My work with yarn now marked me as an integral member of the tribe; almost everyone was into fabric those years, if only making macramé belts or plant holders. Papers from my ninth-grade students piled ungraded on the table. I wove with thick mohair and thin worsteds, with shiny ribbons and crinkled string, with metallic glitter and angora fluff, and made wall hangings from bits of bark, moss, twigs, and eucalyptus bells. I sat on the floor and wove until the motion was regular as breathing, as my pulse. I took extension classes at night with an instructor who urged me to apply to U.C. Berkeley’s M.F.A. program in fabric art. Helen gave me a comb — a hand-carved, hand-rubbed, golden-brown curved tool to press the woof threads down, firmly, into the growing cloth. While shifting the gears of my pale gray VW Beetle in East Bay traffic, I designed weavings in my mind.

I began to envision a tapestry eight feet tall… The trees would be very different, one rough-textured and thick-trunked, erect and dark, the other slim and multi-trunked, birch-like in its mottled bark, with silvery leaves. But underground their roots would be… twining about each other till you couldn’t tell which belonged to which tree. A metaphor for the marriage I wished I had.

I began to envision a tapestry eight feet tall. It would have to be six feet wide to incorporate my design of two huge trees side by side. The trees would be very different, one rough-textured and thick-trunked, erect and dark, the other slim and multi-trunked, birch-like in its mottled bark, with silvery leaves. But underground their roots would be the same shades of cream and beige, their root hairs twining about each other till you couldn’t tell which belonged to which tree. A metaphor for the marriage I wished I had.

Larry actually encouraged my weaving, and once even offered to buy an eight-harness loom. We were spending the weekend in Morro Bay, and came upon the studio whose magazine ads for hand-made looms made me drool. But though the honey-colored wooden looms and Larry’s prompting — “Go ahead, we can put it on MasterCard” — tempted, I walked out of the studio, finally acknowledging it was not threads I wanted to spend my life weaving, but words. I wasn’t picturing myself interlacing strands of yarn between those silkily rubbed beams; suddenly I was thinking of the books lining the shelves of the bookstore down the street.

In that moment I decided on graduate school. To study the threaded patterns of prose and poetry, weave my own syllabic and syntactic designs. It was words I wanted, language, the words of others interwoven with mine.

One night I dreamed I left a dimly lit, stuffy, second-story room crowded with rows of silent, shivering women bent over their sewing at narrow tables. Downstairs, I sauntered unfettered through a wide, breezy, sunlit hallway that resembled the first floor of the Literature and Languages Building at Arizona State University, where I finished my Master of Arts degree in English.

Philomela’s only way to voice her history was through her threads — a silent scream, a mute art. I left off stooping over needles and yarn. Turned away from those cramped definitions of a virtuous woman. Speech after long silence. And finally, I did read Plato. Came out of a cave into the light.