by Deborah Stein

This is a Blanket

DEBORAH STEIN | June 2024 | Issue 34

This is a Blanket

Grace, my neighbor, has a cold. Something knitted is paused on the arm of the couch, unfinished.

“I was going to make a blanket, but you know, I’m using bone needles to crochet today. The steel hooks are bad for you when you have a cold.”

Oh. It is her crocheting that is on the arm of the couch. I’m backing away, mouthing the words, chicken soup, but she is 93, so she knows this.

“Love you mi hijita,” Grace calls down her long driveway to me.

I walk home before sundown. I light the candles because it is the sabbath and call my husband. My husband tells me his grief counselor told him it's good to have a ritual. Ritual is important to societies but I am the only society in the room so I make the ritual. The candles lit, a small meal, just the two of us, me and my body.

The moon rises quickly and the three of us stare into each other, me, the moon, my body, portals that we are.

When next I am in the Walmart SuperCenter in Española, I don’t see bone needles, only wooden needles. I buy them in case I ever have a cold. Or learn to crochet. Because wood is close enough to bone. “I have plenty of yarn though—money can’t buy the yarn!” I tell the cashier, who just wants to put my needles into a plastic bag. Who just wants to get through the shift.

Deborah Stein, *Fragment of Seascape,* tea, ink and watercolor, Atlantic Ocean water on paper, 12 x 16 inches, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Ritual

Then I call my husband and we speak about how dollars will be worth nothing soon. The call drops and I call him back. We discuss China’s global strategy. We wonder about the future. We discuss the blood. We add today’s laments about the quagmire in the center of the world and the madmen in charge of any country we confer are mad men in charge of all the countries. We are all the pawns of mad men. The call drops again and he calls me back. We were saying, what were we saying, oh, just that when will this ever end and what is the end of anything? And that we are all pawns of mad men. We were saying we would like to have money when we are old. We lament our own decisions and throw more sweat into it. I say, my sweat is slowing down. We say we will need money to escape but where does one escape when our shading is a little off, one of our last names reeks a little. “It could be worse,” I say to make him feel better but no one feels better before the call drops again. He calls back and I continue “or if there is no one to care for us because no one will care for anyone anyway. He is saying maybe we’ll need money to buy ourselves a doctor. Or a vet?” The call drops and I call him back. I explain Grace’s theory on making blankets. I tell him how, at the post office, Michelle, the postmaster, told me the other day that corn silk fights bladder infections after she asked me about what I planted this year and how her grandmother has all this plant knowledge and I tell her I’ll save her some corn silk if my corn does ok, if they fix the ditch that gives us water, if there’s any water, if it ever comes down the snaking path to our house from the mountain, if the acequia ever gets fixed, if it ever rains and the plants can get a drink, or if I can get a drink but the call dropped and he doesn’t hear any of it. “I’m just rooting for the corn silk,” I say to the moon.

Bronze Statuette of a Horse, Greek, direct wax casting, Late 2nd-1st century. BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art, photo by Deborah Stein, 2024.

To find everything I’ve lost

Lately I've been so dirty, out in the ditch and putting seeds into mud and the dryness of my hands is the dry of this earth, the dusty pigment of this place. I’m a dirty lost kitten without mittens some days. My collar has grown tight though.

I have to grandmother myself into believing that wherever I am, I am home even if the home is blind to that. It’s better than what it could have been, which is to be nowhere at all, which is what I imagine a grandmother might say. I realize this might be a singular experience relegated to what my particular great grandmother might say. I never met her but she lived through a golden age until the gold wore off and exposed rotted wood, then rooted bone.

We are not all the same in this regard, I remind, boring a hole into the page with my crochet hook.

Dreaming the blanket

My mother used to dream that I had no winter coat, no blanket, and now I worry about that too.

In Gee's Bend when the quilters worked for Sears Roebuck as the Freedom Quilters Cooperative, they would bring home the corduroy scraps to create quilts. They would bring home scraps of old material and sew them as rhythms to live in their own quilts. Loretta Pettway said in one interview that she was glad she learned how to quilt from her grandmother because they had no gas or water, not even a well, and it could get cold on that Alabama island in the winter.

There are no straight lines in the Gee's Bend Quilts because evil travels in straight lines. The rhythms in the threads disorient any lurking evil, perhaps spirit them away. No one pulls the blanket off now. The blanket is the body’s talisman, the blankets protect from evil, the snakes sleeping in the dirt, just out of sight. The fabrics that keep us warmest, have the rhythm of mothers and grandmothers. The fabric they created still pulsates with expression. The hands still vibrate every stitch, the colors move toward you, the quilts have names, hands, something from not nothing, something hoping to keep warm, something from the body, like music.

*Cherry One & Two*,Deborah Stein, gouache on paper, 5 x 7 in., 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Scaffolding

Once there was an old woman who could not yet know she’d be a great grandmother. She knew she was a grandmother, a wife, a sister, a mother. She belongs historically to the matrilineal line, the line that vibrates in a straight line. Now she lives in lines of wind and haunts my trees, my ears and chills my skin. The wind that is the great grandmother was once shot in the back, most likely before even entering Treblinka. That was after she was denied fruit, then a blanket, then a toilet.

I say this because there was once the great-grandmother’s daughter, now a mother, now a grandmother, who threw herself down the stairs a few days after the grandfather died. The grandfather, then just the father, wrangled a way to escape and get his small family, all separated for a time, out of Germany in 1939. Out of the rubble and the dark, taking his wife to see her children again.

If I say this, it's because the daughter of this daughter, who too was once a child, was sent by herself to America on a big boat along with other refugee children who didn't know they were refugee children. When she arrived she took a bus and then a train for some days. She would go to a new school again, learn another language, take care of someone else’s children, sleep on a cot in a stranger’s living room. A few years later, her parents would come and gather her and the brother who preceded her in coming alone to America and they would all begin again by living in Queens.

Then, a few decades passed and the mother of this daughter landed at the bottom of the stairs. It was in the daughter’s own house not far from Queens. The daughter's small daughter, the grandchild, found the grandmother, the Oma, with her feet up in the air. In the years that followed the mother would say to the daughter, “Mama died of a broken heart.”

For what seemed like a long time in the future, the mother found herself a very old woman, isolated again, away from family, alone again with other refugees. Then, finally, in the truest sense of the word finally, there was the mother: daughter/sister/mother/grandmother, dying in a small apricot-colored room in a cot with a strange thin blanket placed over her, clutching its edge at the end of a strange hallway during a pandemic. As her grandmother might say, it could have been worse.

And finally, once the daughter, who was neither mother nor grandmother, broke into a small apricot-colored room with a new quilt to break the chain of mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers who would die alone, and cold, perhaps without a blanket.

My mother now had a blanket and under it were her small curled hands like skeletal birds. The body can deform in such a short amount of time. Wind can be really simple in this way.

My grandmother taught me to count to ten in German and crochet a simple chain stitch when I was five or six. She taught me how to eat meat down to the bone, down to the “mush.” She taught me to fear everything.

Things look so different after the story is over. After the blanket is ripped from the tomb. Many an old woman surviving things worse than death, only to be taken by terror. I say this because the zag of the line I’m able to give is only an offering: fresh fruit, a blanket, a toilet, less rubble.

*Lady Slipper,* photo by Deborah Stein, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

“Everything ends in flowers” – Héléne Cixous

When I stopped writing about Charlotte Salomon, the young German-Jewish artist captured in the south of France and who left 736 autobiographical artworks known as “Life? Or Theater?”, the woman I had convinced myself was my grandfather’s niece and finding it impossible not to write about my mother, I began to paint imaginary flowers and lose some of the leakiest parts of myself. I forgot everything but the essence when I painted and then, like a new skin like on a snake, my shell grew back with more forgotten things but things remembered made their way through the body into something new, something else. A snake growing out of itself into flowers.

Now the snake that was a memory and no longer covered in lament, the sad story of Charlotte Salomon, perhaps my mother’s cousin, all the snakes I’d coiled inside myself all add up. Charlotte who learned finally that her mother jumped out a window and it wasn't influenza after all, the Charlotte who was carted away by the train, pregnant and in love and holding her terrors in the paint and in the fiction, I had somehow connected her with the mother as though she was my real mother, maybe even my father, even though I was also convinced at the time it was Gepetto who was my real father. Charlotte came to me in my dreams in a slinky aquamarine dress my grandfather sent her. But then the story coughed up a rock and under the rock was a snake.

The snake was covered in petals, is all I know. The petals became Charlotte’s granny square blanket, full of holes, escapes and wars, soft and dull peach, until the petals were water and the snake was flower and within that everything dissolved and blurred.

It happened over a course of time, dramatic though, like the slow death of a peony, the one preserved and crumbling on the windowsill to remind us of what we went through to get here. Maybe in this way, it’s a folktale being remembered and maybe it's a spell being called upon, a way to put things back together again.

There are enough yarns to warm up every snake in this town (or to send it running).

“Not the yarn I was thinking you’d write,” says one snake.

“Beggars can't be choosers," says another, editing my typos.

“Anyway, there is no one in this town anywhere near ready to make a blanket, not for me anyway,” says another, rolling its eyes.

I get to work, thinking, “I'll do it. I’ll break this story in half. I’ll tell another one somehow. I’ll make a colorful blanket with no straight lines. I’ll cover everyone, all these snakes sifting rubble, but for now, until I can learn how to crochet water and dirt into a house big enough for us all, I am just wishing that all this skin shedding wasn’t so time consuming.

Now I’m wishing all of this was a question everyone found themselves shedding. Then at least we could talk.

Deborah Stein, *Petal*, watercolor, gouache, Embudo River water on paper 4 x 6 in., 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Issues as Flowers

Later, I call my husband and I say, “I think I have issues.”

“Like what kind of issues?”

“Like trust issues,” I say, and he doesn't miss a beat, “oh yeah, me too.”

“I think I have translation issues too. Like, I read a story and find myself in the story. And grief issues. Lingering issues, issues I can't shake. I keep wanting to slip out of the story but the story keeps pulling me back in, each time in a new language.”

“Maybe it’s simpler than this,” he says and I imagine he’s right, yet between all these issues, aphids on the plum leaves, the old women who are children, the children who will never be old women, the snakes…”

Silence.

“I have to go back to work,” we say, me back to sorting all this dirt, to dig this blind home out of the holes, the home I can see but that cannot see me and he goes back to the lift, installing a light that might shine some truth on all this.

At night, I consider calling a friend but who? Who would want to talk about this, aside from Charlotte Salomon? But the internet is out and it’s late. Charlotte doesn't come to me anymore but at least the dog does.

I crochet a blanket all night, knotting as many astonishments and yearnings into it as I can. I fill it with the color of cherries and the next sunrise, then cover everything of my body until everything is under the holes of the grandmother stitch, the granny squares. The snake petal water skin granny square ritual of this fairytale, covering all this, all this: the loss, some kind of truth, wherever the trust went.

It's a big blanket so the light will be really nice once it shines through.

Three thoughts on the Mother

1. I am the mother now, a mother to my ghosts.

2. When I wake, the ghosts are off work, taking a break, on smoko, beautiful other animals, mothering the young who are now old. The ghost animals don’t know this and do the mothering anyway, while the young who are old now, squirm and resist.

3. I was born a hundred years old, crocheting this blanket.

A fourth:

“You know what I didn’t tell you?” is always the most unsatisfying ending but is actually always the ending.

Deborah Stein is an artist and writer who lives between New York City and Northern New Mexico with her partner James and their little dog Pablo. Deborah was a fiction fellow working with Sabrina Orah Mark at the Under The Volcano residency in Tepoztlán, Mexico and a resident at The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA in 2023. She's heading to the Milkwood Children's Book Residency in July of 2024. Her art and writing has appeared in KHÔRA, Rowayat, The First Person and in collaboration with Here Projects and she just finished her second solo exhibition of works on paper, VIBRANT MATTER at LDBA Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. When she isn’t working on her art she’s writing, each is part of the other for her, a practice which enters into the classes she teaches and lends support to the artists she strives to encourage through her rogue art school, The StoryCamp Disco.