Well its not tomatoes, but the more flowery fruits of my own labor. I so enjoyed reading through the tomato love and all of your fancy ways of consuming them. I am thoroughly stuffed, and feel like we all shared a big meal. Food and love. It is something isn't it? I've been thinking about it for a few days now, how we have favorite ways to eat things, and the memories that a simple fresh vegetable can conjure. Its not just the memory of how you ate it and what it tasted like or how it was prepared, but more, its the warmth of the loved ones that grew it, cooked it or shared it. Its the comfort of being provided for in the most simplest form. Feeding the soul through the mouth.
I went out in the garden today to photograph this quilt and was entirely too distracted by the flowers and felt more like photographing them. I eventually found myself to be taking pictures of the same thing as the quilt, really. The palette was the same. And though this blessed Tennessee soil helped along these blooms, each frame was like another piece in the patchwork of my garden in August. And so I made a new quilt.
And in these thoughts of flowers, fabrics and foods, I found truth in this: offering one's work and toil is one of the greatest forms of love. And whether you are mingling oil and tomato in the kitchen, thread and fabric on your lap, soil and seed in the ground, the gesture of doing your best to provide is the same.
I recently read this quote from a Texas quilter named Mary White, that I think sums up the simplicity of making that is so dear to me:
"You can't always change things. Sometimes you don't have no control over the way things go. Hail ruins the crops, fire burns you out. And then you're just given so much to work with in a life and you have to do the best you can with what you got. That's what piecing is. The materials is passed on to you or is all you can afford to buy....that's just what's given to you. Your fate. But the way you put them together is your business."
good weekend, xoxo,AM