.

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