Carolyn North (carolynnorthbooks.com) is a writer of books that address “the interface between matter and spirit.”
PUTNEY-I was sitting around the campfire at Red Clover Farm in Putney with friends late one night years ago, and I stood up, only to lose my balance and stumble backwards, landing hard and catching my hand in the metal spring of a folding chair that snapped shut onto my knuckles. It was the very definition of a freak accident.
I knew only excruciating pain, the way a bear caught in a steel trap must feel. Then, coming from I know not where, I heard in my head clear instructions about how to respond to my dilemma.
“Use it! Use your pain!” I heard. “Look for your ‘calm core’ beyond the pain. Breathe into the hurt and feel whatever you feel — fear, denial, embarrassment.”
That voice told me to allow myself to be helped, to maintain a quiet sense of humor at my predicament. “Show the others, especially the young ones, how to respond to pain when the going gets rough.“
With that, my horrible pain then morphed into a more interesting type that I could indeed handle. My buddies around the campfire became a brilliant — and, yes, funny — rescue team. I got to observe my daughter as the remarkable healer she is, and I felt the power of a community coming together to support one of their own.
My niece, I recall, had the job of distracting me by telling the story of when her dog got lost. She kept us all in stitches. My job was to look at her — not my hand — and to keep breathing as calmly as I could.
“Breathe,” I kept hearing. “Keep breathing.”
Once the ambulance arrived, it took three strong guys with crowbars to unhitch me from that darn chair! My hand looked awful, its skin scraped down to tendon and bone, but the spring had fallen straight across my knuckles where the hand below is fleshy, so no fingers were broken, no tendons snapped.
I was lucky, and to everyone’s amazement, still calm, even though it hurt like hell!
Later, sewn up in the emergency department at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and sent back to the farm bruised but not broken, I realized that I had not, for one moment, been left alone with my pain. My daughter never left my side. The others came in relays, sat with us, supplied us with snacks, and told us how fabulous we were.
We were. And we could be again, I now know. We can make it through these hard times by staying calm, breathing, and doing what needs to be done — always with a little help from our friends.
The most painful part of this freak accident happened when I had to get on a plane not many days later, when a young female security agent told me to “unwrap the bandage” that had been skillfully wrapped at the farm, to protect my hand from the inevitable bumps and stresses it would receive getting on and off an airplane.
“What?”
There was no way I could neatly unwrap those layers of gauze and cotton and get them back on again with one hand. I assumed she was joking.
But she meant it.
I had to take the bloody thing off so this young woman could personally see my bruises and big blue stitches to be sure I was not hiding a weapon!
“Eww, gross!” she said, shooing me away as I trailed bloody gauze behind me, looking for a quiet corner of the concourse where I could re-wrap my hand and cry — for her, more than myself — and for our culture that, in the name of “security” demands heartlessness from our own young people.
At last, my accident brought me to tears.
* * *
Now, decades later and now living full time in Putney, it is only in my heart that you might find evidence of a scar.
We are all carrying scars, deep ones: for the children languishing in detention centers at the border; for our fellow citizens so scared they would vote a madman into high office; for the forests still being destroyed for profit and for the icecaps melting into polluted oceans; for the droughts and the floods, for the insane wars, and for the homeless of every race. And for the children, the frightened children.
We are scarred, every last one of us, whether we realize it or not. And also scared.
Then I watched how my good friend Carol handled her own wounds after she and her husband lost their home during a big fire in California. They got out with their lives, but little else.
Then her grandchild got racked up in a car accident, her son lost his job, and her husband had a mental health crisis. Her shock level went way over the top. Her therapist alerted the authorities, fearful she might kill herself.
She lost control completely. Carol told me later how she was dragged off to the local psychiatric ward by six police officers, two firefighters, two security guards, and two ambulance drivers, who threatened to tie her down if she didn’t stop fighting them.
When Carol told me the story later, we roared with laughter because she is a small woman and one of the most grounded people I know.
(Six police officers?)
* * *
Sowhat do you do when so much has been taken away that you are left with almost nothing — except life itself?
Carol’s feisty response: “If life has given me scraps — well, then, I suppose I’m just going to have to make a quilt.”
Me too! So we’re going to do it together.
Fortunately, old fabric turns both of us on — some people call folks like us “quilting maniacs.” So we know just how to start: with unsorted piles of scraps!
Carol’s scraps may have been destroyed in the fire, but I’ve got enough for both of us on shelves and in boxes, collected over decades. She loves haunting thrift stores, finding old embroidery on worn-out pillowcases, velvet ribbons, silk sashes, old batik.
“My favorite thrift store sells scraps for 25 cents a bag!” she told me excitedly. Our collaboration is underway!
One day soon we’ll get together, kneel on my living room floor, and lay out our stashes by color. As we place golds next to purples and decide if we want patchwork or log cabin squares, I’ll ask about the family, and she’ll tell me about the latest catastrophe.
And I will listen quietly, placing pink satin next to a dash of black-and-white check while she talks.
Inevitably, we’ll get to our various children, and then politics. Maybe we will cry together about the children who have already died in detention at the border.
Sorting through scraps of calico and bits of raw silk, we’ll take bets on the country waking up soon enough to make a difference. And then we’ll lay out a log cabin square with a center square of cherry-red satin.
I’ll go to the sewing machine to sew it up while she cuts and irons pieces for the next square.
We’ll no doubt wonder together about politics; about what’s going on with the British monarchy; about whether the Democrats will listen to all the smart young women of color taking the places of the old-guard guys; about how to start changing the economic system that’s got it all backwards.
“I love how this red satin looks in the center,” one of us will say.
“What about this off-white lace for the first borders?” the other will offer.
When the square is sewn up and ironed out flat, we will sit back, quietly admiring the new square for a while. Then we’ll embrace in a deep long hug.
“Ready for some tea?” I’ll suggest.
“Sure,” she’ll murmur, sighing from deep down.
It’s an old, old adage: If life hands you scraps, go about your business, know who your friends are, and make a quilt.
I know it works, because I’ve done it. And more than once.
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