there's a pillow that we have on our couch here at home that has been with me for a long, long time. before it was just a regular old couch-pillow (it's the only one i really can stand to put my face against, all the others having knitted covers), it was a display vehicle for all my badges - from all the concerts and goings-on of my teen years. thompson twins buttons, madness buttons, orchestral manouvres in the dark buttons. the best ones were the local ones (like zipperhead buttons, and the one for i-92 "rock of the eighties!" when that wasn't a retro thing). i gave all the badges to my sister at some point, and freed the pillow up for the couch.
before it was the little time capsule of badges, the pillow had spent over a decade in some kind of stasis, or flux, beyond my memory. i have recollections of sifting through my toybox for something or other, on the porch of the house we lived in until i was ten or so, and flinging the pillow aside - it was always in there, always standing between me and an actual toy. but it did seem to be "my" pillow, and all i knew about it was that my cousin elizabeth had made it.
i remember being young enough to be impressed by this. a handmade gift was never really an unusual thing in my family, and beth was only a couple of years older than me. i think i was impressed that she'd been allowed to use a sewing machine to stitch the pillow, which makes me think i was really, really young indeed.
now, i look with amazement at the small stretch along the side of the pillow where beth's handstitching closed up the little gap after stuffing. these little stitches are well over thirty years old. the pillow itself is comfortable, but squeezing and mashing it for investigative purposes suggests that whatever used to be in there - maybe a square of foam - has long since turned into something else.
this photo of beth and me is also a good "family textiles" image: i remember the dresses being made for us by my mother and aunts. the occasion was a "remarriage" ceremony for my grandparents. they weren't like elizabeth taylor and richard burton, they had never become "unmarried", so i think perhaps this was a big anniversary in which they renewed their vows. my mother's writing on the back of the photo says that it's from their "25th anniversary", which makes no sense; my father was 25 at the time of my birth, and was the third child born to his parents, and here, i'm clearly at least four. 35th anniversary, maybe. but it was definitely mock-wedding in style, and beth and i were "flower girls" of some sort, and the dresses, as often were in our family, were handmade. it was on this occasion that i learned the word "periwinkle" - my dress was periwinkle, and that's actual periwinkle in my hands. beth had the red dress and some tulips, which, when i saw how they drooped, i was surprised did not strike her as disappointing.
i remember being particularly excited about the sandals. we had the exact same sandals to wear, and i think this was fascinating to me because beth lived in ohio and i lived in pennsylvania and it was just more amazing than anything i had ever previously conceived, that i would get to ohio and there would be sandals waiting for me and they would look exactly like beth's.
when i saw this photo shortly after having these pictures developed, having come home from ohio, i looked at our feet next to one another - how hers were flat on the ground, how i was standing funny on the outsides of mine, and i thought that's the difference between us. even then - seeing this image no more than a week or two after it had been made, even at that age - i saw those tilted feet as some sign of, if not outright weakness, at least lack of control on my part. i felt, even then, that i was expressing emotion that other people were able to keep in when i was not. i had thought a lot about this "wedding" and the special dresses and i think i wanted to be transformed, elegant; i know i felt disappointed when i saw my feet in the photo, giving away how excited i was.
last i heard, beth was in sudan doing humanitarian work.