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Morning Open Thread: Red Silk and the Never-Ending Honeymoon [1]
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Date: 2023-04-24
Marriage is falling in love over and over again - always with the same person.
“So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-seasoned showers are to the ground.”
– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 75
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This will not be my usual Monday post. My husband and I are celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary this week.
We only had a one-night honeymoon when we got married, so each year since (except during the Covid lockdown), we’ve taken a few days to go away together, another chapter of our “never-ending” honeymoon.
Most little girls daydream about getting married, and some stage mock weddings with dolls, pets, or friends. I was not one of those little girls. It was never “When I get married” – it was always “If I ever do get married.”
The one thing I said about a wedding was that if I was to get married, I’d wear the antique red silk Chinese wedding outfit which had been a high school graduation gift to my mother from family friends who had traveled to China in the 1920s. She had never worn these exotic clothes, but kept them because they were a valuable gift from people she remembered fondly.
I was always fascinated by the embroidered animals, flowers, and symbols, and all their lovely colors.
By the time I passed 30, I was convinced that I never would get married. And then, someone came into my life – at the wrong time for both of us. We became friends, and after the events we worked on together ended, we’d make occasional phone calls to keep in touch. My rocky relationship ended, and then his marriage did. I invited him to dinner to commiserate.
A couple of years later, when we got married, no one was more surprised than I was. There was very little that was traditional about our wedding – but every choice we made together had meaning for us both.
And just as I had always said, that if – I did indeed wear the red silk.
Red Silk
– for all the creators of beauty
whose names we will never know
You hang
in the hall closet of my childhood,
talisman of awe and mystery,
Journey to China made only in dreams . . .
Because of you
the other side of the world is real,
and maps
are pictures of places people live.
How many tiny women
threaded silk,
sewed tiny stitches,
made you beautiful
with flowers, birds, symbols?
How many days
working
until you and the night and their fingers
became one darkness?
Were they old
with blurring vision,
or needle-eyed apprentices?
How many lifetimes
embroidered
into births, deaths, marriages?
Flower centers so intricate
each stitch
a risk of blindness –
Our century
forbids it –
No more blind women
no bound, crippled feet.
We have gained so much . . .
What have we lost?
Too soon,
no red silk sails from China
untouched by machine . . .
Flowers for beauty
Phoenix for long life, good fortune
from five thousand years of women’s hands:
Ancient witnesses to our altered ritual
The garments of my wedding day,
borrowed from another time
and half a world away.
© 1983
[END]
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