My grandma’s Singer was black with a yellow and orange floral pattern on the side. It folded down like origami into a table when she wasn’t using it, but mostly I remember it upright, with her sitting hunched over her sewing, foot pumping the treadle while I stood beside her.
She let me open the thread drawer, which tipped out, to see the rainbow of spools all lined up neatly inside. The bottom drawer on her right full to its brim – if you pushed a hand in, it disappeared into a tiny sea of buttons, cool and slippery against your fingers.
The sewing machine had its own little oil can, a miniature version of the one Dorothy used to oil the Tin Man. My grandma used it periodically to oil the sewing machine. It clicked once and then again exactly like Dorothy’s. I remember it was the Tin Man’s tears and the rain that rusted him up.
I stayed with my grandma during the days in summer. The year my granddaddy died, she cried all summer long, sometimes tucked into the corner of her fancy sofa, other times sitting on the edge of the white bathtub against a black and white checkerboard tiled wall, her sunburnt skin made even redder in contrast with the black and white. She let me peel the skin off her shoulders while she cried.
In the middle of April, a month into our stay at home order due to the pandemic, I suddenly start Googling embroidery kits. I’ve never done needlework, don’t know how to knit, and while my grandma gave me both her Singers, I’ve only used them a few times, making curtains and a few throw pillow covers in my late 20s. Her tabletop Singer holds court in our guest room on the dresser; the larger one with the now empty rainbow drawer is in my writing garret. My grandma is long gone from this world, but I still bury my hand in her drawer full of buttons, click the tiny, and now empty, oil can.
The website that lures me in is The French Needle. It has kits, mostly very expensive and certainly too difficult for a beginner. Scissors, thimbles, needles, pages of spools of thread for embroidery and cross-stitch. Every color, in sets. Rainbows in packages. I want them all.
My grandma was quirky and creative. Would pluck a writing spider from its web to show it wouldn’t hurt me, then set it back again. She planted flowers and cleaned out creek banks along her property, took me to the cemetery where we left flowers for my granddaddy, and tidied all the graves. Once her long silvery hair caught fire when she was burning trash, and she tipped up the taller than me, empty kitchen trash can on top of her head to smother the flame. I can see her in the bright morning sun, tall cylinder-headed woman, scary and then herself again.
Late at night, I add items to the website’s shopping cart, click check out to see the total. Leave the tab open for later, close it the next morning without purchasing. I go back about once a week and fill a new and extravagant shopping cart that I do not buy. A friend says I want to stitch the loose threads of this pandemic together into something beautiful.
I think mostly I want to do what my grandma did, smother the flame, turn what was scary into something new, the entire color spectrum of threads in a drawer, on a website, each as beautiful as the other, and in concert, breathtaking.
Billie Hinton is a writer and psychotherapist who lives on a small horse farm in North Carolina. She keeps horses and bees, studies native plants, and wrangles cats and Corgis. Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, Not One Of Us, Manifest-Station, Riverfeet Press Anthology, Streetlight Mag, and Longridge Review, among others.