To Our Members:
Earlier this year our guild received a letter from Nancy Miller of Burnsville Minnesota, a fellow basketweaver. She shared in her letter that she’s been a weaver for over 25 years and teaches basketry as well as sells her work at Art Fairs near her home.
She also spoke about her eldest daughter, Alea Miller, who is a writer and who wrote her mother a story as a Christmas present. The story is entitled “My World” and it is about life and baskets. As Nancy states in her letter, “I hope you agree with me that to those of us who ‘live baskets’, it is very insightful. I found it to be exactly that.
Nancy, on behalf of our guild, thank you so much for sharing your precious gift. To our members and the basketry world beyond, enjoy!
Sally Turner
My World
“Baskets are like the world,” my father first told me as I sat on his knee, his large, steady hands holding me. “Each weave is a person in your life, connected together to hold the rest of the world in place.” He told me this many times throughout m life. Whenever I would have a bad day or feel stuck in a situation, my father would tell me to check my basket.
My basket: The weaves of people in my life who held my world together. Each weave
formed beauty and structure, and they held the important things . . . life, family, death, and happiness . . . safely within their grip, preventing my important things from falling and breaking. My mother and father were the first fibers forming my basket, and from there my basket grew with each addition to my life.
Eventually my basket was complete—or so my father declared. I finished college, moved out, married, and had a family of my own. I grew older and formed my own basket. My husband and children became the first supporting fibers in my new basket, and new friends and work were woven around them. Yet all these were still supported by my first basket and were reinforced by the fibers of my parents and the basket they helped me build.
I had never paid much mind to father’s talk of baskets, despite his insistence that they were an important part of life. His mother had taught him to weave, as had her mother and her mother’s
mother, and so on for longer than I cared to count. It was father’s connection to past generations. And as hard as he would try to get me involved, I’d always prefer to spend time with my friends. However, despite my apathy, his basket analogy would never leave me. All he had to say was “Check your basket,” and I’d know what he meant.
My father was the first weave to break. His fibers dried out and frayed one by one until he snapped. My mother was next. Her fiber was unsupported without my father next to her, and after ten years alone, she, too, weakened and broke. One be one my basket’s fibers cracked, and soon my basket could no longer hold anything. I floundered for a while with my empty, broken basket and struggled with what I would now do.My World
It was only my father’s words that gave me strength. I knew what I had to do . . . I had to check my basket. My father’s and mother’s basket was no longer there, but because of them I had other baskets. I set to work strengthening those fibers, building and adding to them until they were as strong as my father and mother had made mine. And, one day I pulled my daughter into my lap. Put my lips to her ear, and whispered, “Have I ever told you that baskets are like the world?”.
