Dot Fry was a one of the most fascinating people I ever met. She was a natural-born storyteller, probably because she was such an avid reader. Every story seemed to begin the same way.

The Great Depression, 1929–1939, weighed heavily on rural communities in the U.S., and so President Franklin Roosevelt proposed relief, recovery, and reform through a variety of New Deal agencies. One of those agencies — the Farm Security Administration (FSA) — provided relief to rural farmers.

This week on my loom are some placemats in a pattern that I’ve called “Meadow Valley.”

This past March, I returned to Marburg, Germany where I did most of my undergraduate college studies.