We always talk about curtains. The heavy-duty kind. The shields. The eyelids. Open or closed. All or nothing. The thick fabric, the dense material. Blocking light, gazes, cold and sound. Always those curtains. Curtains are walls of fabric. Dividers. Why always the heavy duty curtains?
There’s also net curtains, you know. Light and airy as a breeze. Sheer curtains. Supple. Easy to wash (by hand, in a basin). Airy, suggestive. Frêle. Veiled. Unnecessary and indirect. They sooo very much differ from an actual curtain! Netting is from another era, it’s hiding in the homes of elderly ladies who’ve cared for it all their lifetime.
In the folds of net curtains you’ll find birds, flowers, squares, triangles. Who knows what else. Looking at the fabric awakens the hands. They want to touch it, that soft stuff. That ribbed, slippery, in-between creamy-white softness.
For an aesthetic experience, a tumbling insight into the power of sheer fabric, I recommend you open this for yourself: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Net_curtains Click the first photo (American cloths) and go from there.
And while we sink into this fine voile (Classroom at St. Mary’s, There was such a lovely light when I came home), Paulien bikes her final kilometers along the Finnish-Russian stretch of the Iron Curtain. Mid-month, on July 13 exactly, she returns.