Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photos: John and Suzanne’s Mom.

The photo below is a good example of the snow piles we saw this year, and it isn’t even from our biggest storm. It shows Debra’s Natural Gourmet trying to make a little room for customers.

What an unusual winter! My husband was able to ski cross country 12 times n Carlisle, Massachusetts, and that doesn’t include the extremely cold days when he stayed home.

Ann winkled me out of my shell to pay visits to two impressive quilt shows. Sometimes I think I’d never see anything new or interesting without her high energy.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston displayed patchwork from rural China. The museum actually sent an expedition to China to hunt down samples like the ones below, often made by poor, unidentified women in the 1970s and 1980s from available scraps, including synthetics. The materials might be unimpressive at times, but the artistry, I thought, was genius.

We also went north to the Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts (click here), to hear quilter Hollis Chatelain’s talk on the emotional effects of different colors and to see her latest work. The quilt I’m showing here is on a tragic topic, the proliferation of school shootings. It shows bullet-shattered glass with rays going outward, each ray the name of another mass shooting. In the lower right we see children huddling in fear. The quilt is called “Ripple Effect.”

Yeah, that’s heavy. But I do respect Chatelain for using her art to engage with the troubles of our times. Everyone needs to wage peace and justice in their own way.

My retirement community’s chair pilates teacher, shown here with her band, wages peace through her music. The residents below do it by exercising their free speech.