Chambers Miss Tynes herself opens. She provides us with large, fragrant hunks of wet terra-cotta clay, and later with Conté crayons in a matching color. She produces from a cabinet Japanese brushes and inks and explains the patterns of haiku. We dig abstract and tunneled forms in the playground dirt, fill them with wet plaster of Paris we’ve mixed with sawdust for strength, then clean away the soil with toothbrushes and whisks, junior archaeologists, to reveal the sculptural forms we’ve cast. We commence a project, burlap stitchery, each of us given a large piece of scratchy, fragrant brown cloth. We fringe the edges, then dig into her vast stock of yarn scraps, everything from fat pieces of early-sixties Day-Glo to twined silks, striated cottons, shimmery flosses, wools wound in gold like the poles on the docks of Venice. The yarns, her accumulated wastes and trimmings, comprise a lexicon of texture, an encyclopedia of shadings and variations, a dazzling multiplicity. We’re issued broad, blunt-tipped embroidery needles and set to, choosing our favorite scraps to thread through the needles’ eyes and the holes in the weave of the burlap.

I begin an intricate, free-form design, spirals and shapes spilling into one another. I stitch a pink spiral, like a nautilus shell, the whorl of a snail, with ribs of violet, and a yellow-and-green explosion beside it; the result is abstract but refers to natural forms. I love this; I lose myself in it, in the hues and heft of the wool between my fingers, the earthy burlap, the satisfying regularity of the movement of the needle. I pour out of myself into the work.

Our creations are called stitcheries, not embroidery, my teacher explains, since embroidery is a craft usually executed by following a pattern someone else has determined. The worst thing is to follow someone else’s design. One day I collaborate with another kid on an evil drawing of Kevin, a boy we all tease because he’s weird, and is said to pick his nose and eat what he discovers. This may or may not be true, but I am grateful that someone is plainly weirder than me, and I participate in the group project to torment him. My friend Walter and I make a sketch of Kevin, with horns coming out of his head; we picture him peeing into a cup. To my mortification Miss Tynes spies the drawing, but she has also just discovered that some girls are using tracing paper to copy pictures from a coloring book. This practice appalls her, and she proclaims that our drawing of Kevin is more creative, and promptly pins it up on the bulletin board. You are the maker of your design, she says. Copies are lifeless but your own designs are aglow with life. I’m ashamed, and in a while I sneak my hateful picture down from the wall, but the message runs deeper than embarrassment.