home? (Diary of recovery)

 

30 degrees Celcius is hot for Germany. We haven’t had many days like that yet this year. But today we did, and the forecast is predicting a few more. I stayed inside for a good part of the day, finishing a small quilt I had started after the SAQA Europe/Middle East Zoom Meeting had agreed that we would be having monthly challenges to a cue. Can’t remember who decides on the cues, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s no obligation to participate and I decided I would if the cue agrees with me, but won’t if it doesn’t. Then the first cue was ‘home’ and I immediately thought ‘oh no…’. German is my mother tongue, and English ‘home’ frequently is translated as ‘Heimat’ (although it could be ‘Zuhause’ as well), and ‘Heimat’ is a term that has taken a shift towards more and more nationalistic (it feels to me) tendencies that I don’t feel comfortable with. I live in a place that does not feel ‘home’ to me, in fact, I think for the largest part of my life I haven’t lived in a place that I would call home, emotionally. So transforming a picture of the place where I live (or want to live) into a small quilt as Els Mommers so beautifully does about her home, the island of Saba.  (Here is an article on Els winning first prize for a quilt at the International Quilt Festival in Mexico.)

That is not something I can do, pictorial in quilts is not mine. But a word has letters, is a text, and under the shower I did come up with a kind of design that plays with the letters, their arrangement, shape. Although I did not get far after the first conception of an idea, a sketch, and the two first seams in the middle of July, I sat down today and said ‘this needs to be finished or you might as well quit fooling yourself’.

 

 

I call it ‘How do you spell that and what is it anyway? (text messages 23)’

This cue found me in a phase when I have been doing a lot of thinking about this country I live in, should call my home, but it just doesn’t feel like I would want it to do.

It is summer, people are staying at home or vacationing in Germany, only few are going abroad. Debates about mandatory testing of returning tourists, demonstrations against Covid19-restrictions (face masks are infringing on our personal liberty!), experiences of people’s rudeness towards each other is making me worried about the direction this society is going. As I am listening to ‘Pale Rider’ yet another time – it has become the soundtrack for my experience of the pandemic in limbo – I am growing more and more distanced towards my fellow country folks. And that showed up in this quilt, I guess.