devika suvilainen | d8 | fin

There's an ancient wooden weaving loom taking up half the floor space of your living room.

You grew up with the rhythm of a heddle bar in the background, stretching out skeins in your little arms patiently as your Nana wound the yarn around the shuttle.

She tells you the machine is an old heirloom, one from even earlier than the Dark Days, and your young mind struggles to comprehend that there was once a world before Panem. "The Capitol would never want something like this," she says sadly, gesturing at the colorful, intricate fabric taking shape within the frame. "Too slow, too imperfect. But this, my darling, is made with love."

That beautiful golden sunset now drapes across your bed and has kept you warm for nine winters. You alone of your family has inherited her nimble fingers and eye for detail, and when you turn eighteen her old screwdriver and a filing cabinet of punch cards await you at the factory.

But you have begged your father to let you keep the loom, as well. You know that the soul of your family's business lies not in the punch cards that have given much of your family's wealth, nor the machines that churn out yards of fine fabric to be shipped westward on high-speed trains.

There is a quiet strength behind these generations of matriarchs, behind the soft clicking of wood that kept you, and your father, and your nana, and generations before her warm through the winter. There is a simple art in each weaving, unsullied by ones who believe only those who produce garish fancies have value. There are strands of tradition, plied invisibly into each skein of yarn.