A heavy trunk with a broken lock takes up a good part of my attic space upstairs. Inside are remnants from my past: yearbooks, a folder full of dramatic poetry from the sixth grade, letters from my best friend the year she moved to Korea. More than letters and photos, though, there are shirts and a blanket and a costume I wore in my fourth-grade talent show. My kids call it the treasure chest; a sense of excitement fills the air each time I crack the lid. They love digging through my history.
At the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison a few weeks ago, I attended a presentation by Beverly Gordon on Cloth and Memory. She spoke about the power of textiles — from clothing, to handkerchiefs, to the blanket a child refuses to give up or (years later) a parent refuses to give away. Fabric holds memory, and “threads are pathways,” Gordon says, connecting the past to the present.
For years, a terry cloth shirt and pair of shorts has stayed buried in my trunk, has moved with me from house to apartment to house again. It’s gone the distance from Texas to Wisconsin. I wore the outfit when I was six or seven. Embroidered on the shirt is a pair of tennis rackets.
I never played tennis, but, for a short time, my parents did. My sisters and I would pile in the car with Mom and Dad on a warm Saturday and hit the courts. My father would teach my mother the art of the serve, the trick to the backhand, and my sisters and I would hit tennis balls along the backboard with badminton rackets. I wore that outfit often to those outings, and the terry cloth became my tangible reminder of those sunny afternoons: basking in the sunlight and in the sounds of my parent’s laughter. Pure bliss.
THE PROMPT
We save a favorite shirt, our mother’s scarf, our father’s hat that he wore on Sundays, because cloth connects us through time and place. Write about something of cloth that holds memory for you.
