Last night my children watched videos they made while grounded at home during the pandemic. Some they had reversed, so that my daughter kicked a boot back onto her foot, jumped backward onto platforms, lay in a field as snowflakes rose through the air around her.

In one, the camera focuses on the stream behind our house as it ripples chaotically, then resolves into a concentric swelling. A large rock rises from the lips of this torus as the current straightens. The rock lifts into my daughter’s hands and rests there, perfectly dry.

The kids have seen this many times before, so they focus less on the rock’s passage through water and air than on how young they look, how small. I’m not sure I agree. Their faces in the video are already losing the roundness of childhood, maturing into a world newly conscious of the invisible.

I’m watching the sky as I cross the same stream three years after they filmed the video. High winds have ruffled the stratus clouds into braided lines. They look quilted, as if we’ve been tucked into the earth against the coming winter.

New England is a land of quilts. Quilted fields, stitched together with hedgerows. Quilted jackets worn three-quarters of the year. Quilted blankets spread across beds and hung in art galleries and history museums. 

A hundred years ago, in a colder time, when people lived in boxes barely battened against an eight-month winter, quilts were as much about survival as beauty. Girls started piecing them when they could barely walk. By the time they married, they might have twelve or thirteen to bring to their husband’s house. 

Women drew together over the work, leaning close, improvising individual patterns onto a shared canvas. My own house, built at the start of the Civil War, might have hosted such bees, the women’s fingers moving quickly as they discussed war and abolition, dairy yields and weather, children and husbands, and each other. 

Nowadays you can buy new fabric, already cut and sorted into colors and patterns, but back then, quilting was a kind of alchemy, transforming tattered textiles into something new and beautiful. The smooth linen of a worn-out shirt, the soft edge of a ripped baby blanket, the sun-faded pastels of discarded curtains or an outgrown dress, snipped and shaped, transmuted into suns, stars, geometries of color.

My sky is quieter: gray and white and slate blue. It appears to be only itself, but such things are hard to define. Oxygen and carbon dioxide, ozone and nitrogen jostle against the water vapor that coils around bits of dust and ash from the Canadian wildfires that burned all summer. There is the occasional bird, as well as the insects who, though sluggish, have remained alive through this autumn that has still brought no frost. Leaves drift up from a southwest wind; shrapnel fractures as hunting season begins. Pollen drifts through the air from lilacs teased into believing it is spring. The air is a river of fragments. 

I imagine reversing its stream, as in my children’s videos. Run it backward long enough to suck out jets and contrails, drones and helicopters. Siphon away the smoke and the sulfur. Let the radio waves and ultraviolet radiation fade as clouds of insects and flocks of birds swell. 

But I’d keep something of humans, still: snatches of thoughts and bits of dreams, edges of voices, sighs that lift into the wind and braid together with the clouds and the light streaming from the sinking sun.