A Lifetime of Memories Woven Into a Special Rug

Fine things rested in the dark under the closed lid of my mother’s cedar chest. When she wanted to retrieve something from inside, I would help her clear the sewing basket and magazines off the top, remove the embroidered cloth protecting the surface, and lift the lid, its hinge squeaking. We inhaled the exotic fragrance of the wood. She would have to move aside a heavy brown-paper package. I always unwrapped it, even though I knew what was inside.

The bag held a handmade woolen rug, an old-fashioned stylized floral design. I loved looking at its rich colors of royal blue, dark green, light green, brick red and maroon. I loved running my hand over its nubby surface, made up of thousands of tiny French knots packed close together. The rug was unfinished, though; one end of the brown burlap backing sagged limply. Rolled up with the rug were skeins of yarn with yellowing labels, waiting to be knotted into place.

It wasn’t until years later that I became curious about it. When I was 17 and about to leave for college, I asked my mom, “Whose rug is it? Who started it? Why isn’t it finished?”

She smiled as she ran her hand over it.

“Why, it’s my rug. I started working on it when I was about your age,” she said. “After I married your dad, I worked on it some until I got pregnant with John Mark. After that, it seemed every time I got to working on it, I’d get pregnant, so I finally gave up.”

She had borne five children, so I believed her.

“Why don’t you finish it?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t want to get pregnant again now!”

We had a good laugh--she hadn’t been pregnant in 17 years--and I rewrapped the rug in its tattered bag and replaced it in the cedar chest.

*

Now I suspect the real reason she didn’t finish the rug was that she was helping me finish tasks I started. She taught me to embroider, but I lost interest after I did the first butterfly on the pillowcases I had bought to decorate--she had to finish them for me. She would type reports for me when my clumsy fingers fumbled over the keys. When it was my turn to wash the dishes, she would often say, “Just leave the pots and pans. I’ll finish them for you later.”

After college, I moved to California and married. On my yearly visits home to Indiana, I would tease her by asking if she had finished the rug yet. As she got older, into her 60s and 70s, her joke about fearing pregnancy became even funnier.

One year--she must have been about 79--I repeated my query.

“Well, how about it, Mom, did you finish the rug?” I waited for her to deliver the punch line of our running joke. But she surprised me.

“Yes, I did,” she said with quiet pride in her voice.

“I can’t believe it. Let me see!”

*

We cleared off the top of the cedar chest, removed the embroidered cloth and lifted the lid with its squeaky hinge. There lay the rug, its blues and greens and reds unfaded by time. I could tell which end she had recently finished because the knots were larger, not as tightly packed. I didn’t say anything, though; from a distance, it looked fine.

“It still needs a backing sewn on.” She paused, running her hand over it, and added, “Maybe you can see to that someday.” She laid it back in the cedar chest.

Mom was 85 when illness sent her to the hospital. When I went to her bedside, I took along the mystery novel she had been reading at home. I tried reading a few chapters aloud to her, but she wasn’t able to concentrate on the story. When she died a few days later, I went back to the beginning of the book and read it all the way through. Even though it wasn’t very good, I wanted to finish it for her.

I retrieved the French-knotted rug from the cedar chest and brought it to California with me. It took her decades to make the rug; it only took a few hours to sew on a backing. I thought about which room to put it in, now that it was finished.

*

What was harder to finish was the grieving. When someone you love dies, even though the person’s death is written in earthquake-size headlines across your consciousness, another part of your mind takes longer to convince. One by one, the implications of her death occur to you. Cleaning her house, you find a dentist’s reminder on the refrigerator and realize she won’t be keeping her appointment. You see the forsythia blooming and the tulips coming up along her wrought-iron fence, and realize she won’t enjoy them this spring. Back home again, you hear the mail hit the entryway floor and wonder--for a fragment of a second--if there’s a letter from her. These tiny aftershocks appear for weeks.

In a way, it’s like making a rug. These moments are French knots that must be tediously worked into the burlap framework that is the reality of her death. So many individual stitches, so many twirlings of the yarn and tyings off. Each memory of her is a blue one, each lesson she taught, a green one, each impulse to talk to her, a maroon one. After time passes, the tapestry of grief is nearly complete, but you’re reluctant to finish it.

I decided to put the rug down in my study. One day my nephew came over and, in crossing the room, stepped on the rug. I caught myself before chastising him, but I realized I had been walking around it for weeks. To me, it wasn’t a rug but a sacred object--one that doesn’t belong on the floor.

Now I keep it in my own cedar chest with other fine things. From time to time I take it out and look at its rich colors. I imagine my mother’s hands, first young, then old, as they tediously poked the needle up through the burlap, wrapped the yarn three times around the silver needle, then pulled it through, tightening the knot. I think of the thousands of knots, the thousands of thoughts she must have had while making them.

No matter how much I wish I could retrieve those thoughts, I know I can’t. But as I run my hand over the nubby surface of the rug, like a sightless person reading Braille, I receive its message: We must finish the things we start, even if it takes a lifetime.