In recent weeks I have begun a project. The local high school has a tradition of creating a banner to celebrate each graduating class. This has continued for over a century, and I was asked to give them a dollop of care. In groups of half a dozen, I bring them home from their storage room, and look every one over with an eye for signs of wear. They each have their own muslin bag, and since these have probably not been cleaned in awhile, I am washing and ironing them. Some have lost snaps over time, which I replace. It comes in handy that I have a cache that includes cards of snaps vintage enough that the price is fifteen cents. Women who are clearing out their supplies often think of me, and as velcro has dominated the closure market, younger seamstresses might not already have a selection of fasteners in seven sizes, like I do.

 

The banners themselves are remarkable. I am enthralled with the workwomanship, tiny stitches of thread, filling in the swath of wings, or leaves, or faces. I seriously doubt that anything I produce will last for a hundred years. 

 

I am barely a sixth of the way through, and began in the middle for no particular reason. This week I carried home the banner that marked my mother's graduation in 1944. She probably touched it. It is a dove with an olive branch, like the one Noah sent out from the ark. He and his family had been isolated on a boat for over two years, with no bearings to tell him when the threat would end.

 

I paused to absorb the historical climate when my mother was a teenager in a white dress. The world was wracked with the enormous cost of war. Boys the age of my own twins were ferried off on ships and planes to face dark enemies. The collective prayer for peace is woven into the velvet, felt by a planet beaten down by incalculable loss. 

 

The war lasted a long time. Uncertainty hung like a nimbus over every decision. One woman who was a contemporary of my mother told me that her engagement lasted five days. Her fiance was being deployed on Saturday, so they quickly got hitched. They were married almost seventy years before he died. How does she feel now about the years WWII hijacked from her life? Does it even matter? It gives me a twig of hope that there might come a day when these months of isolation are no longer weighty enough to keep us from taking to the sky. In a miraculous turn of events we will discover that what we need is ours for a bargain price.