Silk Starfish in the Springtime

My mother had a ritual that ushered in Spring every year—starching the doilies. With the first caress of warm breezes wafting in through the kitchen window of our Cape Cod-style house, she harvested the soft, floppy creations from the cedar chest, dresser tops, and chair headrests. Some were two feet wide—reaching arrogant arms out to the world for attention to their lacey finery. Other, more modest ones were the size of a saucer—little rounded, regular wheels meant for a small girl’s bureau. Some were off-white, or ecru. Some had greens, pinks, and yellows worked into starfish arms of silk or cotton.

I remember hauling my excited 5-year-old self onto the kitchenette chair to watch her. From the vantage point of a gray, marbled plastic seat perched atop hollow, chrome legs, I hunched—elbows to tabletop, chin to hands. This ritual of renewal always thrilled me. Witnessing it, I felt part of the turning of the wheel of the year—the wheel in this case, being made of lace. Spring unfolded as the doilies unfolded, perennially, like flowers. After my mother’s magical ministrations, they stretched toward the sun, all clean and fresh again.

In her emerald gingham dress, my mother tumbled the clear starch crystals from a pink box (which bore a smiling, aproned 50’s housewife) into a shallow pan of warm water. She’d swirl the mixture with her hand—releasing a pleasant, sweet, oatmeal-like scent that I always associate with springtime. The scent was actually lighter and cleaner than oatmeal, and I must have received some kind of warning, because I never sipped it, inviting as it was.

She plunged a handful of lace into the bath. The doilies soaked for an appointed time, while the crystals performed their magic of reanimation on the threads. Then she extracted them, one at a time, squeezed them, and mounted them on a stretching board. The board was a quarter-inch thick sheet of varnished plywood about four feet square. She’d work the warm net of each creation wide and flat, and pin it to the panel. With long, clean pins, she arranged each star point or scalloped edge, anchoring down a strategic border—stretching and shaping the loops upon loops—with her artful, ever-busy hands.

She usually performed this ritual on a sunny day, and often left the board outside under the drying rays—keeping a watchful eye out for bugs, of course. When the sun set, I would help her pull out the pins and remove the dry doilies from the board. Stiff as a triple-starched shirt, they could have been used as Frisbees at this point—if I dared. Mom would place her favorites around the house, and tuck the rest away for replenishment. Other rituals like this—waxing and polishing the kitchen floor when guests were expected, hanging new drapes and curtains with each new season—gave the fabric of my childhood a whole and cared-for feeling.

I tried tatting once, when I was around twelve years old—hoping to recreate the painstaking process I’d watched my grandmother perform. Squeezing the seedpod-like tatting shuttle as if it were a castanet between thumb and forefinger, I started my first and only doily with a tiny circle of thread. With my mother instructing me, I created more loops off that tiny circle, and then loops around each loop, until the netted structure took on a regular pattern and a usable shape. Well, maybe usable in a doll house—I lost interest before my creation became even saucer-sized. This was much more labor-intensive than all the other handiwork I’d ever done.

The process reminded me of lacemaking—still done by talented artists in Ireland and Spain. With multiple bobbins of thread painstakingly twisted around pins to create the pattern, a lacemaker grows the tethered piece in minute increments. I feel a pang when I think of such skills of a bygone era. It seems like there was once a time when people had large swaths of hours to devote to the creation of a masterpiece. At my office job, my hands tap constantly on computer keys. Nevertheless they feel idle and dumb performing their mundane, repetitive, and unartistic actions. Unlike my childhood, when I was constantly folding fabric, tying yarn, weaving threads, shaping clay, cutting paper, or slathering on paint.

I think we pay too high a price for our “civilization” and technology. We moderns might fill our gas tank and pay our bills on time (the measure of a successful life in this day and age) through office jobs that result in carpal tunnel syndrome. I for one have a soul that aches for more time to do artwork with my hands, spirit and eyes. While my mind and fingers are still nimble, I want to weave silk starfish, and do nothing else on a tantalizing spring day but starch them, stretch them, and admire my handiwork.

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My mother was forced by her father to leave high school prior to graduating, to work in a cotton mill (the Kerr Thread Mill in Fall River, MA) to help support her family. My grandmother kept Mom’s artistic dreams alive by paying for a correspondence school art course for her. Mom moved onto office work, then married, taking the standard 1950’s route of motherhood and housewifery. Busy as she was with four children, however, she was always sewing a dress, knitting mittens, or baking cookies. Her life wasn’t compartmentalized, as mine is, and perhaps that’s why the switch from hard fluorescent-lit electronics to soft, handworked fabric seems like a greater and greater stretch for me, with each passing year. Mom changed a baby, crocheted a pillow, then threw in another load of laundry—all in the rhythm of her day.

In between raising six boys, my grandmother produced a prodigious amount of handwork in her lifetime. I imagine it couldn’t have been easy for her either, having eight babies in her bed at home; two died at birth, another was killed in a construction accident at nineteen years of age. It must have been trying, living within the strictures of a traditional French Catholic immigrant family. But the thing I remember most about her was her frequent, velvety soft laugh. She never spoke of hardship. My mother laughed all her life too, until the Alzheimer’s silenced her a year ago. Now I am the forty-something adult in the family in the midst of her productive years—juggling the callings of my spirit with the newfound freedoms and responsibilities women have in these times.

Often, when I visit my hometown of Westport, and walk along Drift Road, near the beach, I am startled by the engine of a car whooshing by. When I vacation there, I sink into a space that expects the soft clop of horse and buggy, like my grandfather drove on that very street to woo my grandmother on her farm in the 1920s. That seems like the right pace for me. This path we 21st century gals walk requires the tenacity of a lawyer, the sensitivity of a surgeon, and the strength, grace, and agility of a ballerina. The struggles and the pitfalls are different from those of my mother and grandmother, but I still have the same need to pick up a piece of handwork and feel the satisfaction of building something tangible, loop by loop, stitch by stitch. To create softwear instead of software. Perhaps we’re not so different than our gingham and taffeta-swathed ancestors—we just need to remember what feeds our souls. And make the time to honor that, as we honor where we came from.