One Stitch At a Time

by Miranda Mueller

 (a poetic writing)

Editor’s note:  Here’s a little something different for our readers submitted by Julie Mueller’s daughter.  A sort of poetic form of what the relationship of a mother and daughter would be, over the years as the mother teaches her daughter to sew.  I respect artistic license, thus I’ve made very few changes. 

“Go on!  You can thread it with your little fingers,”
she said to baby-me giving up on pushing thread
through a hole with fewer nanometers than I had years.
Three more tries until I could finally tear
my eyes away from the slim metallic form
that would finally allow me to sew.

“Knot the end and pierce the fabric just so,”
she said to me before the needle pierced my finger
instead, the blood staining her new sewing form.
I was handed the empty needle to rethread
although staining my face were unuttered tears
that would have to come out later, not stopping for years.

I whined and complained “later”, in these teenage years.
Perfection cried out that every fault of mine was so
violently wrong the life that held it would rip and tear.
The machine chewed the cloth, threatened to eat my fingers,
while the rips in the cloth were mended by the thread.
But my frustrations never had a repair in any form.

From the closet, we pulled out the smelly dress form,
dusty from having been locked away for so many years.
Practice helped; the fabric now weaved in and out of the threads, the dress jumped onto the mannequin, and I barely needed to sew.  Onlookers touched my attire with their long, sticky fingers, while yards of work and fabric nearly drove me to tears.

She spoke in musty terminology as I continued to tear
into trendy designs and create original forms.
I heard “darts”, “folds”, “zigzag”, when my fingers
were already on basting and turning, ahead by light years. 
Her words floated past my ears telling me to keep sewing,
suggesting stores that would take my original threads.

I used to smile at her politely as I watched my thread
fall into the needle eye looking at me with tears.
Her advice is not modern enough for her to sew
with me, her daughter, in this strange, new form.
She taught until the day she realized the years
that separated us were wider than the width of a finger.

The tears finally formed in her velvet brown eyes,
‘til her oh-so-tired fingers brushed away
the drops – the years – threaded to her heart.