"Harbinger’s Hope"

“Harbinger’s Hope” is a piece I started this spring after a prolonged battle with Duke Power, who threatened to cut the 70-year-old sugar maples in our front yard back to the trunk to provide clearance for power lines. The quilt celebrates the renewal of spring and some of the magical things that go on in trees’ branches. When I finished it, I was reminded of this poem by Emily Dickinson:

HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

– Emily Dickinson