Monochromatizing.

Something possessed me to take a roundabout route to the pharmacy this morning, which afforded me a chance to catch up on what's happening five minutes from the one-mile track to which most of my days get tied if I'm not careful. The road that leaves Gambier, heading eastward, is Wiggin Street. At a four-way stop at the edge of the village, it becomes Zion Road, and cornfields stretch out along the south side of the road. Today, everything was dark enough, even at 11:15 a.m., to make me want to shoot in monochrome these open expanses of corn with even its autumn gold washing out. Suddenly the light seems to have left us, taking our color with it.


By early evening, it was clear to me that it was time to step away from the office. By then, the light had gone enough to render it impossible to photograph colors, and so I switched to black and white, to silhouette and shocked shape, once again. I love two things in particular in these images: that little unexpected curl, and the tremulousness of these small rounds.


Sometimes it happens that when I think about quilts for long periods of time--and perhaps most often when I muse over the quilts that I have loved in my life--I find myself reconsidering the possibility that I should make a quilt of my own. Today I imagined it once again and decided that if I were to do it, it would be itself a monochromatic thing: perhaps a deep red, perhaps a deep red wool, all of one color, all of one piece. My quilting was never extraordinary, certainly not extraordinary enough to make a single-fabric, single-color work worth its salt as craftswomanship. Yet at noon I found myself meditating possibilities, which, after all, is what quilts have always been to me: pure, imperfect potential, artistry that someone very near me has taken care of but taught me to love. I imagine one color, quilted in a color quite near it; I imagine the texture of fabric, the added texture of stitching, the push of the needle again and again, the warmth of a curl under a thing finally accomplished.

But then--for I am home for dinner, home for a brief respite before heading back for more work--I start to page through a catalog of gourmetness and realize that what I'm imagining isn't the quilt itself: it's the alternate life the quilt (and the finishing of a quilt) would represent. I want to make a quilt in much the same way that I want to cook beautiful meals every day. Which is another way of saying, I want to nest. Which is another way of saying, though I'm going back to my office, some part of me is simply marking time, waiting until (it hopes) it too might be integral to these days.