My Hands Remember

Last year, while cleaning out the family home in Bonaire, my mother and I found two items I had made with my own two hands as a young girl. One was a macramé plant hanger, twisted and knotted from brown jute—an item that hung from the wide door frame between our dining room and living room for years. The other was a macramé pocketbook I had woven around large rings for my mother when I was about eleven or twelve.

The memories came flooding back, and more than that, my hands seemed to remember the motions five decades after I had first learned them. My hands and heart longed to make those motions again—to create those knots.

I learned to macramé during a summer program for local school children. Each summer, a handful of us from school were invited to attend, choosing two sessions to take over a four-week period. My parents had a firm rule: One session had to be purely academic, and one could be fun. One year, I chose botany and gymnastics, learning about plants and how to walk gracefully along a balance beam. Another year, I chose advanced math and macramé, and that second choice turned out to be my favorite thing I did all summer. I was all about those knots.

Macramé is an ancient textile art, traced back to 13th-century Arabic weavers who used knotting techniques to create decorative fringes on their fabrics. The craft exploded into full bohemian glory in the 1970s— right when I, a young Margaret “Amber” Lanier, was learning the craft.

Back then, Mom would drive me to the arts and craft store at the Houston Mall, and together we’d pick out ropes, twines and sometimes pretty beads to work into the designs. She paid for my materials, then drove me home. I’d get busy—measuring, cutting, organizing and then tying all those glorious knots together.

Macramé is genuinely easy because there aren’t that many knots to learn and the knots are quite simple. If you can braid hair, you, too, can macramé! If you never learned, I believe you could learn by watching a short YouTube video. And like other hobbies and crafts, macramé is trendy again. I’ve seen macraméd items in shops and all over the internet, and those handcrafted pieces fetch a pretty penny. When my husband Gene and I visited Texas in March, we stopped in at a big garden shop, and his mother and I stood together admiring a whole display of macramé plant hangers. They were beautiful—and pricey! I turned to her and boasted, “I can make these. I learned when I was a teenager.”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them since. And so, as Mother’s Day approaches, I plan to make some of these items from my past. I’ve already ordered the materials to make a few macramé plant hangers, and I’ll pair each one with a pretty ceramic pot. One is for my own mother—a nod to our past, to all those trips to the craft store, a thankyou to her and my father for giving my siblings and me opportunities to learn new, interesting things. I’ll give another hanger to Gene’s biological continued from page

mother, who stood beside me in that Texas garden shop and admired those hippie-style hanging pots right along with me.

Now, Mom (Wanda Jarriel Collins), if you’re reading this—and I know you are—yes, you know what’s coming for Mother’s Day. But don’t you worry. I’ll make sure there’s another surprise tucked in the box, too.

And if you, dear reader, learned to macramé as a child, let me encourage you to dust off those old memories and put your hands to work again. It’s back, it’s beautiful and something handmade from the heart is always worth giving.