What the Onion Skins Left

April twenty-ninth. The fabric is on the kitchen table right now, still slightly wrinkled from being wrung out, and it is the specific pale gold of old paper or dried grass and I keep walking past it.

I went to the botanical dyeing demonstration on Saturday. I wrote, a few weeks ago, about Simone naming it without appending 'we should,' and I turned that over for a while, the texture of being told about something and not being recruited into it. I think I sat with it long enough that it became an invitation I extended to myself, which might be how these things are supposed to work. I showed up alone, with no equipment and no prior knowledge, wearing a linen apron that someone handed me at the door and that was three inches too long.

The moment of seeing what the onion skins did.

The demonstration was in the community center's back room, the one they use for things that require newspaper on the tables. There were probably fourteen people. The facilitator had a kind of matter-of-fact enthusiasm that I appreciated, she wasn't performing the wonder of it, she just knew what she was doing and moved steadily and let the pots do their work. Onion skins, a mordant I'd never heard of, an hour of low heat. When I lifted the fabric out I was not expecting the color to be that specific. It wasn't yellow. It was something older than yellow.

Laid it flat and just looked at it for a minute.

I have been thinking about what it means to show up somewhere and not know the vocabulary yet. Not in a romantic way, it was a little awkward, I asked a question that turned out to have an obvious answer, and I didn't have a clue what to do with my hands between steps. But the fabric is on the kitchen table. I wrung it out myself. I keep walking past it. That feels like the right note to end on, actually, not a conclusion, just the fact of the thing existing in the apartment now, asking nothing.