My love language is fabric.

I speak silk fluently.

I have a passionate affair with yarn.

And there are remnants of our collisions stored in the memory boxes of our home. Stories woven in thread. Knitted in newborn caps and sewn in the coverings tucked around our sleepy image-bearers.

My great grandmother was an artist … that’s where my love story starts. She stitched a love for creating right into my bones, with embroidery thread, a handmade quilt, and a scattering of the DNA.

I am her namesake, Rosalyn, and her legacy.

My mother is an artist. She taught me to sew on a cast-iron beast of a machine passed down through generations. And my mother, well, she stitches a line true, steady. Singing a sweet song back to me. And the symphony of silk that carried me towards my Love on our day of becoming one … well, she was the conductor, the creator. And her song, it becomes my story.

So, yes, I can weave you our moments in whispers of tissue wrapped silk. I can stitch you our stories written in the squeak of clean cotton.

I can sing you my namesake’s song in a cascade of dresses … {my Girl, my Rosalyn}.

I whispered all my love, embroidered all my ache, right into her baptism dress of sequined silk … a song to carry us through a year apart.

Muted cotton from New York City for her first Easter Dress, and pink-orange silk ablaze for her third, purchased from a fabric store in Spain the year we left her, and our heart, in Georgia.

Her fifth Easter and Wee Man’s second … and praise the Heavens, the first time this mama got to color coordinate her children with her own stitches. Be still my matching heart.  

Harmonies …

A riotous, colorful quilt to cover her, a chorus in the singing, thirty years after her Great-great grandmother sang one over me.

And my first boy, yes, my son on the day of his arriving, he is wrapped in stitches I knitted on the outside while he is knitting on the inside. A little tale I write after twin pink lines and two and a half years of Hannah prayers.

I speak with swift needles to my boy.

Both my boys lay their head on a crib sheet birthed in a funky fabric shop in Kansas, a momma’s day out with my soul sisters.

Oh … and my second son, swathed in linen I’ve pieced together, named for the graciousness of the God I sing to, named into this family of word-weavers, named for more than one soldier … baptized into the Covenant promises made to us, His children.

This is my story, of thread, and weave, and knit.

This is my love song.

And last night the Girl and I are sitting on the couch and I am teaching her the in and out, the push-pull of a needle, and she is weaving stitches, and stacking shapes. And she shouts out, “I’m sewing.”

And me, well, I am singing. 

~M.

Linking up here  … .