Textiles Building

I walked along Benefit Street, around the corner and down the hill to my last stop, the textiles building. On tiptoes I peered into the window of the dye room, and I remembered what it felt like to be inside that room looking out.

"This is a gift from Iris. It all begins here," our professor said as she lay a sheep's pelt on the floor on our first day of class. From there we learned how to card and spin and dye wool, weave and screen print fabric, how to think in layers and design patterns in repeat. 

I started to walk away when suddenly, unexpectedly, as though it sucked me into its marble and brick, I found myself sobbing, collapsed against the wall of the textiles building. I was flooded with images of how I once thought it was going to be and how it wasn't that. 


How I would live on the coast of Maine and walk to my studio in a restored barn after eating oatmeal in a handcrafted bowl made by my potter husband or how I would live in a loft in SoHo with wood floors and lots of light and hand sew little rhinestones onto costumes for Broadway shows or how my studio would be on the second floor of a farmhouse in Vermont with exposed beams and also wood floors and also lots of light and the sun would fall just so on shelves filled with glass jars filled with pigments in deep red and violet and indigo and I would hand dye fabric for one-of-a-kind art quilts that were shown in galleries from coast to coast...


And then I said to myself, MY GOD! WHAT HAVE I DONE?!!


A deluge of tears and images until, just as suddenly, the textiles building let me go. The only image left was the one right in front of me, of light dappled on brick through leaves. And I walked down Benefit Street feeling both full and empty at once, living the one and only life that was ever really possible, grateful to be on a journey that, for so many, comes not even once in a lifetime.