The Blanket: An Adventure in Fabric Alchemy

How is it that, in a child’s imagination, one thing can become so many things?

My baby blanket certainly did. It was large, or at least it seemed large to me. Spread across the grass, it could be a magic carpet, a spaceship, or an enchanted island floating on a green sea. Wrapped around my shoulders, it could be a royal mantle. Pulled over my head, it became a tent, a cave, a secret world.

It was my companion indoors and out, which meant it was often in the wash. I saw it pass through that ordinary domestic mystery again and again: dirty thing into clean thing, outdoor thing into indoor thing, the beloved object restored.

Although, to be honest, I did not especially love it.

It was tough, dark charcoal, and scratchy against my bare skin. I did not appreciate its virtues then: its durability, its capacity to endure childhood, weather, grass, dirt, imagination, and laundering. I only knew it was mine, and that it could become almost anything I needed.

One person liked it even less than I did.

The girl next door, who was a year younger than me, once declined my generous invitation to join me on it. She informed me that there had been a toilet-training accident involving that blanket. In her mind, this meant it was contaminated forever. No wash cycle, however heroic, could redeem it.

I did not care.

That afternoon, I rolled and unrolled myself in it on the grass, binding myself up tightly and then escaping, as though I were both captive and magician.

Later, I asked my mother about the accusation. Had something happened? I had no memory of it.

“Of all the cheek,” she said, summoning one of her British expressions. “She’s had plenty of accidents!”

And that was that. My mother kept washing the blanket. The girl next door kept her suspicions. I kept playing.

By autumn, after so many washings, the edges had begun to fray. My mother decided the blanket had one more transformation left in it. She would make Halloween costumes out of it for my brother and me.

First came the cloaks. She cut them from the old charcoal blanket and sewed their edges shut. She had no sewing machine of her own, but a neighbour did, and somehow the work got done in that informal economy of mothers, borrowed tools, and practical magic.

Then came the hats.

My father had a ready supply of stiff white poster board, so we rolled sheets into tall pointed cones and taped them until they held their shape. Then Dad trimmed them with adult scissors, making them even and official. My mother planned to wrap the leftover blanket scraps around the cones, but first the fabric had to be decorated.

Out came yellow and blue felt. Then an old red robe of my mother’s, worn past its useful life, was offered up for the cause.

I traced stars and crescent moons onto the felt and cut them out with child scissors. My mother cut more shapes from the textured red fabric of the robe, including one I did not recognize.

“What’s this one?” I asked.

“This is Gemini,” she said, holding up a shape like two Roman numerals pressed together. “My birth sign and yours.”

I had no idea what it meant to be a Gemini. But my mother was one, so I concluded that it must be a good thing.

She laid the cloak and hat fabric flat and arranged the moons, stars, and symbols where they ought to go. Under her supervision, I slowly stitched one shape onto my cloak with uneven little stitches. I did not yet understand how to stop sewing once I had gone all the way around, so she had to finish each one for me. Then I would begin another.

Somewhere in the process, while I was concentrating on my small portion of the work, she completed the rest. The red Gemini glyph was sewn onto my cloak. The scraps were wrapped around the pointed hats. The charcoal blanket, which had once been scratchy, suspect, and fraying, had become wizard’s clothing.

Halloween fell on a school day that year, and naturally I wore my costume to Grade One.

At the school assembly, I ran into the girl next door. She noticed the red symbol on my cloak immediately.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Gemini,” I said proudly. “I’m a Gemini.”

That evening, my mother brought out the finishing touches: masks in fluorescent orange and lime green, both with faux gilded accents, and two silver skull rings with mock garnet eyes. The transformation was complete. The blanket no longer carried me across imaginary seas. It arrayed me. It announced me.

I am sure my mother took my brother and me around the townhouse complex that night. I am sure we knocked on doors, received compliments, and gathered the usual sweet loot of Halloween. But I remember none of that.

What I remember is the color.

The orange and green masks. The yellow and blue felt. The red Gemini glyph. The silver skull ring. The dark cloak that had once been my blanket.

Most of all, I remember the wonder of being dressed, for the first time, as a magic user.

What I felt to be true on the inside was now visible on the outside–at Halloween!

Continue exploring…

For more articles about astrology, faith, meaning, memoir, and the life we share beneath the sky, explore Reflections.