A few weeks ago I tagged along with my lovely, illustrious friend, Dr. L, as she took a gaggle of her folklore students to a local historical farm. It was a beautiful summer day, donkeys were braying, pygmy goats were cuddling, a chicken was beheaded--the usual.
An animal was severely harmed in the making of this photo.
As we were making our final rounds of the sprawling grounds and buildings arranged and bedecked to replicate a working farm in 1917, we stopped in the trapper's tent. A young man in deerskin breeches, no older than fifteen or sixteen, slung a flintlock rifle over his shoulder and nodded out toward the pasture where a team of mules was mowing hay.
"Did you see him out there mowing with the mules?"
I nodded in the affirmative.
"That's probably just how your grandparents did it."
They liked Johnny Carson.
I wasn't sure what to address first. I could have clarified that I was younger than 60 and that consequently, my grandparents had had a working knowledge and appreciation for things like the television and the vacuum cleaner. I could have explained that I wasn't from around here. That my people weren't farmers. That my grandpa measured your success in life by whether or not you could take out somebody's appendix. In a split second, I chose one sentence to sum up the essence of my family as they were in the year of our Lord, 1917:
"My great-grandparents bootlegged liquor in Philadelphia."
I've lived in the West for nine years now, and I like to think that the handmade, handcrafted heritage of my new home has melded with my self-identity as the feisty descendant of hard-working, drunken*, Scotch-Irish city-dwellers.
Maybe that's why I bought this today at a local antique store:
A quilt top, to be exact, in case you can't tell from my award-winning laptop camera photo. A hand-stitched blue and pink Drunkard's Path quilt.
I've always loved the Drunkard's Path pattern. I've heard it was a pattern popular among temperance people, I know it has other names, but hey--I'm no quilt historian. I just like it. It speaks to me and makes me nostalgic for things I don't know I miss. Like how the smell of beer makes me long for my grandparents to drink at my kitchen table and talk smack about the neighbor's kids.
This quilt top has been sitting in some giant snake charmer's basket at the local antique store for months, getting crowded out by the stained blue chenille bedspread and a few other linens from the island of misfit textiles. I've had my eye on this little baby for a while. I'm gonna clean it, iron it, back it and quilt the crap out of it. I'm already so in love.
It's an imperfect, feisty little quilt, sweetly colored and spazzing out all over the place. My kind of quilt.
*I should mention that my ancestors were not always drunk. Great Aunt Margaret is a nun, after all.
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