Quotable Me

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:09:54 GMT

My current big project is quilting my US250 50-star-block quilt, only three months latwr than I hoped to have it finished. Its made of a bunch of variations on traditional blocks, but I still consider it an art quilt. It includes rejected blocks, sloppily made blocks, barely stars, and lots of irregularities, intentionally. The USA isnt perfect. Democracy is struggling, not the first time in our short and conflicted history, and the quilt is intended to convey that.
As such, the quilting is mixed, too. And as I like to do with commemorative quilts, the quilting includes messages in the form of text. My Summer of Love 50year commemorative included hippy slogans and other things that were 50 years old, like the Carol Burnett Show, Star Trek, and the like. For this one, I decided words common in descriptions of the country (dream, from quotes about the American Dream), and gquotes from our founders, or segments thereof (e.g., John Adams, "Democracy is a constant work in progress, requiring constant vigilance to ensure its survival" appears in fragments).
I love researching quotes. We know historical figures through things they said or wrote, that give context to their actions. The words are the history", what makes history different from archeology. We all like to be remembered, however briefly, so I started thinking about what quotes I would like to be remembered for. The ones I came up with had more to do with what I was reading than anything I would ever say aloud.
I would never call anyone a moron, for example, but one of our forefathers did... But I thought, they might be worth writing and sharing, anyway. So these tidbits are what I scribbled down:
Only morons think the image of an oversized house on an acre of lawn is anything but the American headache. Yet townships and counties zone for that nightmare. It's become an ongoing disaster for families, wildlife, and the house-poor, mortgaged-for-life people who thought the pucture-perfect image was more than a facade over elongated commutes, multiple jobs, and internet-addicted kids too far from any source of nature or life.
Ok, I edited as I typed because it started to become a whole essay, too long and detailed to be quotable, and not conveying any more substance. On the same flavor, something I have said:
People sometimes stop feeding the birds during the summer, on the grounds that they can get their food from nature; they dont realize that to a bird, a lawn is the Sahara, a subdivision of lawns without feeders has nothing to live on.
(We have about two thirds of an acre and our goal is to eliminate all but about 100 square feet of lawn and a couple of grassy paths. We arent there, yet, but we have the yard most noisy with bird song and the liveliest with birds, bees, and butterflies. We dont fill the lawnmower more than twice a summer. Its great!

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Quotable Me