Jonathan and I went to the MFA to see an exhibit of quilts: the quilts of Gee's Bend Alabama.
The quilts were created between the 1930s and 2000. Four generations of women in this rural farming community worked on the quilts, pieced together from scraps of anything that was handy - old work clothes, jeans, corduroy, cloth from corn flour sacks. What is odd is that they echo so much of the abstract art of the first half of the twentieth century. Was there some common feeling of the time that painters in urban settings and quilters in rural areas were responding to? How is it that such disparate life experience resulted in similar challenging shapes - geometric, vibrant, and alive.
Before the exhibit, we heard a little gospel concert by a Berklee teacher and some students. The crowd was small, thinned out by people leaving to see the exhibits -those that remained behind seemed oddly restrained, gray haired retirees clapping politely, when really, we should have been dancing in the aisles! The student singers were so sweet - the teacher coaxed them gently, and all the while he was the main performer, sharp in a white suit, eyes partially hidden by sun-glasses.
After the exhibit, we walked to T______ Street to have lunch; we ate in a small restaurant, no bigger than a shoebox, with red walls and a funny tin ceiling painted white. I had been there before, a few years ago on a date with man known for taking a different woman out each night of the week, and I told Jonathan, "it's funny, this town is so small you can't keep running into memories; I did this here, I did that there...." It was a changing day outside, alternately sunny and gray, with a short burst of rain that kept us inside the restaurant, long after we'd finished our food and I eaten the sugary dregs at the bottom of my cappuccino with a spoon, until we made a dash for it, trying to run in-between the fat, heavy drops of rain. Jonathan ran, hands stuffed in his pockets, while I tried to cover my head with my white canvas-and-silver purse.
I walked home later, the rain had stopped and the air was warm and slightly humid. Little puddles of rain collected in 'dells' of the red brick sidewalk and lilac, purple, and white flowers quivered over the iron railings, freshly covered in droplets of water. The colors were so soothing and cool, nothing like the faded, jazzy 'crazy' quilts, sewed half-way across the country, some more than half a century ago. One of the quilts had a small card beside it that had written on it a small anecdote. One of the women quilters had lost her beads as a child, it was one of her few possessions, and she was very upset because when you have so little, that little means so much. But it's okay, the card said, because she has lots of beads, now...
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