Memorial

It took about 9-10 hours to stitch this today. I’m a slow stitcher, obviously. During those hours of sitting and stitching and listening to life in my house and just outside, I thought about what this holiday means. It’s about the people who gave their lives to protect our freedom. Not all of them were military personnel, though I am beyond grateful to them. I thought of the Quakers who were persecuted and murdered because they dared believe that God’s Spirit lives in the individual. I thought of Native Americans who died trying to preserve their heritage. I thought of women fighting for the vote, suffering force feedings and worse in prison cells. I thought of the children living - and dying- in cages at our border, a testament to the evils that we need to route out of our collective life. I thought of my Granny and Papa, “fictive kin” who came to the U. S. in 1917 and later supported friends and family fleeing Hitler’s Third Reich and his Death Camps because they had the audacity to be Jews. I thought of the men, women, and children who died by lynching - people in the prime of their lives whose only sin was being African American. I thought of a couple of saints in my own church who died protecting the right to vote in the Jim Crow South. We owe so much to them— and to many more - those people who were just a little weird, just a little out of it- people who made us feel uncomfortable. Today we live with that discomfort. And we honor them. May God bless them all mightily. Design: Carrie’s Creations, copyright 2000.