Up a ways in New England, a mile or so from my childhood camp, was an old house that sat beside a sizable lake called Lovewell Pond (which the locals preferred to pronounce “lovel”).

Once a summer or so, each bunk could sign up for an overnight at that house. We begged for the privilege, for staying there meant skinny dipping in the lake, eating ‘smores, cozying up around an open fire, baking fresh biscuits in the morning and otherwise reveling in summer’s long enchantment.

One of the things I remember most about that house was the rag rugs. Throughout the living room and along the screened-in porch that ran the length of the house were rag rugs. About a dozen of them. They were dirty, for they held the sand and mud and dirt and dust that accumulated in such a vibrant outdoor place, and, with the way they were woven, were nearly impossible to clean. But they were colorful, and sturdy, and confident, and enigmatic, and comforting in their own way.

I was young and unable to understand why they fascinated, attracted, repulsed and made me sad.

But today, I read the following passage by Carolyn Steedman in a book called Domestic Space and it conjured up that house on the lake:

  “... the rag rug is made from the torn fragments of other things: debris and leavings, the broken and torn things of industrial civilization. The rag rug carries with it the irreducible traces of an actual history and that history cannot be made to go away; but ways of writing it and wanting it (and what it represents) are actually somebody else’s story.”

Indeed. The rag rug - besides being a serviceable artifact that softens the tread and perks up the house (all the while holding in dirt that should have been cleaned up and discarded years ago) - is a silent witness to past vibrancy - not just of industrial civilization but of private lives. It is made of the surviving remnants, the ‘out-lasters,’ the enduring fabric that colored and covered the unfolding of now-hidden outings, occasions, dreams, dressing up. It is both celebration and sorrow, containing stories it can never tell and memories we can never hear. It is hard to know which is sadder: that it must remain mute or that we must remain deaf.

But no one makes rag rugs anymore. (Okay, I am sure someone is preserving the craft but of course I mean that it is not the typical, homespun, ordinary task that it once was.)

And that makes me wonder:

Where are the “rag rug” equivalents of today?
What will capture and preserve the fabric of our lives for those who come after us?
What do we lose by trashing the threads of the past?

And how would knowing that the cloth of our lives would become the useful embroideries of tomorrow affect the ways we lived?

(Photo from vintage chic)