On Sunday my husband said, "Let's go to San Francisco today and bum around"... we have our favorite haunts and places to visit and I thought that was what he meant and what we would do ...
Until we pulled up in front of a museum and I saw a huge sign saying Quilt Show!
He was surprising me with this extra special event!
I went inside and started looking at quilts, many beautiful and some even more beautiful,
and maybe fifteen minutes into it I saw a quilt across the room that caught my eye and I walked up to it to discover that it was an Israeli quilt artists and the quilt was depicting life on the kibbutz in Israel.
Quick history about me: In 1961, at the age of 20 I went to Israel alone intending to stay five weeks.
I stayed on a kibbutz to work and to learn a little Hebrew.
I met a very handsome Israeli man, fell in love, and four months later we were married. (my first husband).
Long story short I stayed there five years!
Had one child there.
Had a hard time raising my child on the kibbutz, because in those days children were raised in the Children's Houses, not at home, and that was very hard for me. It was like all day and all night nursery school.
Back to the Quilt show!
This show was celebrating 100 years of the Kibbutz in Israel.
This was the quilt that had caught my eye earlier...
Lots of detail about the kibbutz bringing back lots of memories for me, some wonderful, some not so...
Each quilt had a bio of the artist and I was familiar with many of the kibbutzim, some just down the road from where I had lived there...
I loved the detail in this quilt showing the gathering of wheat. The thread used was sparkly and fine.
Here's where nostalgia mixed with the sour feeling of having so little time with my baby ...
These "wagons" were called agula and we used it like we use a stroller or baby buggy today.
This piece depicts the children in the children's house at night, protected by a "night guard" not his mommy and daddy. This was the breaking point for me, as both my son and I went to bed crying at night for months on end.
My understanding now is that babies and children on the kibbutz now sleep in their parents homes.
On a lighter note, this is a fun quilt showing this woman working in the kitchen, taking food home from the kitchen in her canisters, and on the side is a board posting every ones work assignments for the next day. She has numbers on each of her clothing items that identify them as hers so when she puts her dirty clothes into the communal laundry they come back to her clean and neatly folded in her box with her number on it.
On a more somber note, this quilt depicted the farm workers working in the fields with their rifles over their shoulders for safety.
I will never regret my five years spent in Israel on the kibbutz. It was hard work. I had fun. I loved the country of my Jewish heritage and people. I just couldn't hack the life on the kibbutz as a parent.
So we came to California and lived together for five more years, had another child, and then got a divorce. Not all stories have happy endings.
But life goes on, new doors open, and we both have new spouses and families, and are now all living happily ever after! ;-))
My dear husband of today and best bud of the past 34 years and I went on to enjoy our usual haunts including the warming hut at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, (tune in tomorrow to see the drawing of the bridge I did from there) ...
We saw this awesome pelican who just stood and posed for me and my camera!
Perfect for Animal Wednesday!
And me, taking my own photo with my iPad, against the beautiful back drop of the Golden Gate Bridge! It was sunny and warm out all day, a tad windy at this point in our day, but still lovely out.
