Through the Eye of a Needle

After I put my small garden to bed last fall, I needed something for my hands. Something not related to a keyboard. So I picked up a tool that’s new to me—a needle.

After casting about for a project, I found one—an embroidered autobiography. I bought a roll of twill tape and divided it into 12-inch sections, a foot for each year of my life. And all winter, this project was my reward at the end of a day of writing and caring for parents. While I listened to documentaries and books-on-tape and book reviews, I embroidered images of my life—three per year.

If you picked up this embroidered timeline, you’d find the cabin where I was conceived and Herman, the duck, who was once my dear friend but who became my enemy and so ended as dinner on my grandma’s table.

You’d see Rover, the dog, who was so patient with children that he stood meekly as my brother used my grandma’s butcher knife on his neck. You’d find the shaped notes I heard in church and the Casselman Bridge over the river where I played.

In my school years, you’d see symbols of the Duck-and-Cover drills during the Cold War and the metamorphosis of a monarch butterfly that emerged in my first-grade classroom. You’d notice the year we moved to Flint, Michigan, where I encountered the civil rights movement and the wonders of bookmobiles and of ice cream carts jangling down our street.

For me, the images of childhood came easy. Now, I’m moving on to the teenage years, when life becomes more abstract, more idea driven. But I’m finding images—symbols of New Math, a paddle to show corporal punishment in schools at that time, fires of the long, hot summer of 1967, and the cover of the Martyrs Mirror, for the year I couldn’t stop turning its pages.

And what will happen when I get to midlife on my timeline? Will the images keep coming? I hope so.

In the meantime, I’m stitching the moments that mattered most, marking my existence on cloth, seeing the patterns of my places in the world, and being soothed by color and fabric and the sliding in and out of a needle.