10 Breaths of Life

Walking on the beach with my grandmother when I was a child was an uncommon treat. She had great feet, tiny with extremely high arches and even at her age one could imagine ballet slippers were their natural habitat. She walked with a lilt and her body had an uplifted quality that made me proud to accompany her on the beach.

Bubba was already in her 80s during my childhood, the result of two generations of women having babies in their 40s. But to say she was still vibrant was a serious understatement. She would race me down the sandy shore, skipping and leaping all the way and she'd win if I didn't give it my all. Her philosophy was, in summary, that if you never stopped moving neither infirmity nor death could catch you and at that point in her life she was running away from both with a renewed sense of purpose.

Late one summer afternoon we paused from our castle building to eat our third snack of the day. “Just a bit of refreshment is what you need” she told me though we both knew who needed to be refreshed. The lemon water appeared from her thermos and a sprig of mint was tossed into each glass. Bubba believed in using your best every day and the beach called for her pink cutglass goblets and a small china plate of thumb print cookies with jam. The miniature table cloth she pulled from the picnic box and spread on the sand was made of pink linen and the embroidery caught my eye.

“What are these 10 pictures, Bubba” I asked. After looking at it for some time she started to cry a bit. This was odd, Bubba didn't cry often. “Your grandfather loved this cloth” she said. “We used it on our first picnic in the Park.” Sensing a story was coming I resolved to settle in and enjoy the moment, not easy for a rambunctious 10 year old.

“I embroidered half of this and my sister did the other half. I suppose we were about your age at that time. Our Bubba called us to come inside one hot summer afternoon and gave us this piece of fine cloth. She told us to find ten things that took our breath away and to make up a picture for each. “Ten breath catchers” she called them. After we had drawn our little pictures of these beauties she would help us transfer the pictures onto the fabric with talcum chalk and then we could stitch them using any embroidery thread she had in her sewing chest.

“I had no trouble with this. My mind was still concrete and I chose very simple things, This blue flower here, that little dog in the corner and these three people were my choices. My puppy, along with my mother, father and sister were my favorite and most beautiful things in life at that time and I wouldn't have left any of them off my list for fear of offending. In truth Samuel, the boy next door was also on that list but this was a secret I would tell no one for another six or seven years so Samuel is represented by the blue flower. “

As I looked at each image I could imagine Bubba as a little girl, stitching these on the big enclosed front porch while drinking ice lemonade. I felt connected to her in that moment as if our brains and hearts were made of the same material. We both loved beauty and neither of us could bear to slight that which we loved. My stuffed animals all went to sleep with me each night. Which one was not worthy of its place on my bed? Had I inherited this from my Bubba? My bedtime prayers were interminably long lest I leave out someone who needed God's protection; leaving out someone was intolerable. Was it like that for her too, I wondered? The cloth I held said it was.

“What are the other 5 pictures?” I asked Bubba. They were much larger. Each was a full scene, a story onto itself. They were exquisite and very complex. Even the faces had detail and each seemed to have taken weeks to complete.

“Sister was talented even then, wasn't she?” said Bubba. There was no jealously, just appreciation in her voice. “God gave her a special talent, and we all knew this of course.”

My great aunt had used her art the way my Bubba had used her music, to reach far beyond their world of immigrant families to travel and earn an independent living, something few women could accomplish in the 1920s.

“Clara decided she would change the assignment that day. What was knew about this? Clara always changed the assignments our teachers gave in school; making them better, more creative and more interesting to view. She told our Bubba that she would rather sketch and embroider the things that she could do that gave the breath back to the world. Who could say no to this! It was an extraordinary thought!