The end of winter is near and the woodpile is dwindling. The nights aren’t as long or as cold as they were a month ago, but I still take comfort in the fire. I dial my sister’s number and it rings in an old farmhouse across the country in another time zone. Her voice sounds so much like my own but on the other side of the receiver she lives an entirely different life. We take turns talking and listening as the flames from my woodstove flicker and dance until the wood is consumed to a heap of gleaming embers.
Her life is full of little people and the Lord. She is the mother of six children all under the age of 12. I am surprised at how she intuitively knows how to resolve countless crises and make the painstaking decisions necessary to raise a new generation of human beings. She is a fulltime caregiver, homeschooler, referee, nurse, maid and cook. In winter she hibernates in the cold, snowy darkness of Vermont while the sun shines brightly in my big Flagstaff sky. My woodstove is for comfort and ambiance and hers cooks meals and is the center of the house.
When we were girls we sang in the car, in the kitchen, in the living room to Barry Manilow records, and on our high school drama stage. These days I sing around campfires and she sings in church. She hums a melody as she folds the laundry and chops vegetables for stew. Lately, she tells me that she’s been stealing moments from her family to write songs.
We talk fashion, and she admires my new boots she saw on a Facebook post. She dreams of wearing something new, but there is nowhere to shop, no extra funds to buy new clothing. In the late-night quiet the small light of her sewing machine illuminates the stitching of a new dress. I wonder where she will show off this new dress—at church? She barely makes it beyond the long dirt road to town save the trip to the grocery store. Several weeks pass before she can spare time to run to the fabric store for a zipper so she can finish it.
By the glow of the woodstove in the long, Vermont night she makes something for herself only. In the minutes she can spare she breathes words into a circle of fifths and reveals her inner life in a song. She steals time, a precious thing.
There are long nights where I am half a world away at my sewing machine when I should be sleeping. I ignore the fact that I must wake early and go to a different kind of job than hers—one that is easier to leave at the end of the day. I stitch around memories of being a little girl on the creaky wooden sewing bench beside my mother, taking turns with my sister. I remember stitching Easter dresses to herald the spring, only to hide them beneath big wool coats in the chill of an early April New England morning. Yet we stitched on if only to fulfill the dream of making something from scratch that is only for us.
My late night stitching transports me to a time when we made dresses for our Barbie Dolls—inventing countless occasions for the lives we acted out in the windowsills of our old house. The set was a collection of found objects combined with plastic furniture from the Barbie Dream House we begged for then soon abandoned. We imagined countless scenarios: a wedding, a family reunion, Barbie performing Abba songs for an adoring crowd or Ken arriving home from a war with missing legs (a necessary storyline when our only Ken broke in half). We spent more time meticulously preparing outfits for these occasions than our Barbies spent living them.
With my stitching I loop with colored thread around these memories, circling back to our present lives that are very different than the ones we imagined. The ones where our children grew up on the same street, making elaborate costumes for their Barbies, and riding their bikes barefoot while we sipped wine on the porch together until finally it was late enough and we called them inside from the darkening night.
