Nothing bad happens when I’m making art.

I was a dancer first, at age 3, enrolled at a studio in Brooklyn. I danced until I was 11. By then, we’d lived in Pennsylvania for two years. I studied ballet, jazz, and tap. We’d been working really hard on recital pieces when Schlep learned that the recital was scheduled for a Sunday. He stormed into the studio, citing the movie Chariots of Fire, mentioning religious persecution. My dancing career ended that day. Years later, back in Brooklyn, I’d take lessons again at age 20. The religious leader, the one who’d show up again during Margaret’s funeral, broadcasting details of her death, told me that it wasn’t too late to go professional, referring to a woman who’d made it to a dance troupe in her 80s. But I didn’t dance for a career. I danced because I loved it. Because nothing bad happened when I dance.

And nothing bad happened when I drew.

I’d started drawing young. My mother was her happiest when she was making something, too. She had natural ability, drawing butterflies and caterpillars.

And nothing bad happened when I wrote.

I picked up my first journal when I was 10, a gift in an Easter basket when I spent Easter weekend at my best friend’s house, my first and last basket.

And even as a college student, trying to maneuver the politics of the religious group while attending college with so little in my bank account, art supplies were cheap. I could grab glitter and stickers and beads and pipe cleaners and felt squares for so little.

It was one of the few ways that I knew how to express love. Let’s make something.

When Rachel and Margaret visited, we’d make little craft projects. A rabbit named Leonard. I took photos as we walked to the train, wrote a little story about their adventures. Those were the happiest memories — when I wasn’t worried or anxious. We just made something and had fun.

Because I’ve found that bad things don’t happen around art or craft in the same way that meals can be a sacred space, with the right situation. There’s no wrong way to make something, not something meant to make you feel.

In my family, I was the only artist for a very long time. We found Margaret’s journals when she died. I didn’t know she could write like that. I don’t think any of us knew.

Emblem of Our House is an on-going series about the death of my sister Margaret in 2018, published every Monday here and on Instagram @EmblemofOurHouse.