While visiting my mom, we found a cache of white hankies she'd inherited from her grandmother and her mother. The workmanship was dainty and breathtaking beautiful. I wondered out loud if Mom could use them to make a quilt. Mom can do anything with the proper challenge.
I then remembered that I too had inherited some handiwork from my husband's step-grandmother. I found them this morning in her old cedar chest and enjoyed the surprise of their beauty. I've never known what to do with them, but now they will be in my mom's hands, and she will make them into family heirlooms.
I took photos, texted them to Mom and had to call her with my insight: "I think my generation of women couldn't really appreciate the work these women did. We were influenced by the changes women wanted and deserved, and the handiwork these women performed was looked upon as frivolous. But now, I appreciate the talent and patience it took for fine needlework."
What I didn't realize at the moment, was that it also takes time, on my part, to value old hankies from these noble women.
"You know, they didn't have kleenex, they had to make and use those hankies," Mom says.
It was more than frivolous embellishment. It was a desire to bring beauty to the ordinary.
I'm on my second day of a nasty head cold and I try to imagine what I would have done without the box of kleenex at my bedside and at my desk. How I appreciate Kimberly Clarke for making my life so much easier with kleenex. And how I appreciate the work of women who didn't have kleenex but took something so ordinary, so utilitarian and made it beautiful--the work of women for centuries.
One of Betha's beautiful hankie
Her response, "What would I use it for?"