The Rhythm of Friendship

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My sophomore year at BYU, I bought a used sewing machine. It was an old Necchi with a pink carrying case which reeked of the 1950s. It has been my dependable companion for my entire married life. There was a time when I longed for a new, fancy machine with lots of thing-a-ma-jigs which were supposed to make complicated project construction easy and affordable. But sewing teaches you that nothing is as “easy” as it is purported to be.

As a child in Primary, learning to sew had been part of the curriculum considered essential for young girls. Plus, my mother was an expert seamstress.  I remember her making my dad stand still while she pinned last-minute adjustments to the tailoring of a suit she made for him. He wore it to church for many years. It still hung in his closet long after she died.

I was twelve when I finished my first dress. It was yellow dotted-swiss with a chain of daises lining the waist. I think I may have taken the zipper out at least three times before I figured out how to make it lay smoothly up the back of the bodice. I seem to remember tears and throwing spools of thread as part of the process. But my mother patiently sat next to me, encouraging me “try it again” until my finished product passed her exacting standards.

In a family with a bunch of kids, that used sewing machine from my college years produced dozens of pajamas and nightgowns, matching shorts for a trip to Disneyland—so I could spot a member of my brood from anywhere in the park. (It should be noted that my sons hated those shorts, but six identical pairs meant the youngest one had the enviable duty of wearing out the hand-me-downs. I’m sure the neighbors thought his summer attire was magically transforming itself size-wise at the bottom of a dark drawer for wear the following season!) I made pants, shirts, church dresses, T-shirts, costumes, even regularly altering Scout uniforms from short to taller and then back again for use from one son to the next.

One memorable Fast Sunday, eleven babies were blessed in our ward—all born in the prior two or three months, including my Daughter #2 and a neighbor’s set of triplets. (The blessing took the entirety of the old 90-minute meeting without time left for a single testimony.) I made zip-up sleepers as welcome gifts for most of those newborns on the old sewing machine because there simply wasn’t money in the budget to shop for a present at Target. I got to the point I could assembly-line a pair of sleeper jammies from cut out to finish in less than two hours.

The kids grew up. The boys revolted at wearing matching anything; the girls found jobs to finance their personal fashion-styles, and I sort of moved out of the sewing machine business–until Daughter #2 got married. She wanted me to make her wedding dress. Oh dear.

My sister was the wedding dress maker. Like my mother, she had a gift for envisioning a project while standing in a fabric store touching a piece of cloth. Over the years she had made more than two dozen—maybe three?–wedding dresses for beloved friends and family, most of which she simply listened to what the bride hoped for and then designed each dress herself.

My sister’s daughter had been living with us for some time working and going to college because her dad was stationed in Germany when she graduated from high school. As love and luck would have it, she also was getting married—the week before my daughter. The two girls decided to hold their receptions seven days apart in our back yard.

My sister, whose husband had been recently transferred to Phoenix, loaded up her sewing machine and came to stay for a couple of weeks. We set up our two machines back-to-back in my bedroom, spent a couple of days in fabric stores across the valley, laid luxurious white satin and silk across my dining room table as a cutting board, and then we began to sew.

By then, that worn machine and I had been friends for more than 40 years. Because it was old and familiar, it took its time with the delicate, slippery fabric, gently easing its needles through thousands of stitches as my sister and I talked, making up for the years her husband had been assigned too far away to visit on expensive phone calls. My machine never faltered; it kept up it’s steady pace of thread and bobbin in time with the purr of her shiny high-tech instrument, the two of them a musical background for the celebrations that were to come.

The brides were beautiful, each in her turn. My sister and I wept together as our daughters knelt across an altar a week apart. I savored those days as I switched on my old machine last week to begin a baby quilt for my first great-grandchild. It beat a song as it hummed along the seams, clearly as pleased as I about the new baby. Together we stitched a welcome for a fourth generation. In an age which worships youth and change and cost, there is a place for the wisdom of experience. And there is beauty in the gentle history of our long, familiar bond.