I wondered aloud yesterday what will bloom next.  It seems that right now everything's finished, and the wheel is stuck, but the grand narrative is advancing. It does that in the movement of its small stories.

This morning I meditated on the swing on the screened porch.  That put my gaze on the brightest of the rag rugs out there.  It is a marvel of colors.

I remembered clearly when I bought it.  We were leaving an art show and I looked across the parking lot, and there was a display of rag rugs in which this rainbow stuck out.  "I have to get that," I said to Tom, who you may think of as suffering with this kind of thing back then.  Over I went, hoping I had enough cash left.

The artist was a sturdy woman with the plain, healthy looks I associate with those who grew up on a farm.  She said the rug was $20.  Good, that's almost all I had with me.  I seem to remember that I was wearing an ankle-length Liz Claiborne khaki skirt that day that had cost me $70.  But in many things, I was frugal.

I told the artist I loved the rug, how it stuck out from way across the parking lot.  She seemed to blush with pride.  "It's the only one I made like that," she said.  I could see that the others might be efforts to appeal to certain tastes in decorating.  This one had to be ends and bits, and it looked to me like they might tend to kick up and pull apart.

But there isn't a lot of traffic on our porch.  We are kind to rugs.  The rag rugs actually sit out there all year.  The must get very cold, but very little snows in.

One little narrative in a small rag rug.  In each bit of the hundred bits that make it up, another story - I mean, these rugs were made of rags  in a time when nothing was wasted.