The oldest thing

Abstract

"'My mother left me three binders with carefully copied recipes and pasted pictures. I never made any of these recipes. I kept them for other reasons. It is the care that moves me, the index, the regular handwriting, the discolored pages. What does a mother leave behind? How do you add value to the daily activities of a household? My mother died when I was fifteen. I never knew her as a woman. This has ensured me that she has always remained a mother figure. The things I learned from her were old fashioned mother-daughter things; cooking, knitting, gardening. She went to a household school and was a patient craftswoman. This is probably where my fascination with manuals and books about needlework and the household started. I learned a lot from her, but not everything. And in that incompleteness lies a valuable resource for me. Like a warm memory that you can look back on, but which is at the same time closed off and distorted by the elapsed time. That open end, the incompleteness, is in all my work.' Ruth van Beek"--back cover.