Grandma’s hand worked lace went out of fashion multiple decades ago. It has a new life now as a lampshade adornment that I enjoy—not a use she would have foreseen for this collar made to embellish the neckline of an otherwise plain country dress.
Otherwise plain. Makes you think if you have the time to wander. A continuous thread, not of silk like a fancy lady would have had but of the available, affordable, common fiber of the working class. In the hands of one who was as humble and durable as her thread content and yet who possessed an eye for beauty and a heart that longed for more of it, this humble thread was made into something quite beautiful. Quite treasured.
She described to me once the simplicity of her first home as a young bride. Having married one of the boys from the farm down the road she detailed how her tiny kitchen was literally created from scratch. Real scratch. It was located in a corner of their little one-room home where she had fashioned kitchen cabinets out of orange crates. She hand-embroidered a cheery bluebird pattern onto rough muslin fabric from a 25 pound flour sack. Having strung these homey curtains onto twine they were tacked to the open fronts of the orange crates and voila! True farmhouse chic in the dust bowl of 1920’s Kansas. That was Grandma.
It was the light in her eyes as she reminisced that revealed she was there once again. Transported in mind back to Kansas with the orange crate kitchen in a place they would start out together on a lifetime of “til death do us part.”
There was no shame at the humbleness of their beginnings. With a satisfied glow she remembered . . .
The Daily Cuppa Jo 