Stitch Family Quotes

Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten

You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough

Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer “Yes”; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect ragbag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.

Laurie was just one more dropped stitch in a family tapestry already full of holes.

O'hana means family and family means nobody gets left behind or forgoten

My life has been like a battlefield, a war that could never be won unless I had her with me, and the day she died my battlefront stepped down and threw away their shields, allowing the gunshots to slip through the second her heart stopped beating. From that moment onwards I was left wounded, and for those seventeen years without her my wounds bled-wounds no stitch could ever repair.

Ohana means family, family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.

I wonder if someday Jack and I will have our own pram filled with tiny skeletons and rag dolls. The scuttle of little feet through the house. Skeleton boys tumbling down the spiral stairs; little rag doll girls with their threads coming loose, always needing their fingers and toes stitched back together. A perfectly grim little family.

Now there are many Shaftoes—mostly in Tennessee—but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler.

Butterfly Kisses Aged imperfections stitched upon my face years and years of wisdom earned by His holy grace. Quiet solitude in a humble home all the family scattered now like nomads do they roam. Then a gift sent from above a memory pure and tangible wrapped in innocence and unquestioning love. A butterfly kiss lands gently upon my cheek from an unseen child a kiss most sweet. Heaven grants grace and tears follow as youth revisits this empty hollow.

around wearing the skin of a murdered girl,” he said, his voice shaking. “That you went home to her family—to her bed, to her parents’ arms—while she decomposed in a grave in a dead place. That you slipped her warm skin over yours, and then your sister stitched you up at the throat.

Perfect You’re a beautiful kind of madness a misunderstood truth O, the things they could learn from the darkness that is hidden behind your eyes So gifted, yet your talents are wasted you gave up chasing dreams Reality hit and you got a taste of failure Cautious now about bearing your soul For if others saw you fully exposed they may not love you like they claim to Time and experience have taught you to trust no one Friends, lovers, and even family have forsaken you You keep the shattered pieces of your heart in a box Stitching, gluing, and staying up all night trying to put it back together Attempting to fill the void that was left Moving from one man to the next It seems no one can satisfy the appetite for affection that you seek Continually picking at old wounds they never heal properly You have no real home, too restless to stay in one place You are reckless, selfish, stubborn, sometimes rude You’ve bottled up the pain of so much that has been done When you’re hurt You close into yourself, shut down You love attention and yet love being by yourself more May God have mercy on your soul For you are truly lost Daily you fight your demons Yet no one knows of that which you endure You bear it alone, never speaking of it You can blame the broken home from which you came Or the environment that you grew up in The people who tore you down so young You can point the finger at those who have whispered behind your back They all have played a role in your development But looking so deep into the past will keep you from moving forward You must love yourself more than these people claim they do Look at where you stand now No one can know the things you have endured like you You’ve never claimed to be perfect Your flaws tell your story There is no need to hide them

I thought of our family, sometimes, as a tapestry: a perfect blending and weaving of colored threads that produced an enviable picture on our surface, while underneath we were a tangled maze of knots and stitches, colliding and separating in our own directions, united only in the mandate to keep the outward appearances lovely.

Would you like to know how Charlotte got those nine stitches?" I asked suddenly, in a tone of voice that sounded perfectly normal to me. "We were up at the Lake. Seymour had written to Charlotte, inviting her to come up and visit us, and her mother finally let her. What happened was, she sat down in the middle of our driveway one morning to pet Boo Boo's cat, and Seymour threw a stone at her. He was twelve. That's all there was to it. He threw it at her because she looked so beautiful sitting there in the middle of the driveway with Boo Boo's cat. Everybody knew that for God's sake-me, Charlotte, Boo Boo, Waker, Walt, the whole family." I stared at the pewter ashtray on the coffee table. "Charlotte never said a word to him about it. Not a word." I looked up at my guest, rather expecting him to dispute me, to call me a liar. I am a liar, of course. Charlotte never did understand why Seymour threw that stone at her. My guest didn't dispute me though.

Disasterology The Badger is the thirteenth astrological sign. My sign. The one the other signs evicted: unanimously. So what? ! Think I want to read about my future in the newspaper next to the comics? My third grade teacher told me I had no future. I run through snow and turn around just to make sure I’ve got a past. My life’s a chandelier dropped from an airplane. I graduated first in my class from alibi school. There ought to be a healthy family cage at the zoo, or an open field, where I can lose my mother as many times as I need. When I get bored, I call the cops, tell them there’s a pervert peeking in my window! then I slip on a flimsy nightgown, go outside, press my face against the glass and wait… This makes me proud to be an American where drunk drivers ought to wear necklaces made from the spines of children they’ve run over. I remember my face being invented through a windshield. All the wounds stitched with horsehair So the scars galloped across my forehead. I remember the hymns cherubs sang in my bloodstream. The way even my shadow ached when the chubby infants stopped. I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again. Desire so real it could be outlined in chalk. My eyes were the color of palm trees in a hurricane. I’d wake up and my id would start the day without me. Somewhere a junkie fixes the hole in his arm and a racing car zips around my halo. A good God is hard to find. Each morning I look in the mirror and say promise me something don’t do the things I’ve done.

That meant there was hope. Hope that a mother's love would pull a son back to her. Hope that the world would learn from its mistakes and build friendships where enmity had reigned. There was hop that someday this stitched-together family they'd claimed for themselves would be whole.

As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me. One such example: my mother never mended my clothes. I remember going to her when I was in the early grades of elementary school, with holes in both socks of my favorite pair. My mom had just had her sixth child and was deeply involved in our church activities. She was very, very busy. Our family had no extra money anywhere, so buying new socks was just out of the question. So she told me to go string thread through a needle, and to come back when I had done it. That accomplished—it took me about ten minutes, whereas I’m sure she could have done it in ten seconds—she took one of the socks and showed me how to run the needle in and out around the periphery of the hole, rather than back and forth across the hole, and then simply to draw the hole closed. This took her about thirty seconds. Finally, she showed me how to cut and knot the thread. She then handed me the second sock, and went on her way. A year or so later—I probably was in third grade—I fell down on the playground at school and ripped my Levi’s. This was serious, because I had the standard family ration of two pairs of school trousers. So I took them to my mom and asked if she could repair them. She showed me how to set up and operate her sewing machine, including switching it to a zigzag stitch; gave me an idea or two about how she might try to repair it if it were she who was going to do the repair, and then went on her way. I sat there clueless at first, but eventually figured it out. Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement. It’s funny, but every time I put those socks on until they were threadbare, I looked at that repair in the toe and thought, “I did that.” I have no memory now of what the repair to the knee of those Levi’s looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. When I looked at it, however, it didn’t occur to me that I might not have done a perfect mending job. I only felt pride that I had done it. As for my mom, I have wondered what

It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

His love for me is like his sewing: various colors and too much thread, the stitching uneven.

Dear Lord...patch this work. Quilt us together, feather-stitching piece by piece our tag-ends of living, our individual scraps of love

As ants, so soldiers. In the years to come he was to see the process at work again and again, sometimes in grim circumstances, sometimes in pleasant domesticity. Men unnaturally removed from wives and family began at once to build substitute homes, to paint and furnish, to make flower-beds and edge them with white-washed pebbles, to stitch cushion-covers on lonely gun-sites.

Filling Station Oh, but it is dirty! --this little filling station, oil-soaked, oil-permeated to a disturbing, over-all black translucency. Be careful with that match! Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms, and several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him (it's a family filling station), all quite thoroughly dirty. Do they live in the station? It has a cement porch behind the pumps, and on it a set of crushed and grease- impregnated wickerwork; on the wicker sofa a dirty dog, quite comfy. Some comic books provide the only note of color-- of certain color. They lie upon a big dim doily draping a taboret (part of the set), beside a big hirsute begonia. Why the extraneous plant? Why the taboret? Why, oh why, the doily? (Embroidered in daisy stitch with marguerites, I think, and heavy with gray crochet.) Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe. Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: ESSO--SO--SO--SO to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all.

In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.

I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone. I didn’t talk to anyone about this, certainly not my friends or family. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings or stand out more than I already did. But I did find refuge in books.

I took care of that evil man. I sewed a curse into his pocket. Sewed it tight. First five stitches take away his health, happiness, love, money an family. Six be the number of Evil. Sixth black stitch make it final. Satan his self gonna steal his breath and escort him to hell.

It can be too sad here. We so often lose our way. It is easy to sense and embrace meaning when life is on track. When there is a feeling of fullness—having love, goodness, family, work, maybe God as parts of life—it’s easier to navigate around the sadness that you inevitably stumble across. Life holds beauty, magic and anguish. Sometimes sorrow is unavoidable, even when your kids are little, when the marvels of your children, and your parental amazement, are all the meaning you need to sustain you, or when you have landed the job and salary for which you’ve always longed, or the mate. And then the phone rings, the mail comes, or you turn on the TV.

We make moments with our families. Sometimes we stitch them together over time, to make more of them than they were. We share them and hold on to them together as if they were treasure, even when they start to rust. Sometimes those moments change shape in our memories, sometimes we stop being able to see them how they really were.

The Scream Death changes the meaning of words 　 Life is not what it use to mean the carefree seamless summer of my childhood is stitched into seasons years decades appointments filling the void with more blackness like oil roiling from the ocean floor love is bottom-lined to to the slit of pleasure God to the slit of the confessional work to clock-punching family to obligation friends to activity partners going through the motions watching myself in a movie in a dream at a wake... we are all amnesiacs lost we suffer from anosognosia and adderall and chronic fatigue and hypochondria he hobbles trembling forsaken alone pressing his ears like a vise in the Krakatoan twilight 　 I scream

She showed me her quilt, scraps of fabric pieced together into the pattern called Valmata’s Return. She was now stitching the top and batting and backing together, overlaying Valmata’s Return with a pattern called Scorpion Dance—appropriate to the story of Valmata, who returned from war and poisoned his father in order to take control of the family estates. They sang the ballad in Lohaiso.

No, when the stresses are too great for the tired metal, when the ground mechanic who checks the de-icing equipment is crossed in love and skimps his job, way back in London, Idlewild, Gander, Montreal; when those or many things happen, then the little warm room with propellers in front falls straight down out of the sky into the sea or on to the land, heavier than air, fallible, vain. And the forty little heavier-than-air people, fallible within the plane's fallibility, vain within its larger vanity, fall down with it and make little holes in the land or little splashes in the sea. Which is anyway their destiny, so why worry? You are linked to the ground mechanic's careless fingers in Nassau just as you are linked to the weak head of the little man in the family saloon who mistakes the red light for the green and meets you head-on, for the first and last time, as you are motoring quietly home from some private sin. There's nothing to do about it. You start to die the moment you are born. The whole of life is cutting through the pack with death. So take it easy. Light a cigarette and be grateful you are still alive as you suck the smoke deep into your lungs. Your stars have already let you come quite a long way since you left your mother's womb and whimpered at the cold air of the world. Perhaps they'll even let you go to Jamaica tonight. Can't you hear those cheerful voices in the control tower that have said quietly all day long, 'Come in BOAC. Come in Panam. Come in KLM'? Can't you hear them calling you down too: 'Come in Transcarib. Come in Transcarib'? Don't lose faith in your stars. Remember that hot stitch of time when you faced death from the Robber's gun last night. You're still alive, aren't you? There, we're out of it already. It was just to remind you that being quick with a gun doesn't mean you're really tough. Just don't forget it. This happy landing at Palisadoes Airport comes to you courtesy of your stars. Better thank them.

I thought it would be easier for you that way. So you could hate me and forget.” “I did hate you. I hated you for making me feel cheap and foolish. I hated you for making me feel so ashamed, and distanced from my own family. And I hated myself for allowing it all to happen. But forget? How could I ever forget?” She blinked back tears. “You broke my heart into twenty-six pieces that day. But do you know something, Christian? Over the past several months here in Spindle Cove, I’ve stitched those pieces back together

Families, I’ve decided, are a lot like quilts—they’ve got layers. The first layer is the family of choice, the people you pick out of the crowd and stitch together, as different in outlook and experience as patches in a quilt. Piecing it all together, figuring out exactly how the patches fit together, takes time and patience. You’ve got to find just the right balance of colors, shapes, and textures, but if you stick with it, before long you’ll have created something unique but sturdy that keeps you covered and makes life lovelier.

her world was torn to shreds. She’d watched from then on as every basic truth of the life she once knew—her home, her family, her safety—was thrown to the wind. Now, those fragments of her past have begun to drift back down to earth, and for the first time in over half a decade she has allowed herself to believe that, with time and patience, she might just be able to stitch together a semblance of what was. It will never be the same—she’s wise enough to understand that. But they are here, and for the most part, together, which has begun to feel like something of a miracle.

Hera's family. But you...you're the embodiment of everything I am not. And yet, here I am, crawling back to you as though I've left a piece of myself behind. And it scares the shit out of me.” “so what exactly are you saying, Mak? I mean, in the simplest way possible, tell me what-“ “I regret not buying that blue shirt from you, if only so I had your attention long enough to convince you that red suits you better. I regret not telling you howmuch I like it when you blow those bangs out of your eyes, or the way you clap after finishing a row of stitches. I regret smothering every smile you made me want to give you. And I regret not telling you the truth. But most of all, not saying goodbye.

The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose – and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. And that’s all we can say about it, the shortness, the swiftness, and the strange unimportance of life. But when June is queen, eternally in the grasses, in the wood pigeons, in the dank rooks, in the potato gardens, in the cabbage patches, wild dreams are given birth to with all the mighty energy of the full-blowing year.

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that were once in books. The same things could be in the "parlour families" today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.

held on to Edward’s hand, gave him some of the best eye contact I’d given anyone in a while, and Dr. Fields tried to stitch me up ahead of my body’s healing. Even with the ardeur days from being fed I was healing too fast for normal medical help. Fuck. Edward talked low to me. He whispered about the case, tried to get me to think about work. It worked for a while, and then the painkiller was all gone and I was still being stitched up. I couldn’t think about work. He talked about his family, about what Donna was doing with her metaphysical shop, about Peter in school and in martial arts. He was working on his second black belt. Becca and her musical theater, and the fact that he was still taking her to dance class twice a week, that amused me enough for me to say, “I want to see you sitting with all the suburban moms in the waiting area.

Hating the Rain She hates the ever-falling winter rain, the gray and endless humidity that bites to the bone and stings even after the hot bath and stiff struggle into bed and under the quilts, but the winter ferns, and the way they wave in a slight breeze as though happy like grandmother’s lace curtains can’t be abandoned or lived without. She hates the endless dripping like a clock ticking away life and the heavy fog that swallows light as though life itself were vanishing, but the tree frogs with their songs and their clinging to matching green like family holding together stitch her thoughts back to July picnics. She hates her complaining voice that discourages her children’s calls and encourages their urgings that she move, maybe to Florida citrus sun, but gray day softness steeps her patience and quiets her fear of loss into something like gratitude clinging like green to summer moss and this she knows: she loves the rain.

Lady Panovar made mention of her French maid about a dozen times last night," Mrs Sedgewick informed the staff tiredly. "Lady Culver ended the night in a fury. She has insisted that I should find her some French maids at once." Lydia's mouth dropped open. "What?" she laughed. "Just like that? An' at her wages? Aren't French maids rather dear?" It was a sign of how very exhausted they all were that Mrs Sedgewick did not upbraid Lydia for her impertinence. The housekeeper normally insisted that the staff show strict respect for the Family, even when outside of earshot. “Obviously, there are no French maids to be had in the area, and Her Ladyship hasn’t the budget to import one, like Lady Panovar,” Mrs Sedgewick sighed. “And so, to sum the matter up - you shall all need to become French maids.” Effie blinked slowly. “Mrs Sedgewick,” she said carefully. “I don’t mean to be pert, but… what does that mean, exactly?” Mrs Sedgewick shot Effie a tight smile. “It means that you shall need new French names,” she said. “At least when you are above-stairs. And you will need to practise a French accent.” “Er,” George spoke up, with a slight cough. Not the footmen, too?” “No,” Mrs Sedgewick said long-sufferingly. “Lady Panovar does not have any French footmen, as far as I know, and so Lady Culver does not require any French footmen herself. You may remain English for the moment, George.

Historically there has been a trend amongst Italian luxury fashion houses for remaining independent, family-owned businesses. Family capitalism is a trademark of the Italian economy and the patterns in fashion are repeated in other sectors like manufacturing and engineering. By 2013,

There was a dress we always kept in the family---a little girl's dress that once belonged to my great-grandmother. Ashley." Millie hesitated, as though to emphasize the name. "Ashley was just a child when she was sold, and her mother sewed the dress and embroidered a rose like that one on it." "Kind of reminds me of the color of that huge rosebush at Eliza's old estate in Charleston," Sullivan said, and Peter agreed. "I mean, I know it's comparing a real bush to an embroidered one... but isn't it strange. Eliza would have a bush with that color rose in her yards both here and in Charleston, and a collection of needlework displays with it in her attic?" Alice shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. Roses are very popular flowers and were especially popular during that time period. It certainly could mean something, but I'm more interested in the sequence of the flowers this person chose to embroider and the connection Millie mentioned to that dress." Alice leaned closer. "Millie, are you sure the stitching is the same?" As a renowned seamstress, Millie's eye could be trusted. Millie nodded emphatically. "I have no doubt about it," she said. "The gentle curve of the petals. Shows remarkable craftsmanship. I remember admiring it when I was a little girl myself. It's one of the first memories I have of falling in love with textiles.

We never know why God gives us a refining fire. We don’t know what he might be refining us for.

That meant there was hope. Hope that a mother's love would pull a son back to her. Hope that the world would learn from its mistakes and build friendships where enmity had reigned. There was hope that someday this stitched-together family they'd claimed for themselves would be whole.

a man comes up to me, begging me to let him know if i see any family photos on the muddy, littered ground. he doesn’t care that his home has been reduced to a pile of rubble, that he has lost every last stitch of clothing, every last book, every last electronic. he just wants a way to remember.

I never expected to feel like this. So effortlessly complete. It’s like you’ve stitched up the holes in my heart I didn’t even know were there.

They projected an illusion of warmth with their home-cooking and hand-stitched quilts, yet underneath the facade was an institutional rigidity, as if they were running an orphanage where children would be fed and cared for but never loved. Love was such a key ingredient in molding humans, yet it was inaccessible to kids inside of the system.

The family were arranged on the veranda under the grapevine, each occupied with his or her own affairs. Mother was knitting, counting the stitches audibly at intervals to herself and saying ‘damn’ periodically when she went wrong. Leslie was squatting on the flag-stones, carefully weighing gunpowder and little piles of silver shot as he filled shiny red cartridge cases. Larry was reading a massive tome and occasionally glancing irritably at Margo, who was clattering away at her machine, making some diaphanous garment, and singing, off key, the only line she knew of her favourite song of the moment. ‘She wore her little jacket of blue,’ she warbled. ‘She wore her little jacket of blue, She wore her little jacket of blue, She wore her little jacket of blue.’ ‘The only remarkable thing about your singing is your tenacity,’ said Larry. ‘Anybody else, faced with the fact that they could not carry a tune and couldn’t remember the simplest lyric, would have given up, defeated, a long time ago.’ He threw his cigarette butt down on the flag-stones and this produced a roar of rage from Leslie. ‘Watch the gunpowder,’ he shouted. ‘Leslie dear,’ said Mother, ‘I do wish you wouldn’t shout like that, you’ve made me lose count.’ I produced my hedgehogs proudly and showed them to Mother

Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind or Forgotten.

The fabric of the past that I believed was tightly woven was still being picked at the stitches, and maybe, just maybe, it was all finally going to come apart, revealing everything that we were and were not as a family

My heart had barely stitched itself back together over the last year and a half, but I didn’t show my pain.

So you—I—stuck to the family plan for a long time, because your success made everyone else so happy, even if you made yourself frantic and half dead trying to achieve it. You couldn’t win at this game, and you couldn’t stop trying. At least it was a home to return to, no matter how erratic, which is better than no home.

But in all of our lives, so many of the little pieces of our past are part of the beautiful quilt that tells our story. A quilt that can warm us and comfort us if we are willing to reach for it.

My grandmother swaddled her baby, as they did two thousand years ago, and let him swing on a tree branch so she could do backbreaking work for fifteen cents a day. Lizzie talked about working, herself, too, starting when she was eight or nine years old, long before the era of child labor laws, at the Milford Shoe Company. “My first day, they put me at a sewing machine and give me two pieces a leathuh. They told me how to stitch the pieces togethuh—paht of a man’s shoe. Each time I did that, they told me, drop it inna drawa. I thought, this is easy. Zip, zip, zip, one afta anuthuh. End of the day comes, my drawa is full. Lady next to me, olda woman—she didn’t have so many done. The boss fired her right then. They gave me her job afta that.” From that day on, my aunt worked in factories all her life. Like my mother, she was heavy set but solid, as sturdy and muscled as the men who worked beside her, first at Milford Shoe and later at William Lapworth & Sons, a manufacturer of elastic fabrics, whose British-born owner berated her whenever a needle broke on her sewing machine. Later she worked at Archer Rubber, where a chemical spray left a small scar on her cheek. Her final employer was the Stylon Tile Company, known for making pink and black bathroom tiles, which were hard to handle without cutting her hands. She always called her place of work “the shop.” She was “working down at the shop.” Before I left her house, she always gave me something to take with me, like a bag of her hand-made swiss-chard ravioli, or if it was close to Christmas, a plate of her own Italian cookies. My favorites were the ceci, little fried cookies that looked like ravioli but were stuffed with sweet chestnut and honey filling, or the ones that looked like bowties, called cenci, dusted with powdered sugar. No matter how busy she was, she never let anyone leave her house hungry or empty-handed. Once I accompanied Lizzie to the Sacred Heart Cemetery to help her with all the flower baskets she wanted to lay on the gravestones of lost family members. There’s something about Italians and cemeteries. I was never attracted to cemeteries, never finding any comfort in visiting the dead, but for most of my family, it was like attending a family reunion. Seeing Lizzie moving

Our family stories were like this. I knew they were valuable because of how well they were hidden. And I stitched together a tapestry out of the threads of their telling.

i walk to where the road meets the sidewalk. a man comes up to me, begging me to let him know if i see any family photos on the muddy, littered ground. he doesn't care that his home has been reduced to a pile of rubble, that he has lost every last stitch of clothing, every last book, every last electronic. he just wants a way to remember. - hurricane sandy

Was I supposed to call out, ‘Leif, we haven’t met yet, but we will wed. Don’t mind that your cousin and best friend can see your future wife without a stitch on.’ Is that how you’d have liked your introduction and my introduction to your family to have gone?

Years after her death, I started thinking mean things about myself, and that holding on to her shirt was pure neurotic clinging. That it was ridiculous. Part of me understood that my hold on it had to do with the excruciating mess and weirdness of my family: how only a handful of people in your lifetime help redeem this mess, so that when one of them dies, hope dies. You never fully recover. You can't.

She wanted to lean her forehead against his arm and cry. Instead she disinfected the wound and the needle and thread and started stitching. “I’ll marry you if you’ll go far away.” “Just me? You won’t come along?” “Yes, I mean we’ll go far away.” “Thank you for the offer, but I don’t want you to marry me so I’ll run away. I like it here.” “But you asked me. You said you would go if I married you.” “You turned me down and gave me time to reconsider. I don’t want you to marry me to get me to rabbit off to Alaska. I want you to marry me because you can’t live without me.” He sucked in a breath and held it as she started the first stitch, let it out while she tied the knot. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can’t live without me?

for the rest of the night. Other than to refuel with holiday leftovers. “Would you still love me if I told you I didn’t know what tasted better, Christmas leftovers or you?” Jana cocked her eyebrow with a sexy smile on her face. Damn, she was beautiful. “No but I will be mad unless you do some very thorough research and come up with a satisfying answer…” I grinned. This Christmas was unlike any of the others Jana and I had spent together. This time we had two little boys, a bigger family and we’d faced our biggest threat yet and come out on top. “If it’s for the sake of research, consider me in babe.” And I spent the rest of the night doing science. Between the gorgeous legs of my beautiful wife. I was pretty sure in that moment, life for the Reckless Bastard’s couldn’t get any better. Merry friggin’ Christmas to us! * * * * If you think the Reckless Bastards are spicy bad boys, they’re nothing compared to the steam in my next series Reckless MC Opey, TX Chapter where Gunnar and Maisie move to Texas! There’s also a sneak peek on the next page.   Don’t wait — grab your copy today!  Copyright © 2019 KB Winters and BookBoyfriends Publishing Inc Published By: BookBoyfriends Publishing Inc Chapter One Gunnar “We’re gonna be cowboys!” Maisie had been singing that song since we got on the interstate and left Nevada and the only family we’d had in the world behind. For good. Cross was my oldest friend, and I’d miss him the most, even though I knew we’d never lose touch. I’d miss Jag too, even Golden Boy and Max. The prospects were cool, but I had no attachment to them. Though I gave him a lot of shit, I knew I’d even miss Stitch. A little. It didn’t matter that the last year had been filled with more shit than gold, or that I was leaving Vegas in the dust, we were all closer for the hell we’d been through. But still, I was leaving. Maisie and I’d been on the road for a couple of days. Traveling with a small child took a long damn time. Between bathroom breaks and snack times we’d be lucky to make it to Opey by the end of the month. Lucky for me, Maisie had her mind set on us becoming cowboys, complete with ten gallon hats, spurs and chaps, so she hadn’t shed one tear, yet. It wasn’t something I’d been hoping for but I was waiting patiently for reality to sink in and the uncontrollable sobs that had a way of breaking a grown man’s heart. “You’re not a boy,” I told her and smiled through the rear view mirror. “Hard to be a cowboy if you’re not even a boy.” Maisie grinned, a full row of bright white baby teeth shining back at me right along with sapphire blue eyes and hair so black it looked to be painted on with ink. “I’m gonna be a cowgirl then! A cowgirl!” She went on and on for what felt like forever, in only the way that a four year old could, about all the cool cowgirl stuff she’d have. “Boots and a pony too!” “A pony? You can’t even tie your shoes or clean up your toys and you want a pony?” She nodded in that exaggerated way little kids did. “I’ll learn,” she said with the certainty of a know it all teenager, a thought that terrified the hell out of me. “You’ll help me, Gunny!” Her words brought a smile to my face even though I hated that fucking nickname she’d picked up from a woman I refused to think about ever again. I’d help Maisie because that’s what family did. Hell, she was the reason I’d uprooted my entire fucking life and headed to the great unknown wilds of Texas. To give Maisie a normal life or as close to normal as I was capable of giving her. “I’ll always help you, Squirt.” “I know. Love you Gunny!” “Love you too, Cowgirl.” I winked in the mirror and her face lit up with happiness. It was the pure joy on her face, putting a bloom in her cheeks that convinced me this was the right thing to do. I didn’t want to move to Texas, and I didn’t want to live on a goddamn ranch, but that was my future. The property was already bought and paid for with my name

Our lives can be likened to building a wall or knitting a blanket: to reach the desired outcome a series of small repetitive events must take place. Brick by brick or stitch by stitch, the work seems painstakingly slow. From the back, it looks plain and knobby, but the front, with varied patterns appropriate for different stages in the construction, emerges over time as a beautifully crafted piece of work. In this hidden way, God involves himself in our lives, each day another row of bricks or stitches made from the events of the day, each year 365 rows. And how many rows will complete the picture? We do not know when the work of our lives will be finished, but we know that all these small things have the power to work together in completing the fascinating, intricate, and extraordinarily beautiful individual that God sees deep within every man, woman, and child he has created.

know there’s solace in making do with what you’ve got, making things a little bit better. What might have been thrown out went from tattered scraps to something majestic and goofy and honest that holds together, that keeps people’s eyes off me and my family, yet lets in the light and sun, like a poem or a song.

For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do. So you--I--stuck to the family plan for a long time, because your success made everyone else so happy, even if you made yourself frantic and half dead trying to achieve it. You couldn't win at this game, and you couldn't stop trying. At least it was a home to return to, no matter how erratic, which is better than no home.

The second radical choice I made was to notice and then express the face that I was filled with rage and grief. Who knew? This was very disloyal to my family, for me to no longer play along with the family plan, but all the ways of pretending that I'd been taught were crippling, life-threatening. They had turned me from a delicious dough of flour, yeast, sugar and salt into a desperately self-conscious pretzel.

People like to say that it--significance, import--is all about the family. But lots of people do not have rich networks of hilarious uncles and adorable cousins, who all live nearby, to help them. Many people have truly awful families: insane, abusive, repressive. So we work hard, we enjoy life as we can, we endure. We try to help ourselves and one another. We try to be more present and less petty. Some days go better than others. We look for solace in nature and art and maybe, if we are lucky, the quiet satisfaction of our homes. Is solace meaning? I don't know. But it's pretty close.

Our lives can be likened to building a wall or knitting a blanket: to reach the desired outcome a series of small repetitive events must take place. Brick by brick or stitch by stitch, the work seems painstakingly slow. From the back, it looks plain and knobby, but the front, with varied patterns appropriate for different stages in the construction, emerges over time as a beautifully crafted piece of work. In this hidden way, God involves himself in our lives, each day another row of bricks or stitches made from the events of the day, each year 365 rows. And how many rows will complete the picture? We do not know when the work of our lives will be finished, but we know that all these small things have the power to work together in completing the fascinating, intricate, and extraordinarily beautiful individual that God sees deep within every man, woman, and child he has created.

Arden sighed and looked at the window. “I don’t know many people who care for it,” he said. “What about potato guns?” Joseph asked. “You ever make one when you were a kid, fill it with hairspray and shoot at the neighbor’s dog?” “Nope,” Buster said, “sorry.” He could feel the article slipping away from him, imagined going on the Internet and fabricating the entire thing. “And the war?” asked David. “I’m not a fan,” Buster replied. He looked down at his shoes, black leather sneakers with complicated stitching, his toes already slightly numb inside of them. He thought about reaching over Joseph, pushing open the door, and jumping out.

A sigh flutters through her corduroy belly. Aging is easy, like falling down a hill. No choice involved. It’s reconciling yourself to loss that’s hard. I was eighty-five when I died. But I felt nineteen. I used to forget how old I was. I’d talk to you for long enough I’d think I was you. Then I’d look in the mirror and think, ack, who’s that old woman? A burst of shivering compels her from one cushion to another. Had I been anything other than a sheltered fool I wouldn’t have worried at all. I had the slut gene. I should have used it more. It’s in the family. You walk across the room, people pay attention. It’s not because we’re beautiful. We’re gnarled things who look like we’ve been pulled from the earth. Root vegetables: potatoes or turnips. Half of us miserable, the other half deluded. You’ve seen pictures of your cousins. However, we are possessed of the self. All arrows point toward us. A blessing and a curse. Not your mother, she was born complaining. Believe me, I was there. No fun at all. That will always be her fault because I made life nice for her. She married a man who couldn’t summon up enough juice to break a glass and lives her life doing cross-stitch, the only thing she’s ever liked. She’s rich enough now that she can afford to be good at only one thing. You kids don’t like your mother and I can’t blame you. But it’s a mistake to assume she doesn’t feel pain. The bird warbles, a mournful sound. As a girl, I liked to press her supple lavender cigarette case against my cheek. She was a real bummer, your mother. “She still is,” I say.

Half an hour past midnight. Death came for him. And for the little family curled up and asleep on a blue cross-stitch counterpane? What came for them? Not death Just the end of living. (304)

On New Year's morning, the rest of the house stirred into motion, welcoming the tiny newcomer into a family that was hardly ordinary, but rather . . . extraordinary. A family stitched together from the scraps of other families.

Ode to Bees Multitude of bees! in and out of the crimson, the blue, the yellow, of the softest softness in the world; you tumble headlong into a corolla to conduct your business, and emerge wearing a golden suit and quantities of yellow boots. The waist, perfect, the abdomen striped with dark bars, the tiny, ever-busy head, the wings, newly made of water; you enter every sweet-scented window, open silken doors, penetrate the bridal chamber of the most fragrant love, discover a drop of diamond dew, and from every house you visit you remove honey, mysterious, rich and heavy honey, thick aroma, liquid, guttering light, until you return to your communal palace and on its gothic parapets deposit the product of flower and flight, the seraphic and secret nuptial sun! Multitude of bees! Sacred elevation of unity, seething schoolhouse. Buzzing, noisy workers process the nectar, swiftly exchanging drops of ambrosia; it is summer siesta in the green solitudes of Osorno. High above, the sun casts its spears into the snow, volcanoes glisten, land stretches endless as the sea, space is blue, but something trembles, it is the fiery, heart of summer, the honeyed heart multiplied, the buzzing bee, the crackling honeycomb of flight and gold! Bees, purest laborers, ogival workers fine, flashing proletariat, perfect, daring militia that in combat attack with suicidal sting; buzz, buzz above the earth's endowments, family of gold, multitude of the wind, shake the fire from the flowers, thirst from the stamens, the sharp, aromatic thread that stitches together the days, and propagate honey, passing over humid continents, the most distant islands of the western sky. Yes: let the wax erect green statues, let honey spill in infinite tongues, let the ocean be a beehive, the earth tower and tunic of flowers, and the world a waterfall, a comet's tail, a never-ending wealth of honeycombs! Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things. (Bulfinch; Illustrated edition, May 1, 1994)

Alex Landau, a Black transracial adoptee, had such a life-threatening encounter in 2009, when he was just nineteen. Stopped by the police and accused of making an illegal left turn, he was ordered out of his car and searched. Landau’s White father had never had “the talk” that is a rite of passage in African American families—when Black parents explain to their teenage sons how to behave if stopped by the police. Landau asserted his rights with the three police officers present and asked to see a warrant before they searched his car. The officers responded by punching him in the face. He was knocked to the ground and remembers hearing one of the officers saying, “Where’s your warrant now, you f—ing n—?” When his mother arrived at the jail, she was horrified to find her son there with forty-five stitches in his face. Though the officers were cleared of any misconduct, the City of Denver awarded Landau a $795,000 settlement. He and his mother are now working to educate other transracial families. Landau says, “I know my mother wishes she could have had the insight herself to prepare me for the ugly realities that can occur.

Scars wound like pale red tentacles over misshapen flesh. The sutures were gone but the raised, ropy skin stretched taut in the shape of each menacing stitch. Living death. Every nurse, therapist, doctor and family member had colluded in the grandiose lie that he was going to be able to do what he wanted. What the hell were they talking about?

My family, and all I knew of love as a child. A man who had never spoken love to me, who had never needed to, for I knew he loved me, as surely as I knew I lived. For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary. It is all. It is undying. And it is enough.

This day is a day I never would wish to come to pass. But you must know, Bea and I are honored beyond imagining that you’re the kind of man who would allow us to be here tonight, to share in your joyous celebration tomorrow, to keep us stitched into the fabric of your life. However, it’s more, Joe Callahan. Bea and I are honored beyond imagining simply to know a man with such love in his heart, he would give it freely to our girls, strength in his mind and body to protect them, firmness in his resolve to take care of them. Regardless if this new book you’re writing with Violet means Bea and I must close our book, a book that has no hope of reopening, there is no other man in the world we would wish to sit in the seat you’re currently occupying. We’re pleased to know you. We’re pleased to have you as a part of our family. And we wish you, Vi, Kate, Keira, and little Angie have all the beauty you deserve as you write your story.

A personal bioplan can take a form as humble as a pot on the balcony of an urban high-rise. One beneficial plant, a mint for example, releases aerosols that open up your airways. That plant does the same thing for the birds and other small creatures, and for the people you love and keep close. The true goal of the global bioplan is for every person to create and protect the healthiest environment they can for themselves, their families, the birds, insects and wildlife. That personal bioplan then gets stitched to their neighbours’, expanding outward exponentially. If we each start with something as small as an acorn and nurture it into an oak, a master tree that we have grown and protect and are the steward of, if we have that kind of thinking on a mass scale, then the planet is no longer in jeopardy from our greed. We’ve become the guardians of it. It’s a dream of trying to get a better world for every living thing.

another Muslim woman took office alongside her. Rashida Tlaib, representative for Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, was the other first Muslim woman in Congress. Rashida boasted yet another first: She was first in her family to graduate from high school. The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a single mother of two boys, and the oldest of fourteen children, Rashida had blasted through other people’s expectations of what it meant to be a Palestinian American woman. And at every step, she was taking all of her heritage with her, proudly representing Michigan and Palestine. At her congressional swearing-in ceremony, Rashida wore a floor-length, long-sleeved black and red thobe, the quintessentially Palestinian dress, which is typically hand-embroidered by women from Palestinian villages. The stitching and styles vary across Palestine, but thobes with lavish designs are worn to mark special occasions, such as puberty, motherhood, and now entry of a Palestinian American woman into the United States Congress. Rashida posted a close-up of her thobe on Instagram.

Besides, every sudden wealth one acquired was necessarily a wealth stolen from someone else, since there is no such thing in nature as a pure vacuum and the fates of human beings are interrelated like stitches in a latticework.

We make moments with our families. Sometimes we stitch them together over time, to make more of them than they were. We share them and hold on to them together as if they were treasure, even when they start to rust. Sometimes those moments change shape in our memories, sometimes we stop being able to see them how they really were. Sometimes we have different recollections of the same moments, as though they were never really shared at all.

Nothing will ever replace my family. Nothing will ever fill the giant holes left in me, especially since I did it to them.” He blew out a breath in one long exhale. “But you and yours are the stitches finally closing those wounds so I can move on. You are not filling the holes, but you are adding more to me. Strengthening me. “I hate to do it to you, to anyone, but that is what you will be at the end of this. Wounded souls stitched together by the gratitude of others, hoping, praying more people come into your life who add something to you.