For all of my life, I have wondered what women were like in the years before my life began. Often, we have so little to go on in trying to see these women, yet these women have managed to leave their mark in folktales, mythologies, etymologies, and not least of all, their visual art and handiwork.

I remember lying under heavy quilts made from flour-sack cloth that had once been dresses made by my great grandmothers and aunts. They were so unlike the store-bought blankets on my own bed. As I grew older, those old quilts were threaded maps to women I hardly knew. Among the textiles I treasure is a quilt my grandmother made me for my high school graduation. When I lie under the quilts my grandmother pieced and stitched for me, I feel enveloped by her love and joy. I think of the women who helped her. I hear her voice as she must have chatted with her sisters and friends who sat around the quilt frame with her to stitch the layers of color and shape together.

And, the stories, stitches wrought with stories. No doubt some of the stories were ones I had heard many times, but I suspect that the stories told around a quilt frame on gray winter days were filled with details these careful women would not tell in front of the men or the children. Quilting allowed women a private space among themselves that did not often prevail. I have an embroidered handkerchief that belonged to my great-aunt, Eula. If I ever met her, I don't remember. All I know about her is that she walked with a limp and was a spinster.

"How did she get a limp?"

"She jumped from a horse and buggy."

"Why would she do that?"

"A man made a pass at her," she answered in a way I knew not to ask further.

What a euphemism for an experience so frightening that she would jump from a moving buggy! Perhaps my grandmother and her sisters commiserated over her pitiable state. Maybe it was a cautionary tale for them when they were young and beautiful as Eula once was. I hold the thin tissue of that handkerchief in my hand and visions of Eula race through my mind wondering if she were bitter, or forgiving, or lonely, or happy. Those stitches run from me to these women just as definitively as the threads of my mitochandreal DNA.

My Aunt Eula's story also leads me to another of my textile loves: language. The word "spinster" derives from "spin" + "ster." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest written use of the term dates back to the 14th century, referring to women, but sometimes to men, who spun threads for a living. Not until the 17th century did the word come to refer to women not yet married.

Also in the 17th century, we see the word used to refer to spiders, which in turn leads me to another of my loves: mythology. As told by Ovid, Arachne was a Lydian woman so skilled in the art of weaving that she challenged Athena (Minerva), goddess of poetry, wisdom, and weaving, to a weaving contest. Athena depicted in her tapestry the ways that gods punish mortals, and Arachne depicted the ways in which the gods had wronged mortals. When they were finished, Athena, seeing the depiction and that it was indeed better than her own, shredded the tapestry and transformed Arachne into a spider, forever weaving her ancient weft and warp.