The Sewing Room

by Liz Zuercher

My fondest childhood memories are the times I spent alone with my mother at the fabric store and in her sewing room.  To most kids that would be the most boring thing on earth.  They’d choose the trip to Disneyland or the first time they hit a home run in Little League or when they won the spelling bee and got all the way to State.  Those would indeed be fond memories, but none of them is mine.

My mother was an artist with fabric.  She made breathtaking original quilts and fabric mosaics that were meant to hang in a window where the light shone through the material like it was a stained glass window.  She didn’t sell any of these creations, but she did give some as gifts.  Mostly, though, she kept the quilts folded and stacked ceiling high in the closet of her sewing room, while the mosaic hangings decorated windows all around our house.  Every room you went into was a kaleidoscope of color.

My mother took refuge in her sewing room, and we kids were not allowed in there – except for me on the days we came back from the fabric store.

My mother wasn’t one to show her emotions and there were times when I wondered if she loved any of us.  But when I saw her in the fabric store, fingering a swatch of chintz or a bolt of striped denim, I caught a rare glimpse of who she was inside.  She had a look of rapture on her face when she held a piece of dull red cotton up to the store window and it transformed into a glowing Christmas tree light.

“Look at this, Emma,” she’d say.  “Isn’t this bee-you-tee-ful?”  She’d string out the syllables just like that, as if that would prolong the joy she felt in her heart at the sight of that light.

I loved seeing her so happy, so alive.  And on those days I felt like I was basking in that glow, too.  I felt like she loved me so much she wanted to share her joy with me.

Together we would choose the fabric for her next project and together we would carry the soft bags home.  Together we would arrange the swatches on the special shelves my father had made for her.  All the colors of the rainbow were there on those shelves, ordered by hue so that the shelves themselves looked like they made up a quilt. 

The shelves took up one whole wall.  Another wall held a corkboard where my mother pinned the paper patterns she drew up.  The pins had balls of color on the ends that my mother placed in the spot those colors would go on her quilt. A third wall was home to the Singer sewing machine where all the work was done, and in the middle of the room was a bare table where she laid out her fabrics to cut and arrange.  She had it in the middle so she could walk all the way around it and look at the design from every angle.

On the fourth side of the room was a big window that looked out onto Grove Street and the jacaranda trees that lined it.  Beneath the window was an upholstered bench where sometimes my mother would sit and stare out at the world beyond her house.  If I caught her doing that before she heard me come in, I thought she seemed like a prisoner dreaming of freedom.  But the sewing room was cheerful and bright and full of the fabrics she loved, so I could never understand why I felt so sad when I saw her there looking out.  When she heard me and turned her eyes away from the window, they brightened when she saw me standing at the edge of her fabric world.  So, when she let me enter that world, I felt close to her, part of what she loved.

I was fourteen when she got sick and almost sixteen by the time she could no longer find the strength to leave the bedroom.  Propped up by pillows in her bed, she’d say,  “Emma, bring me some fabric.”

I’d go to the fabric shelves and fan through the swatches, picking out a few I especially liked.  I carried them to her and laid them out on the bed.

“Make a pretty design,” she’d say.

I’d arrange and re-arrange the swatches until I was satisfied.  Then I’d look up at her for approval.  She’d think a while, biting her lower lip and tilting her head, and then she’d say, “That blue one in the corner – change it with the purple one in the middle.”  I’d make the switch and she’d smile and nod.

“That’s better,” she’d say.  And when I looked at it, I could see that making that one little change had made the design so much more pleasing.  It was magical.  How did she do that?

After she died it took me a long time to go back in the sewing room.  It was just as she’d left it the year before.  Someone besides me had been in there, though, because no dust had gathered.  Every surface was clean and tidy.  The shelves of fabric still formed a beautiful rainbow and when I opened the closet, all the folded quilts were in perfect order.  A life’s work, I thought, as I ran my fingers over them.

I picked up one of the fabric mosaics, took it over to the window and held it up to the light.  A prism of color exploded in the room and I felt my mother’s spirit there, joyful, just as she’d been in the fabric store.