Use the scraps

and own the process.

A friend recently shared a photo of a concrete wall with the word Tonawanda posted across the top. He’s been living abroad for twenty years and this word, the name of a small city near Buffalo, NY, held some sort of nostalgia that made being close to home extra special. 

My mind read TOWANDA - Kathy Bates’s war-cry in the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. Towanda came out of Bates’s mouth at a point in the movie when she chose to show up for herself in life and take control. The word has become a cultural symbol of empowerment¹, either big or small. Sometimes I whisper it in the quietest of moments, like when I win at 45’s (I never thought I could), when my voice is clear in my writing, or when I make something out of nothing for dinner. 

I bet my aunt Sandra would say that sitting with a cup of tea on her deck beneath her flowering baskets hanging from twisted wisteria vines after a productive day in the studio is a quiet towanda moment. This is how I found her when I dropped in the other day. 

Sandra is a textile artist, a weaver. Her studio is in the front of the house where there's a loom, shelves of books, a long table wrapped in canvas, and a white pegboard stretched across a whole wall, covered in inspiration - twisted wire formed into words, images, envelopes from friends. 

That day she’d been working with strips of unbleached cotton, weaving them into placemats. Her cotton collection has been gifted, thrifted, and handed down over the years. Much of it comes from her brother-in-law’s grandmother, a woman who sewed everything, even underwear. 

Cloth has to be torn into strips in order to weave it at the loom. Sandra demonstrates for me by pulling out a length of soft cotton with a thin hand-stitched hem on one side. “This might have been a curtain,” she says as she makes a tiny cut in the cloth with her fabric scissors and rips off the hem in one quick motion. Then, using the stripes on her apron as a guide for width, she makes another snip and rips a strip stopping just before the end. Then another snip, another rip, and on it goes, back and forth, stopping just before the end until the cloth is now one long, thin, strip of fabric. 

Sometimes the cotton has hints of lettering woven in, or has a coloured thread twisting through. They become a little surprise in the weaving, a splash of colour to show that life isn’t uniform. 

I went home and looked at my pile of zucchini. It’s that time of year; they’re local and plentiful. But I’ve already torn them into strips. Sliced them so thinly they melted in butter and shredded them into cake batter, as the brother-in-law's great-grandmother would have done.  Every last strip of it. 

In a last effort to turn this mood around, I slice the zucchini (and the eggplant and summer squash I had in the pile) crosswise, toss the circles in olive oil, season with salt and grill them on the barbecue. On this particular day there’s ricotta in the fridge. I crush garlic with sea salt until it forms a powerful paste, stir it into the ricotta with the zest of a lemon then spoon it over the grilled medallions. I pick fresh mint leaves from the garden and snip them with scissors over the pillows of ricotta.

Then, I whisper towanda. 

1. For an example of how towanda lives on in current conversations, listen to this podcast episode with Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne titled, Find your Towanda.