threads

Since Arlo died and I didn’t return to my usual summer teaching, I’ve been carving out more time for the things that I actually enjoy. With my improved writing schedule, I also feel far less guilty spending the evenings creating non-academic goods.

When you’re a graduate student in English, everyone always assumes that you learned to read before you learned to swallow and that you spent the entirety of your childhood clutching Charles Dickens or even the Bobbsey Twins. There’s a reason for this image and most people I’ve come to know during my own grad student tenure do, I guess, fit the bill. Not me. I grew up in rural northern Michigan with a surgeon father (e.g. he wouldn’t know a novel if it cut him with a scalpel) and a mother who was too harried by her children and her own job to model the life of the mind. I suspect there was very little that attracted me to reading when I was young. I preferred floating in the lake and knitting by the stove to turning the pages of C.S. Lewis. And even as I wanted to want to read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I just really preferred Little House on the Prairie.

So I filled my time making things. I received a play sewing machine when I was five (the needle was plastic) and a real sewing machine when I was ten (the needle was metal… and sharp). After that, I was endlessly amused by stitches and fabric, stuffing and sizing. My grandmother, a tough woman who traveled 3000 miles by train with her twin sister to join the WACs (or maybe the WAVEs) during World War II because there wasn’t enough food on the farm and she believed it was the right thing to do, was a seamstress also. For years she made all of her – and her children’s – clothes. This meant that by the time my mother had her own kids, she had no interest in spending her evenings cutting out poplins and hauling the Singer up from the basement. I suppose it skipped a generation.

When I sew now, I feel connected to my grandmother. I see her guiding my hands, telling me to let up the foot pedal, watch out for the final stitches on a zipper. She used to iron and cut out her patterns with military precision, flummoxed by my slapdash doings. And she arranged her pieces just so, making sure not an inch of fabric was wasted. My sister inherited her exactitude, but I’m looser with my stitches, okay if the corners don’t meet and the seams need to be taken out four times before I get them straight. I worry endlessly in every other aspect of my life, but when my hands are working, my head is at rest.

I’ve always felt sheepish talking about my domestic desires, my preference for linen over cotton, my knowing a French seam from a flat felled one. Somehow it still seems a signifier for my bookless childhood, my hopelessly unerudite beginnings, my country ways.