207 Emeline Drive
Hawthorne, NJ 07506
ph: 973-949-4626
fax: 973-310-3061
alt: 551-206-6867
eileende
The Log Cabin Dialogues
I live in a foster home for wayward family heirlooms.
If there’s a breakfront, painting, chair, table, knick knack or piece of bric-a-brac earmarked for an estate sale or orphaned by parental downsize and exodus to a small manufactured home in Florida, these ancient refugees (the heirlooms, not my parents) invariably end up at my door. Some people attract stray animals or special needs children no one else wants to adopt. I attract antiques. Even my husband is thirteen years older than I am.
I attribute this to two things:
First, I imprinted like a baby duck to its quacking mother when I read the entire Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” series as a child, and later I attached like a barnacle to “Little Women”. Because of this, any homespun, country or Victorian antique from these approximate eras has me clicking on all emotional and visceral cylinders.
As a child I was determined to be like Laura Ingalls or Jo March. I adopted an air of quiet independence and studied every homespun domestic skill I could - pie baking, home canning, quilting, embroidery, sewing, knitting, playing an instrument (after all, Pa played violin and Ma, Mary and Beth March played the Pianny), gardening, folk medicine, you name it. My dear Gram Shew was Ma to my Laura and Marmee to my Jo as she spent hours teaching me to knit, crimp pie crust “just so”, use a sewing machine and set a proper country table.
Second, I have a roomy house, unlike my three nomadic musician siblings who obviously imprinted on “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.
As I sit here in my home office my Gram Grape’s well-polished mahogany coffee table sits behind my chair, groaning with piles of files, papers I intend to file and books I really truly intend to read one day. (Grape wasn’t her real name. When one of my many nephews was a baby he didn’t understand “Great Grandma” and called her “Gram Grape” instead. It stuck). Her ornate crystal fruit bowl sits in my dining room hutch and gets hauled out on holiday occasions or parties and heaped with artfully presented fruit no one eats. I have scores of old family trivets, serving bowls, tatted and crocheted doilies, aprons and tablecloths, embroidered napkins, goblets, wine glasses, even Gram Grape’s favorite plum pudding set. Many was the Thanksgiving ol’ Gram Grape would get tanked making her famous high octane plum pudding hard sauce.
Our bedroom has the rocker in which Gram Shew rocked my father. Gram’s mother Mema’s Victorian dresser with carved mirror holder has been my dresser since college, and my husband Art uses Gram Shew’s oak dresser, a prim little piece sadly mismatched to his leggy 6’2” frame. Every morning I watch him stoop over those drawers and paw through them looking for the day’s undies and socks, then grab his lumbar spine and groan a little louder every year as he straightens up and has to bend his knees and practically kneel to shut the drawers. These days he leaves the drawers slightly ajar to keep his Tylenol consumption down.
Why, you may ask, doesn’t Art use his own furniture? Ah, that’s another story altogether. The short answer is - when we got married twelve years ago (a second marriage for both) and went househunting, I wanted a farmhouse from the Civil War (since there were no log cabins or authentic lemonade porch Victorians to be found at the time) and Art wanted a California Contemporary. He said he couldn’t stand up in the farmhouse. Fine, I said, you can have your expletive deleted modern beast, but I shall strip the godawful bamboo wallpaper off all the walls and cover them with sponge techniques, murals and vintage stencils. I’ll fill the house with antiques and you must relegate your chrome and glass monstrosities to storage. Since Art was smitten with both me and the house of his dreams, he acquiesced. We now have a California Contemporary with a Victorian soul, and my parents have someone upon whom they may dump, uh, pass on their accumulated curios.
My house overflows with antique dry sinks, spice cabinets, tea trolleys, embroidered upholstered rockers, crockery jugs, benches, century-old dolls, threadbare quilts, side tables, quilt racks, hope chests, dog-eared old family albums, slides, baby books, huge oval gilt picture frames, lamps, even my father’s diminutive toddler rocking chair, which came to me in shambles and which of course I had restored and recaned.
Over the summer during our yearly upstate New York family reunion my mother presented me with two more additions to my antique orphanage. As the festivities drew to a close on the final night of the reunion and my musician siblings put away their guitars, keyboards, amps and drums (the reunion is really a five day jam session interspersed with swimming, hiking, tennis and lots of junk food), my mother hauled two large black garbage bags into the room and smiled that smile I know too well. It was time to add to my collection. It wasn’t technically time to actually “give” me something I can “own”. I am merely the curator of family accumulations. I’m “taking care” of these offerings, seeing if I can “do anything” with them. Translation “Please fix this and store it for an unknown duration for unclear purpose”.
This year’s booty was my mother’s 55 year-old wedding dress and a crumbling, smelly, oily quilt from the 1800’s purportedly made by a great great aunt in the Hudson Valley. The wedding dress, once a pristine, comely lace confection worn by a fresh-faced girl with de rigeur 1950’s style perm and red lipsticked mouth was now a crumbled, mildewed clump of stained, rigid taffeta and diffident rows of weathered mother-of-pearl buttons. I could only keep the garbage bags open for the few moments it took to size up these diamonds in the rough before the mold and mildew threatened to close my bronchial passages in acute spasm. “I’ll see what I can do” I croaked, and my mother smiled that smile.
The wedding dress was a no-brainer. No dry-cleaner would touch it because of its age and fragility, so I let it hang in a steamy bathroom to take out the wrinkles, draped it on a padded hanger, buttoned and smoothed it and put the something borrowed, something blue items, garters, gloves and silk stockings into a ziploc bag which I pinned to the veil. Everything was then sprayed with blessed Febreze, hung in my art studio for a few days to air out further, then finally placed in a vinyl garment bag in our dry basement cedar closet. When I told my mother what I had done she replied petulantly “Well, who are you planning to give it to?”, as if she had secretly hoped I would burn it. “It’s for posterity Mom” I replied defensively, and she relaxed. Right answer.
Now the quilt. The quilt. I despaired as I unfolded it layer by oily, crumbling layer and recoiled at the sour cloud of mildew that spewed from every seam. I spread it out over my living room couch to let it air for several days, and as the days ticked by and I turned it every other day to give the other side its dose of fresh air and Extra Strength Febreze, I found myself examining it, and being drawn in by it.
It was a large quilt, made of handstitched squares comprised of thin panels of fabric laid out in strategic, surprisingly sophisticated color combinations. Peach and salmon patterns coexisted happily with all manner and tone of browns, greens, yellows, oranges, reds, blues, rusts, even the occasional renegade purples. Somehow it all made sense, there was an almost mathematical logic to it combined with an indefinable magic, like its maker knew a mystical secret that enabled her to take random scraps of cloth and meld them into this cohesive, living, breathing piece of art.
I was hooked.
Granted, this quilt needed help. At least 15% of its panels were almost completely deteriorated and sprouted tufts of yellowed, clumpy batting. It’s edging, probably once a delicate ecru, was a dingy shade of mushroom. Its backing was the same unfortunate shade, but surprisingly strong and intact, and the edging was also well attached at the seam but very worn along the outside edge.
As I surveyed the quilt I knew my next project was to restore it as closely as I could to its original state. This became an imperative. I combed fabric stores for the closest possible matches I could find and scoured bookstores and the Internet for tips on antique quilt restoration.
I began to cut long strips 1 1/2 “ wide to replace fading panels. I turned their rough edges over and ironed them flat, cut them to size, eased and pinned them over their fading comrades and painstakingly ladder-stitched them in. I wanted to do justice to the tiny, even hand stitching my long-lost relative had used a century and a half ago.
My project became a paean, to Laura, Ma, Marmee and the March sisters, and to all the women who settled the Hudson Valley and braved Indian attacks, pestilence, hard winters, loss and almost constant laboring (although I continue to feel the Indians got an extremely raw deal). As I worked each square began to speak to me, to tell me its story, and my imagination soared. This piece is from her sofa, I thought, from a few remnants after she stuffed and sewed it. This is an old housedress, this a shred of curtain, that a piece of a child’s nightshirt. The din and clatter arising from each square almost deafened me as I heard children playing, screaming, running, crying, whispering, nestling in Mother’s lap for one more song, one more bedtime story. Curtains swayed in the breeze of open spring windows, iron pans clinked loudly on heavy stovetops, men stamped their snowy feet on hooked rugs by the front door and shook the ice from their beards, and I sat in a trance and stitched and rubbed and smoothed and marveled.
Another layer of the puzzle emerged as I noticed other panels stitched in as I was doing, covering previous threadbare panels. These fabrics were different, heavier, stronger, brighter, with patterns almost foreign to their ancient forbears, but with the same attention to the flow and tone of the piece. Someone else sat as I sat and felt the need to keep this quilt and its maker alive and in one piece. A whole new series of impressions arose from these new panels - this woman had a washing machine, probably one of those round pink ones from the early 1900’s with a detachable washboard. She wore frilly aprons, had her hair permed and went to church on Sunday after having a snort or two Saturday night. Her children were wilder than the ones from the Valley, with peashooters and buck teeth, Little Rascals all. Maybe she had an affair with the butcher, maybe her husband had to track her down with her lover in the mountains and beg her to come home. I sewed on.
My mother called in the middle of my reverie and I asked her about the quilt. “Oh, the quilt!” she exulted. “It’s Log Cabin style. Probably worth a lot of money, it’s very old you know”. I knew. She wasn’t sure exactly who made it, but it had been in the family for over a century and a half. I told her about the intensity of my experience restoring it, and she humored me “That’s nice dear. Glad you’re enjoying it”. She was happy I was “fixing” it, but not surprised. She knows that’s what I do.
Money being what it is, generally scarce, I started thinking. What happens when I pass on? Who will get all these refugees? I can’t let some callous antique dealer buy lock stock and barrel from my bereaved ones, can I? Shouldn’t I have some control over where they go? Where does my responsibility begin and end? I asked my mother how she would feel if I sold some of these treasures to collectors. She demurred and mentioned a sensitive teenaged niece who might marry well, or perhaps my son might marry a girl who could take on my curator mantle. Perhaps, but it would be nice to be able to go into Nordstroms once in a while and do more than sigh. I’m a writer and artist “of a certain age”. I gave up commercial writing ten years ago when being a well-paid corporate cog meant writing slogans and ad copy as Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” played in a loop in my head. Art for art’s sake is great, but I could use new underwear and a raincoat that doesn’t have 1980’s shoulder pads like a middle linebacker.
How would it feel to hand off that antique circa 1900 bisque K&R Doll? How would it be to know her flirty round eyes, long blonde curls, real hair eyelashes and four perfect little white baby teeth were beguiling someone else? Would she take up the same position of honor she holds on a high shelf in my studio? Would her new owner hold her and pet her like I did, and my Gram Shew did before me? Would great great aunt Whoosis turn in her grave if her meticulous, miraculous quilt left the family tree? Is having a pair of soft Italian leather stiletto boots from the famous Nordstroms shoe department worth betraying my lineage and its artifacts?
I think I need to lighten up. But before I do, I’ve got a pale salmon pink paisley print panel (how’s THAT for alliteration) winking at me from the ironing board. Time to listen to it tell me where it belongs.
I plan to live to 100 anyway. I’ve got 50 more years to think about it.
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207 Emeline Drive
Hawthorne, NJ 07506
ph: 973-949-4626
fax: 973-310-3061
alt: 551-206-6867
eileende