Memory Crisis

“I will boil a pan of rice and serve you to dinner for the whole week. You wont know the difference, because you don’t remember what you just had for dinner”.

To forget what you can’t forgive is useful, but to forget important pieces of your life, in slow motion, is something else. In a most pleasant way, my mother forgot her anxiety. She hardly worries. And when she worries, is about her forgetfulness. Leaving behind frustrations and worries as her personal behaviour becomes of a child. Never the less, she is pleasant and wonderful be around.

Once up on a time, I desired forgetfulness. There, where bits of my life I wanted to erase.

Today, I struggle to remember, to give mother her pills. “ I have to remember for my self, and I have to remember for you. That’s twice the memory.” Having a limited memory capacity, that means, I am forgetting a lot of other stuff. Important things that have to come in second place, because besides taking care of my mother, I am taking care of me and feeling very alive into my work.

My work. Sometimes I wonder why I should follow the working plan and do my interviews with the embroidery women? The fact is: that the plan has developed. And now I am opening a window into a world on the road of forgetfulness. Trying to capture the roots, the stories, the ways of living I use embroidery as tulle, to approach and study people’s behaviour.

The ways people still live here, their social skills, their nature, and their work; are hardly recognised, in some of our modern societies. In the nature of embroidery, this society has developed a special way of communicating with each other.

Simplicity is one of my favourite stiles and I avoid what I don’t need. But as the economic development increased for the last 20 years, the enormous consume and changes of life stiles, scared me before and still do.

For the present times, no one talks about anything else than the big crisis. The “no job” and ruin of many business, is the daily talk. “Crisis” is a dominant word in every conversation. Very few sentences are pronounced without this word.

As I look around I can observe, the fields taken care of, people are turning back to the agriculture. The children are walking the 1000m home, less driving up and down, empty shops and people taking to work home made lunch. Maybe this crisis is a blessing to the environment?

Not being able to control our greed, the lack of money, will decrease consume. Hopefully, we will be wasting less, minimizing consume. Buying what is essential for existence and survival, our ways of living could change in a positive, meaningful and healthy way.

Around here, the neighbour comes to get parsley every other day. Sometimes I borrow (which I never pay back) heads of garlic. The other day the neighbour bought a box full of corncobs and shared with me. She sent a full bag twice. Double sending. I tried to give back one of the bags, but she replied, “I will be very angry with you, if you do that. I have plenty and if you don’t want to be unfriendly with me, you take them and use them or, put them in the freezer”. And she blinked with her aye. Sometimes we get too much of one vegetable, that we have again to give it further to other neighbours that might not have that specific vegetable. We hardly by the vegetables that grow around our area.