A weaving story taught me to count my blessings

Last year was difficult for me. Health issues nagged as home-maintenance projects piled up, unstarted. Efforts to fend off winter blues failed. I was overcommitted to teaching and volunteering obligations. The daily news of depressing events weighed heavily.

In hindsight, my life was better than I admitted. My stroke’s effects were minor—I could still weave, my mental capacity wasn’t impaired, I can walk with Mary, ride my bike, garden, putter at house projects, much the same as before. I canceled some obligations and worked harder to complete others. But I couldn’t rise above the self-pity.

Then I read a post on Pinterest and I was better.

Surfing for new Pinterest pins provided some escape from the doldrums. Although passionate about card-weaving, I knew little of other band-weaving techniques. Gently prodded by members of the Scandinavian Weaving interest group at the Weavers Guild of Minnesota, I began to study techniques and structures of bands woven in northern Europe, in particular traditional pick-up techniques found in all Scandinavian and Baltic countries.

Pinterest brought that distant world to me. I found people with similar interests, followed their boards, even struck up conversations with some.

A few weeks ago I found a picture of this beautiful band, woven in 1970 by Latvian weaver Anna Apinis. The band is housed in Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, in their collection of artwork created by immigrants.

The Pinterest post linked to this historical note on the museum’s web site:

Woven belt, using traditional Latvian patterns from the Zemgale region, symbolising the Morning Star. Woven by Anna Apinis, circa 1970 on a hand made back strap loom using the pick up technique. It was made for her daughter as part of a Latvian national costume when her daughter finished Latvian high school. The ornateness of this belt indicates it is part of a woman’s costume. The loom on which this fabric was woven was made for Anna by fellow survivors of World War II, in Memmingen, a displaced persons camp in Germany with wood scavenged from bombed-out ruins. It was designed by Anna’s husband Ervins. Anna used the loom to weave traditional Latvian designs using threads gathered by unravelling old scraps of fabric. Anna brought the loom with her to Australia and continued to weave Latvian designs on it.

I was stunned. Compared to what this woman went through, my problems were minor and my self-pity seemed petty and selfish.

Why did this woman’s story affect me so much more than the incessant news of afflictions and horrors: I was concerned, sometimes outraged about ravages of Ebola ripping apart families in West Africa, about American blacks being treated as subhuman; about the forcible displacement of massive numbers of families—by the UN’s reckoning, 43.3 million in 2011. But these events did not make me reflect on my own circumstances. Yet Anna’s story did. Why?

Perhaps the overload numbed me to the news. It became abstract, an upsetting but dulled background noise. Anna’s story, being told matter-of-factly and being a long time ago, jolted me back to reality. It reminded me of the suffering of individuals, but also the ability to rise above, make a life within horrible conditions.

Perhaps our common interest in weaving, especially pick-up band weaving, made the story particularly relevant. I could envision a young husband crafting a loom from rubble, a young wife unraveling a shirt for thread.

Yet these reasons felt insufficient. Through Mary’s work with Karen refugees I knew of weavers who were tortured and driven into displacement camps, who made looms from scraps, who somehow found yarn. Yet their story did not affect me like Anna’s.

So I asked Mary, who throughout our marriage has had the uncanny ability to hone in on the obvious. To her the fact most relevant  is that the events occurred in the aftermath of World War II. To my and Mary’s parents it was known as “The War”. Its effect was universal, disruptive, and devastating: Food was rationed; jobs and manufacturing plants were retooled to support the war; brothers and fathers and sons were lost; we saw wholesale slaughter (Hiroshima, Dresden, the Jews).

The war became a huge swatch in the fabric of who they were. And by osmosis, to us, their children too. We grew up hearing the stories, learning about lost relatives we knew little of, being near others who returned with embedded shrapnel. Emerging worldwide media coverage, although primitive by today’s standards, made the war halfway around the world real and immediate, showing us lives lost, disrupted and displaced—real lives, not abstractions.  Although too young to remember, The War became a part of us, too.

It became a part of Anna in a way that we could imagine because we lived it, vicariously. Anna survived. Perhaps weaving kept her going and, in her own way, thriving. The band she wove in 1970 is a witness to her survival. Reading her story brought back all of those images woven into the fabric of me. Her story was, in a big way for me, personal.

Am I still wallowing in self-pity? Not as much. I weave. Life is not perfect, but good.