The Rose-Path Pattern

The Rose-Path Pattern Connie Higdon Laura Dean taught me to weave in the summer of 1974. I was twenty-two, just out of college, a Vista volunteer longing to find some meaning to my life. She was seventy-six, upright and frail. She worked at a government-funded craft center in Union, a tiny community straddling the state line between West Virginia and Maryland. I was assigned to the center as her assistant. I had asked Vista for a placement in West Virginia because I loved a man who had loved the Appalachian country. I saw him in Chicago as I made my way east on an airless Greyhound bus. He'd told me months before I didn't matter to him, then wrote me letters interlined with desire. In the dirty, unseasonably cold streets he wrapped his raincoat and his arms around me. Chicago that June was draped in black and gray. Appalachia , when I arrived on the first of July, shone green and gold, clean-washed and steaming. I moved into a boarding house for volunteers run by Mennonites from the Maryland side of Union. The Mennonite men were farmers who spent their summers shoulder-deep in corn and wheat, their winters delivering emergency supplies in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Uganda. Mennonite women made quilts and ham and pickles and ran Head Start programs for the grandchildren of Appalachian coal miners with black lung, the children of unemployed alcoholics and teenage brides. German Mennonites and Scotch-Irish hill people created a single community of resource and need in Union, transversing the state line and boundaries of religion or culture. They had little else in common but the great blue-green hills, the purple hollows thundering with white rivers and the hymns they sang—reedy and untuneful, at first, to my ear. Laura told me she had worked in this place for thirty summers. Her people were Baptists, but she believed in the Mennonites' efforts to encourage women in the area to build a tourist industry around their handweaving. Her grandmother had taught her to weave when the WPA tried to revive handcrafts in Appalachia during the 1930s. In 1974 a recession and the bicentennial loomed and federal money again began to trickle into the hill country. There was a kind of craze for heritage, anyone's heritage. I was taken with it, but each year it seemed that fewer local women were interested in Laura's classes. They left Union as soon as they could drive or get married, looking elsewhere for their lives. Learning to weave takes a determination and patience that I had only begun to acquire. Laura was a steady teacher. We worked side by side every day she was in Union, all afternoon and late into the evenings. My back ached from leaning over heddles, my head ached from drawing warp thread after thread through the tiny dents in the loom's reed. Laura worked without a break from lunch until dinner and after dinner until eleven or 14 later. If I made a mistake, she sat by me on the bench, her narrow old hands quickly and patiently pulling threads, moving them to the proper heddle. She never shamed me for a mistake, but she never let one go. We rarely talked as we worked. Weaving is a solitary task. Talking makes mistakes, she said. We both ate our meals in a Mennonite cafe in Union, but I usually avoided sitting with Laura. She seemed so old and reserved, although she knew everyone in town. I was young and shy and I noticed right away that she ate very slowly. I couldn't imagine what I would find to say to her, or she to me, over such a long meal. At lunch, I hurried to get to my quiet afternoons of weaving after working with impatient, energetic teenage girls all morning. After dinner, the long ught beckoned me out to walk alone by the McKenna River, picking blue chicory blossoms and black-eyed Susans. For four or five weeks our contact was restricted to those nearly silent hours at the looms, when conversation consisted of "Honey, you're pulling those warps uneven...