MY MOTHER MENDING

I came across this photo when clearing my mother's house. She died so recently that I still can't take it in, and this domestic vignette, recorded on film by, I suppose, me, is bittersweet, to say the least.

She always sewed, did Ma. She taught my sister, and (a decade later) she taught me. Starting with buttons, progressing to dressmaking and embroidery, detouring via crochet. My sister took it way further than I--tailoring, for instance, her first husband a three-piece suit. Me, I was more prone to extemporizing strange punky trousers out of old bedsheets. Naturally, we all sewed things up when they tore.

Last I saw that basket, punctuation of my life, it sat open by the William Morris sofa. Ma had been sewing to the last, hemming a pair of pants I'd bought her just before she stopped walking.

I like to think she was still smiling her sewing smile, made of absorption and of relief from thought and stress. How lucky I was to learn that smile. Let's teach stitchery to all our daughters and sons, pass on the basket, send them mending into the future. 

R.I.P. Marianne Sekules.