It is cotton season on St. Croix.
Along roadsides and shorelines, yellow wild cotton flowers rise from the brush, soft, resilient, unassuming. Survivors from the island’s plantation past, they grow without asking to be seen. Hiding in plain sight, the cotton carries a memory that never left the land. Its presence is so familiar it is often overlooked. Most people drive by. I stop.
This cotton holds ancestral knowledge. It remembers hands before mine, hands that picked, cleaned, spun, and carried this fiber through lives shaped by pain, endurance, and ingenuity. The plant persists not as monument, but as quiet inheritance. The land keeps the lesson.
When I collect the fibers, I do so with care and intention, aware that this plant once shaped lives, landscapes, and economies. What remains now is not the plantation, but the cotton itself, still growing, still offering. I gather slowly, listening. Later, in the studio, I clean and spin the fibers into string, coaxing continuity from what was nearly forgotten. The motion is circular, meditative. Lint by linters, the past moves forward through my hands.
Each strand becomes a quiet conversation between land and hand, past and present. The cotton is no longer a remnant; it becomes material for repair, for remembering, for transformation.
This is not nostalgia. It is transmission, a way of honoring what was carried, what survived, and what still teaches. The cotton does not belong to history alone. It belongs to now: to breath, to making, to memory still in motion.
