Striking A Chord: Around The Frame
Last December I received an email from Jim Parry of Science Central asking me if I’d do a quilt presentation for the opening of their exhibit Quilts: Light the World. I was honored and excited to share various quilts and show how the use of light and dark color fabrics was used to create a variety of patterns and invoke feelings from the audience. The day before my presentation, I brought over my quilts and took some time to view the exhibition quilts. One in particular “A Tiny Moment of Happiness” by Maya Chaimovich, Ramat Gan Israel.
Chaimovich based her quilt on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Match Girl” or as I first knew it as “Das kleine Mädchen mit den Streichhölzern” from Herr Lowell Shearer’s German class at Wayne High School fifty years ago. As the story unfolds, it’s New Year’s Eve, a little girl leaves home and can’t return until she’s sold her matches, or her father will beat her. To keep warm she crouches in the corner of a house and lights a match and imagines a stove cooking a feast. She lights another and fantasizes a table laden with food and in a third match she envisions herself sitting under a candlelit Christmas tree in a warm home. As the flame goes out, she realizes the candles are just stars in the sky. She watches as one of the stars falls and she is reminded that it is a sign that someone has died, and she thinks it’s her grandmother. The next match conjures up a vision of her grandmother in heaven and the match girl begs her to have her join her and end her suffering. The match girl continues to light all the matches to bring back her grandmother’s vision. On New Year’s Day the little match girl is found dead. People thought she had tried to warm herself with her matches. They would never know of her visions and her happiness to no longer suffer but to be reunited with her grandmother in heaven.
Chaimovich’s black and cool tones of blues, purple and greens dominate her painting. She then used sparks of yellow and orange to pierce the darkness, offering a glimmer of hope that never manifested. Unlike most fairy tales, this one’s happy ending was the girl no longer suffers. No ghosts, no rich uncle, no benefactor to take pity on her plight. We can only conjecture on why Hans Christen Andersen wrote it. To me it strikes a chord to call us to be more cognizant of people who live lives of quiet desperation where a kind word, an invitation to lunch, assisting on a project, offering to babysit, etc. can make a world of difference and renew people’s hope in the world.
This column is dedicated to the memory of Perla Alicia Nieto September 28, 1964 – December 7, 2023, who lit up her Kroger customers with her smiles. May her memory be eternal!
Lois Levihn is a 15-year columnist for the Waynedale News. If you have a quilt or textile you’d like to share, contact her at bornagain quilts@frontier.com or 260-515-9446
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