Embellished

Little pieces of my childhood are suddenly everywhere in my home. Having come into marriage with no physical reminders of my past, it’s both comforting and disarming to turn around and find the pair of owl figurines I loved as a child, or my mother’s sewing basket sitting on a table. So many things haven’t yet found a space here and so are floating, free form, until they land in a place that feels right to me.

One of the things that gravitated right away to its permanent home was a little wicker basket of cloth napkins. I found them on my mother’s washing machine, freshly laundered and folded even though I know for a fact she hadn’t used them in two decades or more. I’ll never know her intent on pulling them out of storage and prepping them in the days leading up to her final hospitalization, but it doesn’t matter. I know God’s intent, and it was this: that three days after her funeral, her daughter would stand in the still life of a left behind kitchen, taking in the details, and find her eyes drawn to the familiar but long-forgotten shape of the basket that sat in the center of the table in another kitchen, a lifetime ago. And her daughter would go to the basket, expecting to find it had been put to use for bills or pencils or some other mundane thing, but instead there would be the napkins. The blue calico ones the daughter had called “Holly Hobbies,” and the cream linen ones the mother had embroidered so carefully over the course of the last, long winter before school came, when the whole house never seemed to stop smelling like orange rind tea. An intact memory, waiting to travel home with her.

The napkins went instantly to the window seat nook near our kitchen table. Birdie was instantly smitten, taking them out to sort, folding, refolding, running her fingers over the patterns, asking me questions about memories I haven’t pulled from the drawers of the past since before I moved away from the home where domestic touches were part of my mother’s thoughts.

At the bottom of the stacks, she found a half dozen plain, blue-edged linen napkins.

“Why aren’t these embroidered?” she asked with the innocence of a child who has never started a project with the best of intentions and realized decades later that it was still unfinished.

“Maybe Oma ran out of floss. Or time. More likely time. Or maybe she was just done. Who knows?”

Birdie has the heart of a romantic, coupled with an insatiable optimism and the ability to see opportunity everywhere.

“Can I finish them?” she asked after some thought. “If you think Oma wouldn’t mind.”

I told her that I was sure Oma would not only not mind, but that she’d have been delighted at the prospect. And so Birdie pulled out my favorite embroidery pattern book, Doodle Stitching: The Motif Collection (affiliate link), found her hoop, floss, and needle book, and began.

Her work is still in progress. A snowless winter 40 years later finds these final linen napkins being “fancied,” this time in the hands of a less accomplished but equally dedicated seamstress. It was not anything my mother could have ever foreseen, but yes… it is what God always planned. I’m sure of it, and it gives me comfort.