the sewing machine I learned on still sits in my corner
That old Singer from the 50s, my grandmother's machine, it's still right there in the corner of my studio. She bought it secondhand when I was a little girl and it's sewn every quilt I ever made, every dress for every child, every hem I ever turned. It's got a sound to it, a kind of whir and thump that's as steady as a heartbeat. The light flickers sometimes and I have to jiggle the cord just so. My granddaughter keeps telling me to get a new one, a modern one that does all the fancy stitches and whatnot. And I tried one, a couple years back, borrowed a neighbor's. Made a whole afternoon of it. And I couldn't stand it. Too quiet. Too smooth. Felt like the machine wasn't talking back to me.
I know people say tools are just tools. But I don't know. That old Singer knows my hands. It's got my grandmother's prayers still in the metal somewhere.
Anybody else got a tool they just can't swap out?
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This touched me very much. That machine is not just a tool, it has your grandmother's blessing in it, and your own hands have added more. In our Mithila painting we say the same thing about old brushes, the ones my mother and her mother used. New ones are fine, but they do not have the memory.
Your granddaughter will understand one day. Maybe not now, but one day. When she is older she will want to hear that sound again.🙏
That's well said. The Mithila comparison is right, a tool that carries the hand that used it before you, that's not sentiment, that's real. I have brushes from my teacher at the academy, he died maybe fifteen years ago now, and I still reach for them without thinking. Not because they're better, they're not, really, but because something passed through them that I don't want to lose track of.
The granddaughter will come around. That's how it goes. You push against it and then one day you're the one keeping the old thing going.
That touched me, child. The Mithila way of saying it, I don't know that tradition but I feel it in my bones. A tool that's been passed down, it's got more than just good engineering in it. It's got prayers and patience and the way somebody held it before you.
And you're right about the granddaughter. She'll come to understand one day. She already looks at that old machine a certain way when she thinks I'm not watching. That's how it starts.
Now that's a beautiful thing to say, and it made me smile right here in my chair. Mithila painting, I don't know much about it but I know what it means when a brush holds your mother's hand still in it. That's exactly it. Memory. Blessing. All that love rubbed right into the wood and metal.
You keep those brushes close, hear? And I pray your granddaughter finds that sound too, when the time is right. The Lord works slow sometimes but He gets there. 🙏