Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Drop Me a Stitch Tonight
Twenty-five years ago, our old beach house on Lake Superior burned down. It was January, bitterly cold, with snow so deep in our driveway that a front-end loader had to clear it before the fire engines could get to the house. Not surprisingly, it was a total loss. Still, when we came back in March to look at the ‘grave site,’ I found little snippets of embroidered pillowcases strewn about in the wet sand.
This made me all teary about embroidering.
So, I bought an embroidery kit that involved a lot of flowers and butterflies. I finished the butterfly and put the kit away. I’d not embroidered since I was a kid and then I was a clumsy one, my stitches thick and off kilter, nothing like my mother’s perfect sewing, each split stitch, each French knot flawlessly executed. She finished the edges with a delicate crocheted border. I could kick myself now, ten thousand years later, for putting her pillowcases in the washing machine. What was I thinking?
Lately, as recent events have me treading water in the deep end most of the time, I started looking over at the bookcase where I’d put the embroidery kit a couple of years ago. And in some weird, unexplainable way, I began to yearn to embroider.
So I sat sewing in my office last night while I watched the news on my laptop. I watched the new video of Alex Pretti’s murder and then the next new video and watched people standing with their sorrow at the place he was killed. I listened to the commentators and the experts and then noticed I’d missed the proper angle on the satin stitch on the leaves. My imperfections have stuck by me all these years.
I have no hope of ever finishing this which is fine because, what’s the point in finishing it? If I endeavor to finish it, then it becomes a goal and then an accomplishment and then it can be one of the other things weighing on me while I’m treading water in the deep end. Screw finishing it. Screw having the proper angle on the leaves.
I’m going to just keep embroidering purposelessly until run out of thread or the country has been set to rights, whichever comes first.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
A waitress at my favorite breakfast place has a tattoo on her arm: perfectly imperfect.
Don’t know why I thought of that with your words, but …. oh well. And, I really like the tattoo
wisdom.