Let me tell you something about our dad. He loved travelling around South Africa in our caravan. He loved travelling to wild places specifically. He loved, before our home suburb developed, cranking the volume on the 1812 overture on the record player and walking down to the spruit and just listening (much to the chagrin of our older siblings). He loved Woodland Kingfishers and Brown Snake Eagles. Once he retired he loved flannel shirts. And he had the biggest collection of boring corporate ties that I've ever seen. He loved my mom's quilting hobby and he loved taking these works of art as the requisite blanket on picnics or to lie on underneath the fig trees on the banks of the Sabie river.
Mom kept his ties and flannel shirts when we cleaned out his wardrobe after he died. She always knew she wanted to do something special with these items. She finished this work of art over the last few months.
It's a picnic blanket, so we don't have to use the bed quilts on damp, squidgy and weedy grass on all future picnics. It's made from his flannel shirts (the green flannel is extra) and bound in his ties. The quilt pattern is called "Snails trail" and this too has significance. Dad was house-bound on oxygen for the last few years of his life. From the oxygen concentrating machine he had a long "trail" of translucent pipe to his cannula... just like a trail left behind by a snail. That's how we'd track him down in the house if he wasn't in the bedroom. Mom called the quilt: "Ties that bind" - holding the quilt together.
You'll notice the dirt on the label. That's cos we broke the quilt in at our church's recent potjiekos competition.
Pretty artistic way of remembering Dad. Eleven years today that he's been out of our physical presence, but always with us. Even now when we go on picnics. Even more so when we hear the call of the Woodland Kingfisher: a loud trilling song, kri-trrrrrrr descending and fading.
No comments:
Post a Comment