My cousin brought me three trash bags of clothes back in March when they cleaned out my aunt's house, and I finally went through them Saturday. Most of it went to the mission, but I pulled out my mother's church dresses. She wore the same four to Sunday service for close to thirty years. That navy one with the little covered buttons down the front, she had that on the day I got married and the day we buried her sister.

Twenty-two yards, roughly, once I take the seams apart. Plenty of cloth. I've had it laid out on the floor of the back room since Saturday afternoon.

I can't cut it.

I know better than anybody that cloth is meant to be used. My grandmother would have had it pieced and quilted before the week was out, and she'd have looked at me funny for standing over it the way I have been. But there's a thing that happens when a piece of fabric still holds the shape of somebody. You unfold it and there's the wear under the arm, and the hem where she kept letting it down and taking it back up. That hem's a whole record of her. I don't want to lose it in a seam allowance.

The other three I could cut. Don't ask me why that one's different.

So right now the navy dress is folded on the cedar chest and I'm working around it, piecing the green one with some old shirting I've had since the nineties. And I've decided the navy can wait until it tells me what it wants to be. Some cloth you have to sit with. Sometimes a good while.

If you've got a piece in your own stash you can't bring yourself to cut, I'd like to know I'm not the only one holding a pair of shears and just standing there.