I’m back. I still can’t tell you why I stopped blogging exactly, but I can tell you why I started up again. The urge to blog hit me on the way in to work a few days ago, when I saw a bumper sticker that read:
I would rather be quilting in a beach house.
Something about the sheer unapologetic arbitrariness of that bumper sticker caused something to stir deep within my soul. It’s the same sort of sensation that I feel when I drive past the Knife Store on the corner of Sisk and Pelandale. I think, “Sure, you could have opened a Mexican restaurant or an auto parts store, but you looked at that location between the Japanese takeout place and Supercuts and thought, “Aha! The perfect location for my knife store!” I’ve never been inside the Knife Store, and I don’t know anyone who has, but somehow just knowing that somebody can open a knife store wherever they damn well please is a source of encouragement for me. It’s a testament to the indominatable spirit of human individuality and not opening yet another Mexican restaurant. “Why a knife store?” you might ask, to which I respond, “Why not a knife store?”
And yet, my fascination with the ‘quilting in a beach house’ bumper sticker goes beyond even my appreciation for the irrepressible arbitrariness of the human spirit. I can only assume that the middle-aged woman who was driving the car had had this bumper sticker custom-made to her specifications; a Google search for ‘I would rather be quilting in a beach house’ turns up nothing (I had half-expected to discover a catalog of other such absurdly specific bumper stickers, such as ‘My son was not student of the month at Hughson Elementary School because he was edged out by that kissass Tyler Wagenbach’ or ‘My other car is slightly smaller than this one, and also teal’).
So. This woman had that bumper sticker made specifically to communicate to the world that if she had her druthers, she would at this moment not be driving, but rather quilting – and not quilting anywhere, but in a beach house.
And not ‘my beach house’ or ‘our beach house’ or ‘the beach house,’ mind you. Just ‘a beach house.’ As if any old beach house would do. While I tailed this woman on State Highway 132, I entertained the possibility that perhaps she spent her evenings casing beach houses with an eye for one that was ripe for quilting. Then, when the time was right, she would scamper through an open window, dragging her quilting supplies in a tote bag emblazoned with “I’m not a quitter… I’m a quilter!” (or something equally pithy) behind her. She would sink into a comfy rattan easy chair, haul out her supplies and exult in the unparalleled joy of illicit beach house quilting.
Or perhaps she nurses fond childhood memories of quilting at her family’s beach house – idyllic summer days when only the failing light would eventually force her to take a respite from quilting, and then only to slip into a dream of stitching together the ocean and the sky. “I wish we could stay here forever,” she would say to her mother as she drifted off to sleep, and her mother would nod, staring wistfully out to sea. That was the summer before Daddy left, and her mother had had to go back to work and sell the beach house. She had returned years later only to find that the whole neighborhood had been torn down to make room for a condominium complex.
Or maybe she’s never actually experienced the pleasure of quilting in a beach house, and it’s merely a dream of hers – possibly a notion sparked by something she once saw in Better Homes & Gardens, a picture of an attractive suburbanite housewife curled up on a leather couch and absently fingering a half-completed quilt while beatifically regarding a puffy clouds in an azure sky hanging lazily over white-crested waves. Affecting a well-timed cough, she tore the picture from the magazine while sitting in her dentist’s waiting room, and even today, seventeen years later, she still carries it everywhere she goes, the much-creased picture slowly fading as surely as the dream itself.
Whatever the case, I hope that she gets to quilt in a beach house some day soon, and that the experience is all that she hopes it will be. Frankly, it sounds like a miserable experience to me, but I suppose I’m not the quilting type. In fact, to me “quilting in a beach house” sounds like shorthand for deliberately missing the point of an experience, like “Eating at McDonald’s in Paris” or “Driving a Ferrari in first gear.” (I’m sure there’s an actual expression for what I mean, but I can’t think of one. Or maybe there isn’t, and “quilting in a beach house” will really take off.) I mean, you can quilt anywhere. Why waste a perfectly good beach house? Go outside already.
Yeah, so I’m blogging again. Probably not on any kind of regular schedule, but I'll try to post once a week or so. Hey, it beats quilting in a beach house.