My mother made this skirt as a teenager, sewing together scraps of fabric from her sisters and aunties: each square a story, a memory, a life.My maternal grandmother gave birth to 13 children, eight of whom made it to adulthood. My mother was extremely shy and introverted. In spite of this, she was the only sibling who left home as a young adult (the ancestral country of Malta) to go and see the larger world, and marry my father in Canada. She was very brave! And in her heart she truly was a gypsy at a certain level; because of my father‘s work, constantly being transferred to a new place, we really lived the life of gypsy. I went to eight different schools before I got to university!
I never saw my mom actually wear the Gypsy Skirt, but she would often pull it out and admire the different squares of fabric, and remember the aunties and the sisters that each piece of fabric represented: clothing they had made, dresses they had worn; stories and memories in little squares. For her it was the way to bring her ancestors and her relatives across the ocean with her, coming all alone to a big new country, in the middle of winter … Snow ?! she had never seen it before.
My mother had a tiny 21 inch waist, so even as a little girl of nine years old, I could wear the skirt and proudly did so every Halloween. I always knew I was wearing her story, and theirs. I feel held in the connection to my Family of Women with this garment.
A lineage of courage, stitched by hand.
A record of love in cloth.
Haiku:
Patchwork from her hands
Stitching courage, crossing seas
Family records