I’d just graduated from high school when Oma woke up and couldn’t move her legs. The ambulance took her two hours away to the University of Virginia Hospital. She was attended by the surgeon who’d famously operated on Christopher Reeves after his riding accident. I stopped by with flowers on the way to a small Outer Banks camping trip to celebrate getting out of high school. I remember one of our friends’ cars broke down in Mechanicsville, VA. We slept sweaty in cars or on the windy beach or rolled up in sheets on the sand. We played toss the watermelon in the ocean. We didn’t think about the great changes that lay ahead.
Oma suffered from nerve damage numbness and pain for the rest of her life. The fragmented specialists tossed her from appointment to appointment, never really seeing the whole picture. When I hear the word grace, I think of Oma. Her presence in the world emanated a loving calm.
Oma’s graceful artistry lives on in her rugs. Every one speaks of her attention and care. They are prized by family and friends.
To rug hook, you put a hand you cannot see behind the monk’s cloth (her favorite type of backing cloth) and reach down to hook each next loop up, pull with the hook and your unseen hand until it’s the correct height, and again, reach down to the unseen hand.
She would joke that she was always ripping out areas and which colors were giving her fits. The yellow too bright a hue. Not enough of that soft blue for the border. She understood that no sky was bright white, there were grey blues yellows too. Oma’s eye for graduations of color and detail make the rugs resonate with life.
Here is baby Benton feeling the soft skin of her hard working hands while he gazes at her.
Drawing her designs, I felt Oma near me, helping me to heal. The best doctors could figure, she had calcium deposits that fused some of her vertebrae. The lauded surgeon didn’t cure her. Her numbness and pain never really went away. She learned to walk again despite not being able to feel her legs much of the time. Oma talked on the phone to friends and family, immersed herself in the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner, and loved watching the local plants and birds change with the seasons. An afternoon tradition of rum and cokes helped manage her pain when monthly epidurals didn’t. I can feel her beside me as I weather my own trials.
Drawing her rugs does not do them justice. Read to the end, and you can see a real one.
Instead of a song, I’ll close with a poem, one I gave to Oma after her beloved second husband died:
Running Egret
We want our nature to have a face.
An eye we can look into
not like ours—clearer. Strong body
moving swiftly over land, belonging to no one.
Nonpartisan egret,
beyond everything that burdens us,
unexpected, unpredictable,
sheer motion—flash of white—
creatures with a silence
wider than our own.
There are days we wake and need an egret.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
Love through time and space.
XO
Oma's Artistry - Part 2
My jaw literally dropped when I saw her rug at the end. What a talent.
I have seen some of Oma's rugs and they are beautiful, museum quality. Your writing and drawings show you too are wonderfully talented, as was your Oma.