michele merges martens
"mom's kitchen closed."
65"h x 44"w.
Photo by Keith E. Martens.
mom's kitchen closed
christmas eve
when she was too sick to cook
and i was too far away in time
and fear
to remember traditions.
when i cracked her green depression glass
measuring cup
trying to make jello salad her way
i couldn't stop crying.
(two years ago when dad died
we still thought we could keep things the same.
when mom died, we knew we couldn't...)
I worked on this quilt in a year-long process. During that time, my mother became seriously ill and she eventually died, after six weeks in a coma in an intensive care unit. The poem came from a Christmas Eve shortly after she became ill, when I was struggling to continue the traditions the same way, hoping to reassure my mother and help her. Instead, while trying to make strawberry jello salad at midnight, after cooking all evening, I caused her more pain when I broke her treasured, valuable measuring cup. Measuring cold water right after pouring out hot water caused a huge crack.
The quilt is meant to be a memorial to my mother and my father (who died several years ago), and it commemorates our family's love of cooking and getting together at holiday meals, meals with all sorts of traditional and favorite foods, laughter and loving. It also acknowledges that those times are now only memories, and that I can't ever go back and be a child again.
My parents used to talk about opening a little restaurant, to cook the recipes they had developed over the years. This quilt shows the door to that restaurant, or perhaps the door into heaven... the door is made from vintage fabric, like my mother's aprons, and the window in the door has a curtain made from the apple pie part of the dishtowel. The calendar parts of the dishtowel form the threshhold, and symbolize the passage of time.
The sky around the door is fabric I hand-dyed, and it's full of stars and flying objects - some of them things that are leftover from my parents' lives. A "closed" sign hangs from the doorknob. Written on the binding in several places are all the names of our favorite foods.
Mom always used to tell me, "your brother will
get my silverware, and you will get my china and crystal". After she
died, and we were packing things from the house, I found the measuring
cup, crack and all, in the back of the china cabinet.
© 1999 Michele Merges Martens. 48 Bridgewood Ln,
Watervliet, NY. 12189. 518-782-0646. martem@rpi.edu
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