Loom
Spools of thread—each in different shades of black, blue, red, purple, and green—hung from pegs on their wooden racks on the wall. Outside, the light bounced off the March farm field-- green with a cover crop--then shone through the window in the tiny room, the whole space taking on an emerald-tinged kaleidoscopic hue, the colors shifting, blending, and breaking apart with the movement of the afternoon sun.
The treadle loom took center stage with just enough space for its massive wooden moving parts, the breast beam making a clean swipe across the width of the room, the head roller just clearing the ceiling by a few feet. A rag rug was beginning to take shape, denim blue strips of cloth (once a man’s work pants), alternating with whites (his Sunday-best shirt) and blacks (his jacket).
Nothing was ever wasted in this Amish household. Hour after hour, Flora bent over the warp and weft of her creations, pulling the threads tightly while she had natural light. Late night weaving by the glow of the overhead kerosene lamp hanging down from the ceiling, would cost money. And waste fuel.
“What’s going to become of Flora’s loom?” I’d asked Freeman, her grandson a few days before the auction.
Upon Flora’s death, her things had been moved into the barn to be stacked and sorted for the sale. Freeman and his new bride had moved into the family’s dawdy house, their things assuming their place in the bedroom, living room and kitchen. But the weaving room remained unchanged.
No one had touched Flora’s loom. Balls of rag strips filled cardboard boxes on the floor. Finished rugs were neatly folded on a small chair in the corner. The process was meticulous and time-consuming: from rags, to torn pieces, to sewn strips, to wound balls, to a pattern emerging on the loom, to finished rugs, tied and knotted.
Freeman shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe one of my aunts will buy it. If not, my dad will.”
“Will you take it out to the barn?”
“No, that’s too much work. We’ll just disassemble this once.”
So late in the afternoon of the auction, I sat on the hard bench with my rugs on my lap, Isaac announcing the sale of the loom. All the rugs had sold from the catwalk, the beams stripped down to bare pine wood.
“Now it’s time for Mom’s loom,” Isaac told the auction crowd.
The loom stood before us only in our minds. There was no steep hill of memory. No one needed to go into the house to look. We all had so many images of that magnificent creature in our heads, the warp held under tension with the interweaving weft threads. The shuttle passing through the shed. The shuttle passing through Flora’s small hands, her feet barely able to touch the treadle. The finished rugs getting shorter and shorter as Flora’s height began to shrink, her life growing older.
“Hi, Flora,” I’ve brought some friends to see your rugs,” I’d said on one of my many visits to her loom in the dawdy house. Throughout the years, I’d had many visitors who wanted some kind of momento from the area. They wanted to buy something to help the Amish economy. Or, they hoped to catch a glimpse of Amish handiwork.
I took them to see Flora.
Other visitors thought the Amish too restricted. It was such a shame that the Amish would never hear a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart opera. I reminded my guests that it was a delight to be invited to an Amish hymn sing, and that Mozart may have died of cirrhosis of the liver, a disease rarely encountered in Buggy Land.
Others mourned the fact that the Amish weren’t allowed to go to museums like the Chicago Arts Institute and see great works of painting and sculpture. I reminded my guests that Grant Wood of American Gothic fame also died young of liver disease.
And the Amish didn’t have music or art in their schools? They weren’t allowed to express themselves through drawing or writing? Any of the arts?
I took them to see Flora.
On the way, we discussed fine art versus folk art. Why was one better than another? Did fine art take more skill? More training? Who was more imaginative? The sculptor or the potter? What had more value? The art that was produced in a fine arts school? Or the art that was produced on a farm? Did a utilitarian object preclude a fine art designation?
And didn’t crafts come with their own limitations?
I once interviewed several African-American quilt makers in Alabama. They made wildly colorful, dramatic and playful “crazy quilts.” They stored them neatly folded between the box springs and mattresses of their beds. A local curator discovered them and soon they were a featured exhibit in the American Folk Art Museum in New York, wowing the same public who strolled through the MoMA.
Was it just chance that brought these artworks to a wider audience? Were the folk arts taken for granted? Hidden away under the mattresses of their creators? Or did the fine art museums not seek them out, not give them enough of an entry into the wider art world?
“Mmm-muh,” one of the African American quilters said to me after I told her I lived among Amish quilters and rug makers. “I could never follow those patterns. Never buy into the symbols of Amish life, too balanced, too cut and dried.”
It was true. The Amish mostly stuck to patterns. Lines were generally neat and straight. Free expression was discouraged. I doubt Flora had ever seen a “crazy quilt.” But you can’t snuff out creativity in a culture. Amish women express their artistic talents in their gardens as well as their rugs, in their cake decorations as well as their quilts. They can’t help themselves. No matter how hard a culture may try to suppress it, creativity inevitably bubbles up to the surface.
And Flora often expressed herself in unorthodox patterns in her rugs. A basic denim rug may have had streaks of red running through it in a random fashion. A highlight, a burst of color, the weaver’s leap of her imagination.
“What rugs do you have available today,” I had asked Flora.
We stood in the kitchen, the late winter afternoon light changing quickly to evening.
“Oh, she said, “I’ll bring them out.” She told us to stay in the kitchen and she would bring out the stack. She disappeared to her loom.
“Let me light the lamp,” her husband said, adjusting the wick on a kerosene lamp. “A fella can’t just flick a switch on the wall around here.”
Soon Flora reappeared with eight rugs, smoothing them out on the kitchen table, over the backs of chairs, and on the sofa. She looked at each one, taking them in, feeling them with her hands. Then she looked up at us, her eyes dancing in her face, like the rabbit puppets at the sale.
I thought it must be hard to part with artwork, something you’d handled with such care.
My friends examined one rug, then another, trying to decide which colors and patterns they liked best.
“I’ll take them all!” my friend finally said, gathering up the rugs in his arms.
“Oh, my,” Flora glowed. “This is my lucky day!”
And that was my lucky day at the auction, sitting on the bench, Flora’s rugs on my lap. I was so happy that I was able to have this small part of her life, that I would bring these mementos into my own home. I would place them on my floor where they should last 30 years. They might even last longer than I.
And the loom? One of Flora’s daughters bought it. The next morning, the men took it apart, piece by piece, and slid it into their driver’s van. Then they sped off, south toward Missouri, the breast beam and head roller slapping together over the gravel roads, the rack of spools of thread wedged against the van wall, their multicolored auras blurring into a streak of red.
Mary Swander is an award-winning writer of non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Her latest play, Squatters on Red Earth, is now on tour. For more information contact her website: maryswander.com
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You bring us into worlds we would not know were it not for your keen observations. Thank you for all you do!
Love how you've woven the power, beauty, and precious connections of folk art, family, and continuity to life, Mary! I relish each strand of your words. I can feel the rugs beneath my feet! Thanks for the reminders of what really matters in the world!