Needlework

This mitten thing started when I sent The Maker a message asking about scraps. Pretty sure it was sometime in 2022, which I’m also pretty sure was last year. He and I didn’t really know each other. I had admired his work for a while. Maybe we had already sold some bicycle parts back and forth. But maybe that came after. I know and I don’t. Time gets weird as it piles up and evaporates, and I am a partially reliable narrator at best about these and a lot of other things.

My message asked if his work, which includes cutting up wool blankets to make remarkably nice anoraks and jackets for winter expeditions, ever leaves him with leftovers. I was hoping he could give me a piece of fabric just big enough for patching a couple buttonholes and a pocket corner on a plaid wool shirt I’d worn ungently since paying $7 for it at Savers. He sent back something like, “I’ve got a couple garbage bags full. You can have it all if you want it.” I said I did without knowing why. My only use for wool scraps was fixing those small spots on that one shirt, and Ms. LaCount (my wife) and I try hard to minimize our clutter. (more…)

My grandmother, an immigrant from Belgium, gave me a thick, crocheted afghan in my senior year of high school. I’m fifty years old now. I still have it. This black, white and gray acrylic afghan—one among hundreds she gifted family members—holds in its hooked stitches the last breaths of the life that she wove into mine. I don’t keep it on my bed today, but my kids will have to figure out what to do with it when I die; I won’t let it go during my lifetime.

Families are big and complex. They can gift us things we don’t understand until many years after they are given. I had the great fortune of living in Omaha, Nebraska, with my grandmother during my junior and senior years. She was in her seventies, alone, and no longer able to drive because of deteriorating vision. I was a grandson who desperately needed refuge from an abusive dad. I’d lived with an aunt and uncle for the second half of my sophomore year. They had already raised three children from another aunt (a story for another time) and had three of their own kids at home. They both worked—he was a cop, she was a secretary. Even then, in the early 1980s these were not high-paying jobs. (more…)