How Do You Know When It’s Time To Quit?

It took me 12 years to make this quilt. The plan for it clarified before me like road in a fog, just enough vision for the next moment or two. The embroidered grid flowed stitch at time from light to dark, intensity to pallor. The plan I was setting up for myself seemed overwhelming but I just kept going. I wanted to see the finished product.

Last year, I realized the quilt was complete. I still have border squares which can take some quilting and I’ve done a few, but I consider them optional. If a symbol becomes meaningful to me, I add it, but I do not assume I’ll finish every last square. The next owner may want to do that.

It is the quilt that reminds me that I’ve never been afraid of long term projects. I take comfort in that when I’m tempted to quit on my 8 acres before I’ve been able to finish creating my vision for it.

Overwhelmed. It is easy for me to sink in June beneath the tidal wave of green arching over me. Multiflora Rose, Oriental Bittersweet and Ailanthus want to conquer all other species of plant life on this hill, or so it would appear. Vines spread up, roots writhe both down and laterally under the soil. From above and below, the invasive exotics strike and smother the native plants and altogether with the oak and sassafras, dogwood and cedar, they rise up to block the view from the top.

The quilt was art by addition. Sculpting the view from my porch is a project in subtraction where nature keeps coming in and adding back in what I have purposely deleted. Nothing opposed me in quilting. To my sorrow and confusion, my home project, has put me at loggerheads with nature. No one wins that war. Money and man-power can create an uneasy truce.

I’ve employed guys with chain saws, guys with industrial strength brush killer, guys with hand tools. I’ve gotten estimates from guys with back hoes and bulldozers. I’ve consulted burn specialists. But in the end, it pretty much boils down to what I can do with a pair of loppers and a small battery powered chain saw. My will, moving my tendinitis ridden elbows, my arthritic spine, inspired by a vision.

Is there any virtue in taking on the impossible in service of maintaining one’s home view? If my passion were to feed the hungry or alleviate the pain of advanced illness or if I had some way to offer hope to the economically disenfranchised then yes. But spending oneself for a love affair with one’s home is a more questionable life use of personal resources, to my way of thinking. Yet I can not let go; can not envision myself anywhere else, can not imagine abandoning this project before I can glimpse its completion.

At the top of this blog is a picture taken from the front porch in 1993. At the bottom is the same view today. In the photo to the side is a typical view of the insurgent forces.

From experience I’ve learned that Ailanthus stumps must be painted with full strength brush killer if you want to avoid cutting down the same tree forever. Even so, it can produce whole communities of relatives.

I was warned by a farmer friend of mine to cut down the female Ailanthus that bloomed beside the house 30 years ago. I was young and stupid and I thought its blooms were pretty. He warned me it would take over the property. I think of him as I pluck baby Ailanthus trees from the hedge, the driveway and the ice cube trays.

I was delighted with the Bittersweet when I saw the first berries one long ago autumn. I had no idea I was not looking at American Bittersweet but a species from abroad which could turn a hillside into a wasteland, bringing down oaks. I got distracted for 10 years or so with other concerns and when I next gave Bittersweet my attention, it had formed a killing shroud over every sumac, maple, oak, birch, cedar and sycamore.

A hopeless war insidiously becomes a way of life. After hope of winning has been exhausted there are only acts of principle, small forays against tyranny. The complicity of those with compatible agendas. I wield my nippers because it's the right thing to do. I subtly favor the native species to even the balance of power. I consider the possibility of a companion goat. And I wait to know the moment when it is time for me to surrender the battle to another.