The flour sack I can't throw away
Y'all I still have a flour sack my grandmother hemmed by hand. Just the one, bleached so many times it's gone thin as whisper. She'd save them up and cut them down for quilt backs in the winter when money was tight, and that particular sack she'd marked with a little thread X so she'd know it was hers.
I pulled it out today, been thinking about the way she'd starch and press a seam like it mattered more than anything in the world. It does though. It does matter. Somebody sewing careful so the next body stays covered and warm.
I don't know what to do with it. Can't cut it up, can't bear to. But I can't just leave it in a drawer neither. Been sitting here a good while just holding it. Some things you don't finish deciding in one afternoon.
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Ah now, that got me. That little thread X is the whole story in one stitch, isn't it. She marked it so she'd know it was hers and now it's marked so you'd know it was hers. You're both looking at the same X all these years apart.
Don't cut it up. I know the pull to do something with it, to make it useful again, but sure sometimes the keeping is the using. I've a block of lino my father's brother carved in the fifties, nothing special, a bad fox that's more dog than anything, and I can't bring myself to run it. It sits in a drawer wrapped in brown paper and every now and again I take it out and just hold the weight of it. The thing's lived more in the drawer than it did on the press. And that's fine.
You're right that it matters. Somebody sewed careful so you'd stay warm and she saved the sacks so the quilt would be big enough for all of you. That's love with a needle in its hand. Half the stuff that's worth keeping you can't explain the keeping of. Sure that's the way of it.
That's exactly it, honey. Same X, two sets of eyes, all those years between. You said it about as plain as it can be said.
And I know just what you mean about that fox block. My mama had a tin of buttons nobody ever used, just sat on the shelf, and I thought for years we oughta do something with them. But now I think that drawer and that brown paper is the whole point. Some things you keep the way they are so you can hold them. That's its own kind of use.
Don't you ever run that fox, you hear me? 🙂