The Threads We Carry

Some lines begin long before the hand learns how to draw them.

Sometimes I think about the long journey that began in a small house many years ago, beside my grandmother.

I was a little girl then. I used to sit next to her for hours and hours. She sewed, embroidered, turned the soft fabrics in her hands. I watched the small movements of her fingers, the threads passing slowly through cloth, the quiet rhythm of making.

At the time, I didn’t know that these hours were shaping something deep inside me.

The little girl grew into a teenager, and later into a young woman. Through all those years I stayed close to her. I was beside her until the end of her life.

Only much later did I begin to understand what those years had quietly given me.

The delicate lines.

The thin threads.

The textures she taught me to see not only with my eyes but also with my hands.

The small napkins.

The embroidered tablecloths. The soft scarves.

The tapestries hanging on the walls.

The German magazines she used to leaf through slowly.

And the stories. Stories about a home that once was. About another life. About a world that disappeared, a culture and way of life that now survives mostly through memory and story.

When I was a child, these hours beside her were a place of comfort. A small island of quiet inside a reality that was often very complicated.

Years later, standing in my studio in front of large drawings spread across the walls, I suddenly understood something I had never seen before.

The lines I was drawing.

The textures that kept appearing.

The movement of my hand across the surface.

Perhaps the hand remembers things the mind no longer knows.

All of it carried something of her.

As if without knowing it, I had been carrying those years inside me. Carrying the threads, the patterns, the stories. Slowly translating them into lines. Into large drawings. Floral. Lush. Images that tell a story that is partly mine and partly belongs to everything that was lost.

Today I walk through the streets of New York. I wander through museums. I listen to music at the Philharmonic. And sometimes, in quiet moments, I feel that the journey that began beside her is still unfolding.

Perhaps this is how memory remains alive. It slowly becomes line, texture, gesture.

And sometimes, many years later, it fills an entire room.