Legacy

As summer starts to fade, and the scent of flowers becomes more faint, I find myself turning more inward, and returning to my small tapestry and embroidery projects. My husband and son are both computer game aficionados, an interest I respect , but that eludes me. My father's mother and his two older sisters are skilled seamstresses, and on my mother's side there are several painters, her mother, and her two older brothers. I decided to combine both legacies and do embroideries of my own design, as a way to pass on both art forms for my son, who also has an interest and talent for art, especially pencil and ink drawings. My husband has a solitary nature, which can prove to be a challenge for my gregarious personality, so embroidery became a way to embrace our quiet life style, and in a way that part of Michael suits my basically Buddhist perspective on solitude. Michael has always been intrigued by Australia, especially the outback, and I can see him there, because his tolerance of solitude is impressive. My embroideries take a long time, anywhere from six to nine months, and the stitches are minuscule, so it takes an excruciating amount of patience, making the experience transcendental and very meditative. Most of the poems I was finally able to release and write after my family fell apart, were written carefully in my head, while working on an embroidery project. In a  world of instant technical gratification, needlework seems outdated , and belonging to a different space and time. But that is precisely why I like the challenge it presents. I am an anachronism doing my painstakingly slow needlepoint, while I hear the noises and sounds from my son's and husband's computer games. I am working on my 7th project, and each project presents a new technical challenge, depending on whether I am working on flowers, animals, an abstract design, depending on the thread I use, and since I draw each pattern myself in pencil on the canvas, that too presents a different challenge each time. It is in a way, like creating a painting, but with needle and thread. I love choosing the colours, the dimensions , choosing the design. It is interesting to be inundated in the language of computer games, much of which I  do not understand, and to have my son and husband attend the PAX video and computer game convention in Seattle for the 4th year in a row, as I work on my embroidery project of a family of red eyed tree frogs, and smile at how our family literally sometimes lives in different worlds.