I write, I stitch. This is the twelfth drawing in Nancy’s fourth set of drawings. There are 95 drawings in this set.
~~~~~~~
Nancy (my developmentally disabled sister-in-law) draws.
I (the woman who flat-out loves her) stitch.
Category: stitchings (Page 6 of 37)
Allow me to introduce you:
Starting with the adorable little boy in the left forefront
and working our way around:
Crawford Hewell, Jr., who would grow up to be my daddy
Crawford Hewell, Sr., a.k.a. Granddaddy
The woman is Maude (Montie) Gay Hewell, a.k.a. Grandmother
And the chubby little baby she’s holding is the fella I’m named after:
my Uncle Gene
. . . . .
When it was time to bury Juanita, her one-day old daughter,
she tied a knot and hung on.
When Edgar and Earl, her twin boys, were born dead,
she tied a knot and hung on.
When the tractor turned over, crushing and killing her 18 year old son Gene,
she tied a knot and hung on.
When her beloved granddaughter reached for the Zero candy bar kept in the back of the fridge,
she tied a knot and told her “No” for the first time
because that is the candy bar Gene was going to have for an afternoon snack
after he finished pulling up tree stumps with the tractor.
She kept it as her private memorial to him,
thinking of him every time she opened the fridge to get
eggs
or milk
or just to remember a spell.
When the bank robbers came and held her family hostage over night,
when they kidnapped her husband,
when they put a gun to her five-year old’s head,
when they drank their prohibition liquor and rebel-roused and threatened
her mother,
the midwife,
and her newborn baby boy,
she tied a knot and hung on.
Meet Maude Gay Hewell,
My grandmother
and the first woman featured in my
Pink Galoshes Portraits of Irrepressible Women series.
. . . . .
This picture was taken in November 1933,
six months after the bank robbery and kidnapping.
As with all my Pink Galoshes Portraits, I’m also identifying how these women remained irrepressible in the face of devastation and hardship. For Grandmother, she had a loving family, and she loved her family. Plus it was 1933, right smack dab in the middle of The Great Depression, so she had no time to wallow and settle herself into the victim chair. She had babies to feed and a husband to love, so she pulled on her pink galoshes and tromped on through the mud and the muck to get to where she needed to go.
. . . . .
Pink Galoshes Portrait, Maude Gay Hewell
20.25″ x 16.25″
photo transferred onto fabric
pieces of a 1930s double wedding ring quilt somebody started but never finished
French knots (36 hours’ worth)
hand stitched
. . . . .
I’m penning 100 stories in 100 days, limbering up to (finally) write a book about that weekend in May 1933 when the bandits came knocking and held my family hostage, including my daddy who was five years old at the time. Had things gone horribly awry, I would not be sitting here today, penning these words – think about that for a minute. Kinda’ makes your head hurt, doesn’t it?
To make sure you don’t miss a story, you might want to get your free subscription by clicking the button in the orange strip across the top of this page. Just mash then follow the directions, and voila!
And hey, if you are or know any Pink Galoshes Women,
please holler cause I’d love to meet and profile you and them.
She bought cloth
not because her cupboard was bare,
not because she had nothing else to do,
not because she was addicted . . .
but because she needed to feel hope
and believe in the goodness of tomorrow.
Mostly she bought cloth because she was scared
and didn’t know what else to do
but keep her hands busy.
~~~~~~~
To get my writing legs back under me, I’m penning 100 stories in 100 days. Maybe you want to subscribe and have it delivered to your front door every morning? Just mash the button in the orange box at the top of the screen and follow the directions.
Today, another story in stitch . . .
At first
they looked like horns,
but looking closer,
She saw that they were actually arms
reaching up in search of hugs.
Rinse Cycle, #2: Pivotal Epiphanies in a Woman’s Life
~~~~~~~
I’m penning 100 stories in 100 days
(#100Days100Stories).
There’ll be personal history,
made-up stories,
and I don’t know what all.
If you’d like to get a helping’ of my daily potluck,
mash the button in the orange box
at the top of the screen and subscribe,
why don’t you.
Today, a story in stitch . . .
Then One Day
she knew she had to fly
despite decades of being advised to
remain small and quiet and safe.
Seeing Her soar, the Others began to fly, too
every one of them wondering
why they’d waited so long.
The Rinse Cycle, #1: Pivotal Epiphanies in a Woman’s Life
~~~~~~~
#100 Days 100 Stories
Click in the orange bar at the top of the page
to have it delivered to your door every morning.
It’s all about choices, y’all. Choices and consequences. A pretty simple concept with pretty darn important repercussions. Too often we let somebody else make our choices for us and we are surprised or unhappy or cranky with the results. Or we go through every single day with a nasty, negative attitude and we wonder why we are so miserable. If these remarks resemble you, thunk yourself up side the head for me, will you? We learn a lot about ourselves from the choices we make and the consequences that ensue, and we learn a lot from life in general when we stew, thrive, or wrestle in life lived in the aforementioned consequences. Making our own choices, accepting responsibility and/or asking for help living the consequences, and making different choices when possible and necessary are the keys to living a self-determined life, and if you ask me, there’s no finer way to live.
Too often we take away the choices of others in the name of expediency or ease. Take dying people, for example. As life wanes, all too often opportunities to choose do, too. I’m not talking about drastic measures – that should already be spelled out in the living wills and such. I’m talking about things like what to eat and what to wear and what would you like to listen to now.
We spent today with Nancy, and we fiddled with cloth because I wanted to give her the option to do something besides draw. If you could see the video (I am, for the first time ever, traveling without my computer, and let me tell you: there’s a rather steep learning curve when blogging from the iPad, so alas, no video.) hear me in the background of the video asking Nancy what color cloth she wants to add next. (Though I don’t have to admit it here since you can’t see the video, I will nevertheless tell you that I am surprised and embarrassed and disappointed at the way I kinda’ rushed and overwhelmed by offering 3 color choices instead of waiting for her to process and decide, but that’s the value of video, and now that I’m aware, it won’t happen again.) She chose to fiddle with cloth; she chose which colors she wanted to add; and eventually she chose to pick up her crayons.
It was, as all days spent with Nancy are, fun, worthwhile, and thought-provoking. What say we make our own choices instead of abdicating our power, and what say we strive to gift others with the opportunity to make their own choices every chance we get. It’s a quality of life thing.
In Our Own Language 4:10
His grandfather took him into the woods and left him in the quiet all day long. At the end of the day, his grandfather would fetch him and ask: What did you see? What did you feel? What did you learn?
You can learn a lot from reading and listening and watching, but you develop your Inner Authority from doing.
Though she has many external authorities in her life, Nancy also has an Inner Authority. I can see it when she makes her marks – the way she starts without hesitation, the way she stops when she knows she’s finished, the way she selects her colors and turns the page and sometimes rips the page into pieces, keeping the bits she likes while discarding the rest.
~~~~~~~
She (Nancy, my developmentally disabled sister-in-love) draws.
I (Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her) stitch.
In Our Own Language 4:9
We All know a lot more than we think we do
and Wisdom is buried inside Each One of Us.
All we need is a way to make Art,
a Good Listener
or a Good Looker
Someone to Witness us
to help the Knowledge and the Wisdom
to emerge and flow.
PS: And hey,
if anybody ever tells you junk that sounds like
you shouldn’t care what others think,
or how you shouldn’t care if anybody
ever even sees your creations
know 2 things:
their inner moron is showing
and
they’ve had good witnesses somewhere along the way.
Witnesses they’ve forgotten about
and never appreciated enough.
~~~~~~~
She (Nancy, my developmentally disabled sister-in-love) draws.
I (Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her) stitch.
In Our Own Language 4:8
She (Nancy, my developmentally disabled sister-in-love) draws.
I (Jeanne, the woman who flat-out loves her) stitch.
We have neglected the gift of comprehending things through our senses.
Our eyes have been reduced to instruments
with which to identify and to measure,
hence we suffer a paucity of ideas that can be expressed in images
and an incapacity to discover meaning in what we see.
~ Rudolf Arnheim
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integrity
This work by Jeanne Hewell-Chambers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.TheBarefootHeart.com.
here ‘n there