When my sister and I were young, my mother would give us each a pair of scissors and we’d cut to and fro, turning old worn clothes that could no longer be repaired into long strips. We matched the colours, then tied the strips to one another and rolled them into big balls. We did it with the delight, both of that sense of permissible destruction and of play with the multicolored skeins that preceded our rags being threaded as wefts through the warp of the loom and turned into bedding. Then when we’d lie down on the clean, freshly washed patchwork quilts we’d recognize, in their stripes, our clothes, dresses, sheets, table-cloths and towels. Our history, our life transformed within the implicit continuity of homemaking. Nothing is ever wasted, nothing ever gets old as long as it is able to vitally sustain us. Our past years brought us here—our little rags—dreaming of the future for the coming year. May it be multicolored and bright and lovely and may we be well and strong enough to welcome it.
