A Useful Skill

“Oh, just sew it shut and move on!” was Mother’s advice.  Pointed yet all-purpose, it served well for changing the subject in the middle of my tale of adolescent woes brought home from school. Her few words, plus the swing of her arm into the air in one cosmic pull of the needle, ended the conversation whether or not I was done. Sewing worked for Mother as a world view. Identify the need, come up with a frugal solution, and stitch it up.  “If people only knew what problems could be solved with needle and thread!” She meant it figuratively and literally.

From what I could tell, Mother believed, number one, that problems were already in my script, and, number two, girls were destined to have more problems than boys. Mother was not going to let her only girl grow up without learning how to work a piece of cloth.   She gave me that.  And since she also taught me that a gift received should be passed along and given again, I am ready to give.   But it should be said that, while my sewing skills have been a gift sure enough, they have also been an appendage I sometimes have wished I could detach from myself, forever, and throw in the trash. 

A teacher once told me, “Never learn to type, because then you’ll end up as a secretary for men.”  She just as easily could have said, “Never learn to sew, because you’ll end up doing women’s work for nothing.” I never knew if she was speaking from experience. We did a whole unit on labor movements, and she certainly opened my eyes to the Unfair.  But here I am, my mother’s daughter, thankful for what she gave me and better off passing the gift forward.

Are you in need of a couch but can’t afford a new one for what they cost nowadays, several weeks of paychecks?  Haul home the one just put out on the sidewalk (look in the cleaner part of town and get it fresh before a dog pees on it), and sew a slipcover. For a normal-size couch you’ll need ten to twelve yards.  You can save money and lots of time by not using piping along the edges, but it looks a lot better with it. It may take you about a week, but you’ll have a couch as good as new.

Your glasses are never where you want them? First of all, you’ve probably already managed to acquire several pairs so you can have them in different spots – kitchen, bedside, reading chair, around your neck.  But they tend to migrate around the house, as few people are boring enough to always put their glasses where they found them. After Mother died, I found thirty-seven pairs of eyeglasses strewn around her two-bedroom apartment. Sometimes giving an object a special place increases the likelihood that the thing will want to return to it. Why do you think grown people make those big peg boards with a hook for every tool and a thick black outline to match each shape?

But back to the missing eyeglasses.  You’ll want to sew a pouch, open at the top or with a flap, just big enough for your average type of eyewear.  Stitch the pouch to a sash that you can tie around your waist or to a cord that you can wear around your neck like a lanyard.  It’s also a good idea to have pouches that stay in one place, so sew them to the sides of your chairs or to your mattress, and if your furniture is not upholstered, sew the pockets onto an elastic cord and hang the cord on your bedpost or your chair arm.  If you don’t want to buy elastic, just cut and tie a bunch of rubber bands together. They’ll get dry and break sooner than elastic, but they’re free.

You need a gift? But it’s the end of the month, and your cash drawer is light?  Everybody needs hand towels in their kitchen, even if they never cook.  Find an old shirt; men’s shirts are best, because they’re larger, made out of heavier fabric, and have fewer pleats and tucks.  Cut the largest rectangle you can manage out of the back of the shirt.  Then roll in the edges of the rectangle and sew them tidy so the edges won’t fray in the wash.  If the shirt is made out of one-hundred-percent cotton and has been worn a few years, it will be very absorbent, which is something you want in a dish towel. If you’re lucky enough to find a linen shirt, you’ll have the highest quality gift. For drying off a wet plate, cotton acts like it’s enjoying the drink, but linen acts like it’s dying of thirst. Your gift will be extra special because you made it.

If you’re a man you may have already stopped reading and therefore not even have gotten this far to where I am addressing you.  You might have thought, “This isn’t for me.  Men do not sew, cannot sew, don’t want to sew, don’t need to sew, are thought to be weird if they sew.” All that can be corrected.  I’ve seen a full-grown man shape a barbecue cover with thread and fabric as well as my mother, and it’s a rare and wonderful sight.  Keep a look out for that kind.  And then ask yourself, why not?  Contrary to what my mother practiced, all sons and daughters could learn how to sew, and then that’s just one more tool in the boy’s pocket for solving problems, and we girls could hand over some of the mending. 

That’s my goal.  Not to hand over the mending exactly, but to teach my son. I’m teaching little Beau how to sew his own camping pouch. In a few years he’ll be ready for a full space suit.  Or by then maybe he’ll want to be an apiologist (isn’t that a fancy word) and we’ll make him a bee suit.  When he’s older he’ll have one more option for imagining what’s possible.

I would have done the same for my daughter, but she hardly lasted long enough to know the world beyond the end of her minuscule newborn sighs.

 Compared with many other things one has to do in life, it’s really very little effort to grow a human being in the first nine months, and not much more even after that.  But it is an unfathomable effort to hold a bare whisper of life and watch it just fade and STOP.  That’s what wee Sula did.  I wanted to put her right back where she had been, doing just fine, and tell her that if it was more than she could manage to be outside my belly just yet, she could take her time.  Just take…her...time.  I’d carry her around inside of me until she was ready.  She tried so hard to do what she was supposed to do just by coming out into the world.  She should have been rewarded with a life.

I told Lance to go home and bring me back two boxes of my scraps, the one labeled “LINEN - FINE” and the one labeled “COTTON – LIGHTWEIGHT”.  And thread and needle and scissors, of course, all of which he brought me lickety-split, dear husband that he is, even though at that moment he was just as much a weeping mess as I was.  He had not even had the chance to experience the nine months (nine and a half, to be exact) feeling the movement and rhythm of Sula next to his innards, the way I had.  That’s a serious deprivation for a father.  Lance barely had a few hours with our little one, and none without the nervous swirl of doctors and nurses and technicians scurrying and hovering and asking and telling, their panic hardly disguised by the calm blue of their uniforms.

I would not let them put Sula in a box. No. Sula would have light and air coming through.  She would have the touch of the gentlest cloth, and I, who had been two hundred percent ready to welcome her into a life on this planet, and then, in fact, did bring her into this world, was going to give her my best hand-stitched swaddling for her way out of it. 

Propping myself up in the hospital bed, I arrange all the scraps on the bland hospital coverlet, so I can see my palette of colors and textures.  It’s hard to concentrate. Lance is holding Sula, her spirit starting to make its way out of here, no medical hands on her anymore, wrapped in the standard-issue maternity ward blanket with pastel lambs and bunnies cavorting in a meadow. They’re leaving us alone now, but the sounds of the ward never stop, and they still insist on taking my vitals.  We don’t have much time. I cannot think; my belly is empty; the world stands still and yet refuses to cease even for a heartbeat so that Sula can have everyone’s attention for a respectful moment of silence.

I have a job to do.  I notice in the box the set of old dinner napkins I remember picking up at a sidewalk sale the summer of our Maine vacation, before we even had kids.  Someone in another time and another life had made a fine crocheted edge on all sides. I decide to cut off just that trim to use around Sula’s head, like a crown.  I rub between my fingers the pale blue oxford cloth that came from a secondhand shirt I found at the swap shop.  And a scrap - must have belonged to a family of some means – from a heavy bed sheet the color of thick cream with a long double row of tiny eyelets.  There is more here than I need, but I choose a few shades of white, a contrast in texture for accent, and the main piece I cut from handkerchief linen that came from a curtain job my friend did for someone’s dining room. I choose its pale rose color not because Sula is a girl, but because rose is the shade of heart and love and will give off warm reflected light the color of a kiss.

I am usually a slow worker, but I work quickly now, cutting and sewing and shaping. They open the door again to tell me I don’t have much time. Well, how much time is “not much time”?  Not enough.  Sula did not have nearly enough time, and now she has forever.  I try my darnedest to concentrate.  It just takes the time it takes to make small stitches and French seams.  It has to be beautiful.  I trim a small piece from a flannel pillowcase for its light honey color and soft nap – that will go against her chest for warmth. When I had Beau, I remember the nurses told me infants like to be tightly wrapped, so I make the packet smaller than I think it ought to be. 

And then it is almost done but for an opening through which Lance and I slip wee Sula, cooling and silent.  We hold her together between us.  Maybe if her spirit is still hanging around, she will hear us, so we tell her how much we love her and that she will always be in our hearts and that we are here if she ever gets scared.  It’s like putting her to bed, that’s all.  Except now I have to tuck in the remaining bits of puckering, close any small gaps, and sew shut with a fine row of yellow embroidery loops the final opening, not much wider than the “birth canal”, as they like to call it, my body, through which she traveled this morning.  And lastly, the letters: S and U and L and A, with serifs, across her heart, in silk thread the color of green apples. 

Sula will never know green apples.  She will never know somersaults and speeding down the hill feeling the wind in her hair.  She will never know the tussle of brotherly love or the excesses of grandparents. She will never know the exuberance of a red crayon or the magic of red shoes or the gush of sweet red watermelon in August.  She will never know the red of a valentine in her mailbox or the red of her own blood that gives her life.  She will never feel a storybook opening up inside her imagination. She will never share the laughter of her teenage cohort climbing fences carefree in the night. She will never know the mystery of love or the touch of intimacy.  She will never behold the miracle of her own infant and its first gaze, or the little hand in hers as she walks to the first day of school. She will never smell the salty ocean or feel the damp of the forest on her skin.  She will never compose a dinner party and be surprised by the turn of a conversation.  She will never know the frustration and bliss of writing a song or shaping pots out of clay or the driven pursuit of knowledge.  She will never know the death of a friend or the heartbreak of abandonment.  She will never have her feelings hurt. She will never disappoint or regret. She will never need to explode with fury and loud protest.  She will never have to feel the meagerness of her power in the face of war and cruelty. She will never have to fathom loss and wonder how she will ever survive sorrow or have to learn to live with it like a necessary organ somewhere between the hunger of her stomach and the beating of her heart. She will never know the hush of snowfall, the tulips of spring, the sandals of summer, or the beach fires of autumn. She will never know green apples.

. . .