to The Village Square

To honor their sacrifice

May 26th, 2007

As we build our new Village Square community, Memorial Day weekend, I think, is the right time to talk about the history of the “Threads of A Nation” quilt we’re using on our website. Years ago, before I realized that if you spent 14 million hours on a project, it was hard to sell it for a profit, I wanted to be a textile artist. I made my first “Threads of a Nation” quilt well before September 11th, as a tribute to my father, brother and grandfather who all served in the military, and to my father-in-law who died in Vietnam. The quilt incorporates a rubbing of his name off the Vietnam memorial.

To get the rubbing, I bought a pad of nice paper and brought a fistful of pencils to the Mall in Washington. Other people visiting the wall that day, all of whom I suppose had some part of themselves etched in granite there, asked me if they could borrow paper and pencil to do their own rubbings. We stood at that wall, some ten or twenty strangers, connected briefly in common pursuit… leaning and rubbing. I left, short a few pencils and all out of paper, with my rubbing on a single piece of paper and the memory, another thread in the quilt, I suppose.

When I first imagined “Threads of A Nation,” I wanted it to depict the dreams and hopes, the principles, the struggle and heartbreak, the achievement that is woven into the fabric of America. I used ethnic and contrasting fabrics that, as the individuals who together make our country, strain against each other close up, but once assembled make a whole—one with more depth and richness than were all the pieces similar. Among the words printed on the fabric are passages from the Constitution and Gettysburg address which embody both the idea of what this new country could be and the bitter divisions that have strained our union, leaving the threads of our nation worn but not broken.

Today, these ideas seem somehow more real, more important, less theoretical than in the days when I first committed them to fabric. Today, we must take special care to remember the principles on which this country was founded. Today, we must see how deeply we are all “threads” in the whole - those of us who opposed going into Iraq, those who supported it, those who engage politically, those who enlist and go fight. It is these principles that the men and women who have lost their lives for our country were serving.

Today, Memorial Day, it is the day to remember—and honor—what those who fought and died gave for this country that they, like us, love.

- Liz

Entry Filed under: War & Military