At seven in the morning I opened the balcony door and stepped outside to check on the plants. I pluck a leaf here, a twig there, feel the soil for moisture, and look for new flowers or tiny fruits. I glance up and see, in the patio across from mine, my neighbor in his nineties doing the exact same thing I’m doing. There’s no denying it — I was born old. My passions at fifty: embroidery, cooking, gardening, tending plants, rewatching old Columbo episodes, being with family, writing, reading Carver and Chekhov, walking in nature, studying different types of fermentation, and exploring New Medicine.
Right now I can’t embroider for more than an hour a day. Between organizing group orders from small producers, trying to keep up with the incomprehensible new rules that creep across social media (thankfully I don’t watch TV), and my habit of staying up far too late, I can’t manage the early mornings I’d like. Still, I’m happy—I’ve nearly finished two new pieces in the past few weeks. I had to pause them because I’ve run out of thread, almost all the spools are gone. So I started another one that I really love. It has something abstract about it, despite being a very real subject: a giant seaweed, a little flattened, which you can see below. I found it in the herbarium of a California university website.
It’s a kelp that grows in the seas between Alaska and Mexico. In this stunning photo by Tom Boyd, a New Jersey photographer passionate about marine conservation, you can see the algae alive, in all its beauty. It has huge lobes, drifting to one side with the current, held up by round, air-filled bladders. I don’t know how to put into words my admiration for all this—my sense of belonging to it. A teacher of mine once said: “When you look at the sky, breathe the blue; when you look at the trees, breathe the green.” Maybe only that synesthetic phrase gets close to what moves me. The sea, especially, runs in my veins. It makes me feel instantly safe when I’m near it, even as I hold the deep respect due to a shapeshifter of its power.
This time I’m working on an old kitchen towel, maybe hemp. I always hope that what I feel for the subjects I stitch into fabric somehow gets caught in the threads. That someone else, brushing a hand across it, will sense that energy and feel the same shiver. In the image I used, the algae is pressed flat in an herbarium—transformed from the brilliance of living matter into the tenderness of preservation and the precision of cataloging (which, with my Virgo stellium, is irresistibly appealing). Who knows how long this magnificent sea creature will endure without decomposing, carefully folded in the archive of its admirer.
This time I began embroidering with the lightest thread, the one I usually save for the second pass. I was hoping to buy a very particular shade of green I spotted the other day. I haven’t managed it yet, so I started with a blue. That green will wait for another algae.
I don’t think I’ll repeat this experiment—the pale thread is driving me mad. I don’t know if it shows in the photos, but following a pencil line with such a faint color is really tricky, especially with the eyesight shifts I’ve been dealing with lately. I’ll finish with white, bold and in backstitch, as always.
Now I’m heading to the patio to sort the catalpa branches by size, stacking them into wooden crates and imagining them burning in the fireplace this winter. Even after twelve years, I can’t quite believe I own a tree. A real tree, tall as a mountain, bursting with leaves, and capable of blooming flowers so intoxicating in their scent. I breathe it in too—the ivy climbing up its trunk, the wild strawberries at its roots.
Leave A Comment