Dear Little Jo,
Somehow it’s not the biggest shocker that you sleep in a tent. It gave me a laugh picturing you curled up in there with your flashlight and your poetry books or whatever.
At one point my bedroom was decorated with all kinds of football stuff. But once I was off the team I took everything down and trashed it. I figured, no point dwelling on it.
So it’s bare walls, faded green carpet, an old piece-of-crap computer, a bed too short for my legs. Not exactly an Inner Sanctum. Except for this one thing I sort of like because it’s so ugly. It’s a quilt my mom and her mom, my babcia, made for her hope chest. She had a hope chest, like an actual chest made out of wood to hold her wedding stuff. Dishes and towels and silver spoons, that sort of thing. Anyway this chest came with my parents when they immigrated, and this quilt is put together from pieces of things that got too worn out or full of holes to use for anything else.
There’s something about this idea I like. Things getting used till they’re not useful anymore, and then cut up into pieces and put together into something useful again. I mean it is a horrifically ugly quilt. There are orange and pink and brown bits, and the bits that were probably white originally are all various shades of beige. I like it exactly for its ugliness though. I like how my mom, and my babcia before her, and so on, back a bunch of generations, must have been thinking one hundred percent about warmth and bed coverage and not looks.
Sincerely,
AK