SEWING WORDS

Stitches run in lines, like ants.  Each follows on the heels of the one in front, and as they spread out along the seams they form, they bring order to chaos.  Pieces come together and are made coherent.

I am not a seamstress – my dress will tell you that.  She was the marriage of a memory and a reality, and she began with a bolt of fabric that looked like old-fashioned drapes.  My mother and I searched through pattern books for an appropriate dress, and we watched The Sound of Music while we sewed.  If you’ve ever seen the movie, you might remember that Fräulein Maria makes play-clothes for the Von Trapp children out of the drapes in her bedroom.  I used to look at those outfits and marvel at the ingenuity that made sundresses out of curtains.  I don’t know if I envied the Von Trapp girls more for having those beautiful dresses, or Maria for being able to make them.  The fabric in the store – remarkably similar to Maria’s drapes – meant that I could have my dress, and make it, too.

The dress was not a difficult affair – four pattern pieces, seven pieces of fabric, and the marching lines of stitches that bound them together.  It took shape gradually, owing to the setbacks caused by mistakes that Fräulein Maria would surely not have made – a skirt with two left sides, and seams at 5/8 of an inch instead of 3/8!  But the dress emerged, cheery as spring in Austria.

It is the special power of stitches to bind together disparate elements.  But I am not a seamstress.  The interweaving of image and thought needs a stronger thread and a finer needle.  As reality fades to the abstract, words march past in long rows, as intent as ants, but much less uniform.  Stitches become letters, and the width of the seams is no longer as important as the pieces they join together.

Was there ever a quilt as full of unrelated elements as the simplest paragraph?  Words that have blossomed in a trillion contexts find a home in a quiet sentence, made similar only by an arbitrary linkage.  Every sentence is a bedspread, at least: the stitches are not uniform, but they seem to belong together.  Nowhere but in a crazy quilt of the imagination could fabric in a pattern of green against white evoke a song sung high in the mountains.  Nothing but an ant-train of words could stitch them together.

Or perhaps a sewing machine, in a pinch.  I sat there for a few hours, but finished the armholes by hand in a wingback chair.  And if the dress looks like drapes, so much the better, and I will be a Von Trapp child singing in the Alps.