You might as well know that I’m a 51-year-old guy with a bright orange and red plastic toolbox that is covered in Kraft Cheesasaurus Rex stickers, which I obtained as an adult using box tops from macaroni and cheese, and which for the past 20 years I’ve used as a sewing kit. As you lift the lid, a tray divided into little compartments raises up, just like a regular toolbox, exposing a larger area below for bigger items.
I mention this because I cleaned out that box today, something I’d always promised to do “some day.”
There’s a lifetime of sewing in my little plastic toolbox. That’s because I don’t sew as frequently as some people. My grandmother, for example, lived on a farm in the 1920’s when sewing the family clothes was part of daily life. My mother learned from her. My sister grew up sewing because she was good at it, and she still sews a lot now. People like that have entire rooms for sewing, with chests and cupboards and sewing machines and funny scissors and favorite patterns and a well-lit workspace. Not me. I work strictly on a “need to sew” basis, mending things only when absolutely necessary. And it’s all done by hand. I’m capable of using a sewing machine for short periods of time, but only after someone else has looped the thread through its little maze, and used their own confident, knowing fingers to properly place the bobbin.
I can replace a button. Repair torn fabric. Re-affix a belt loop. Mend a seat-cover the dog has chewed. I sew once or twice a year, and today I repaired an oven mitt that had split down the seam when I’d washed it and dried it, turned it inside out to dry more, and then turned it back, and it split.
When you sew as rarely and as simply as I do, you only need one needle. But you can’t buy one sewing needle because they’re sold in big packets, so that’s what you buy. Each time I need to sew something, I take a needle out of the little packet, sew, and then drop the needle into the compartment below the little tray. The eye of the needle still holds its last wisp of unused thread. Over the years I’ve tossed a lot of needles down there, each with six or seven odd inches of brown, gray, blue, white, black, or silver thread that I’m too lazy to remove.
Each needle, and more importantly each scrap of thread, tells a story. Things mended at the last minute. Things mended as quickly as possible with sweaty fingers before a ceremony or celebration. It just has to hold for a few hours. Things easy or difficult. Things that took a minute, and things that took an hour. Things finished with high or low degrees of success, and things I gave up on rather than finish at all. Things at different times for each member of the family. A pocket, clasp, hem, shoulder strap, button, or drawstring. A pillowcase. A bathrobe. The Velcro strap on a small terrycloth eye mask with little sheep on the front. And last August, the heavy cloth handle of a suitcase, the afternoon before our youngest daughter left for college. As she organized her things down the hall and prepared to move out of her room here at home, I sat on the balcony for more than an hour, fastening, strengthening, and reinforcing each strap where the handle attached to the suitcase. I needed reassurance that this suitcase handle, and frankly all current attachments involving my daughter and me, were strong enough to last forever. Or that if they did fail, the blame could never be mine.
Today, for no reason, after finishing with the oven mitt, I dug around in the bottom of the toolbox for all the old needles. One by one I carefully picked up each one, pulled out the strand of thread left over from its once urgent and now forgotten task, and placed each strand in a small pile next to the sewing kit. Then I poked each needle into a pincushion where it could be easily accessed next time. In the end, it only took a minute to empty out those little remnants, although I’d been procrastinating it for decades.
Then I walked across the room and dropped the little ball of thread into the wastebasket. It seemed to weigh nothing.