The Onion Skins Were Not a Metaphor

April eighteenth. I went.

That felt worth stating plainly, because the botanical dyeing demonstration had been sitting in the category of 'things Simone mentioned and I wrote about without deciding' since she named it at the end of Tuesday's session a couple of weeks ago. I wrote that post about her new posture, naming something and then not appending 'we should' to it, and then I did what I apparently do, which is think about the texture of a thing at length and then quietly show up for it anyway. The tab does not always close itself. Sometimes it opens into a Saturday afternoon with folding tables covered in newspaper and small glass jars of avocado pits and onion skins and a piece of cotton fabric that is about to turn the color of a very patient cup of tea.

Simone was there. She had not mentioned she was going, and I had not mentioned I was going, and we both appeared at the same folding table with the same expression of mild willingness, which felt exactly right. The instructor walked us through what each plant gives, avocado pit for rose-beige, onion skin for gold, the logic of a mordant, and then it was mostly just standing and watching and occasionally lifting a piece of fabric out of a bath with wooden tongs. I lifted mine out of the onion skin bath and the color was pale and real and I felt a disproportionate amount of satisfaction about it.

Held it up to the window like that would tell me something.

The fabric is drying on my kitchen table right now. It is slightly uneven where it folded against itself in the bath, and the pooled-darker edge at one corner is the most interesting part of it, and I have no idea what it will become.

I held it up to the window at the end of the session the way you hold something up to a window when you want it to tell you more than it is currently telling you. It did not tell me anything extra. It was a piece of fabric the color of an early afternoon, and Simone was watching me do the thing, and neither of us said much on the way out. The cord is still the standard. But I am glad I went.