The Shoebox Sewing Box
From the “Work in Progress” blog series
Note: This piece has been revised and is included in “Chapter 2, VI. Works in Progress: Writing in Image,” Stay with Writing: Practices for Sustaining the Writer’s Work and Life. Selections from the original blog are included here. Artwork by Neil Freese.
2019
I open the Nike shoebox, the sewing box my mother had before she died. On the outside is what’s left of a label stating “USA 10 ½,” much too big for my mother, and “Reg $59.95” but marked down to $39.95. Oddly, inside is a smaller Bass shoebox. In black marker on masking tape on one side of the box, not in my mother’s handwriting, is “Sewing Box.” I don’t remember ever having a conversation with her (or anyone) about the box. I remember only that the supplies within it seemed like something I could use, a good thing to keep, so I did. I believe the box is at least thirty-five years old; it might be closer to forty. It’s in pretty good shape for much-travelled, middle-aged cardboard.
The Bass box within the Nike box holds a blue plastic container with “Johnson Baby Wash Cloths” across the top. It’s possible my mother used them, but I know I did after my son was born. The container likely dates from 1990 or 1991. My mother died in 1988.
There are samples of Maggie’s Organic Cotton, a company launched in 1992—so they aren’t right too—and a vertical roll of thread with needles, the kind of travel sewing kit my ex-husband would have picked up on a business trip. There are Singer Iron-on Patches—and spools of Woolworth’s Size 50 Polyester thread. They could be my mother’s. But I have also used iron-on patches on blues jeans of all shapes and sizes for years, long after she was dead. I am not sure about the Dritz Glovers/leather Hand Needles for $1.39 or the Heavy Duty Snaps from EZ International for $4.00. Hers or mine?
I put the lid on the Nike box and take in what is now clear—and probably has been for years. The box isn’t hers. Every time I’ve grabbed a needle and spool of dark thread to replace a button, mend a hem, stitch a rip in someone’s slacks, it’s possible I was using a remnant from her, but more likely, was using something that I (or someone else) acquired over the years. Does it matter that not all in the box is hers? Every-day activities, life changes, random shopping have likely added to or subtracted from it. A generation has passed and another is passing—moves across country and from one home to another have occurred since she could have used the box. Maybe it started out her box but now is something else. For me, if something in the box is hers, it is still something of her I have. But what if none of it—what if nothing in the box—is or ever was—hers?
Sewing is something she did, and by holding onto her sewing paraphernalia or some vestiges of it, I kept part of her with me. Inside the box, I see the accoutrements of her sewing self…
2020
In Spring, in pandemic lockdown, I take on a massive clean-up. In a back bedroom, I lift the top of a very old cupboard, which I might not have opened in twenty years, and there is the pin cushion in the shape of a large strawberry, a small berry dangling from the top to make sure we get what we are seeing, straight pins with silver and blue and black tops stuck in it.
It’s inside my mother’s sewing box, a beige box with a lid that does not have any company branding on it. I have no idea what the box originally held, but it is stuffed now. In it, among other things, are Clarke’s Hand Sewing Assortment (needles) for 80 cents; two maroon Nouveaute buttons for 27 cents; an unopened packet of White Bias Tape (5 yds) for 25 cents; a bright green zipper; a small white envelop of extra shirt buttons; black cutting shears, so worn the black enamel is stripped away…
I’m curious about the box, but I don’t know if I can embrace it as my mother’s. The other box—the Nike box in its longtime place on the shelf in my closet—is already my mother’s sewing box. That it is really an emblem, not an artifact of my mother’s life, has little sway…
Here’s my leap. Please join me:
I am trying to figure out what I am saying in this piece, and I am impatient.
My mind and calendar tell me I have only so much time to give to this piece, so when I sit down to work, I am busy thinking about how quickly I can get the most done. I am focused on resolving the piece, rather than evolving it—and I know I won’t ever resolve it if I don’t allow it to evolve. For example, I rush through the use of the words remnant and emblem, but the piece is trying to tell me I need
To see what arises in me when I use each word and then reflect on what each means to me (What remembrance or experience does the word evoke, and how do I understand it?)
To look up each word. Be reminded of what each means and how it is used in multiple contexts.
Then I can know more about if my sentences work or if I need to rework or cut them, and/or how to interrelate my experience and uses of words—or take my ideas a new direction. I can’t just blow past the words.
I am also impatient with what this piece is saying, where it is leading me, with my contradictory feelings/experience, and the too-much work I feel it will take to discover and explain the complexity I feel. I resist the “facts” it is providing me—and the conflicts they are creating in me. How could I show my resistance to what is real or accurate, while also accepting it, using it—and maybe even learning from it? Do I really want to take on all that?
Then, I realize the core of my impatience is this: Just how inaccurate is my memory…