from the pen of icarus blake

I never met my great grandmother Velma, she died some years before I was even born.  Based on photos and my mom’s recollections of her to me, she was a short woman with a big personality and an uncanny knack for fiber arts.  20 years after her death, my mom drove our minivan three days across the country and three days back, clearing my grandpa’s basement of all her remaining mementos.  She laid them out on the coffee table when she returned, and I sat with her to look through them.

There were the photos of my great-great grandmother, letters from the apple orchard they sold in the late 1800s, pictures of hundred year old chow chow puppies in greyscale.  There were also the tools: crochet hooks, embroidery floss, a souvenir thimble from a local election in 1938 too small to fit my fat fingers, and her 1929 Singer sewing machine.

I wiped the dust off the old Singer, the wood finish worn thin where she fed fabric under the foot of the machine.  The cast iron pedal and legs made moving the whole table a two person job.  My mom tells me, as we moved the hulking thing out of the minivan and into the house, that Velma set it up in the family room.  When my mom went to her grandma’s house, she would sit on the couch and watch Velma sew her a new dress.  Velma clothed the whole family from that sewing machine, weaving fabric scraps into art worthy of a professional tailor.  Now it sits in my brother’s old room, too big for my two bedroom apartment.

Instead, I took home the crochet hooks and the unfinished projects, the embroidery floss, and the thimble that doesn’t fit my fingers.  I use one of the hooks to work on a scarf, and the plastic warms up in my hands until it feels like I’m holding hers.  I crochet until my fingers go numb, and a voice I’ve never heard tells me to ease up my grip.  Once I work the blood back into my fingers, I start another row.

Later, I set my own Singer down on my desk — cleared of the clutter, computer sitting on a chair off to the side.  It’s a temperamental plastic monster, so far from the steel casing and gaunt practicality of the 1929 model hiding at my parents’ house.  It jams three times, and I curse at it.  Of course I do.  I finish the patch job on my jeans with one of Velma’s needles, and push it through with the thimble.  It’s the only thimble I own, it only fits on my pinky.

I barely know Velma’s face, looking back at me from 50 year old polaroids, but I think I know her hands.  Her textile skill skipped my mother — who curses more loudly than I at her own Singer (a 1980s model), whenever she’s forced to use it — but that isn’t to say it didn’t touch her children.  My past is peppered with blankets and baby clothes, woven of nigh-indestructable acrylic yarn and worried to threads by my busy little fingers.  These things passed into the family when we were born, passed from Velma’s busy fingers to my grandfather’s hands to the hands of my mother and onto the backs of her children.  30 years after her death, I have not visited her grave.  I don’t feel much need — I have these things her hands touched, I work with her tools.  The crochet hook grows warm in my hands, and I know she’s holding it too.  These ghosts sit with me, and I did not need to meet her to know her.