Handwork — By Adrienne Pilon

artwork by Adam Straus

The chuppah that served as my wedding canopy started out as a white linen tablecloth, one made by my great-grandmother sometime between the World Wars. With close friends, I spent some happy hours embellishing that tablecloth, trimming it with satin, sewing in tiny pearls and sequins.

     I don’t possess the skill of my maternal great-grandmother or my great aunts, all of whom left me a legacy of linens: tablecloths, kitchen towels, handkerchiefs, doilies, napkins, pillowcases, all stitched, embroidered, crocheted by those never-idle hands.

     Those women spent their days working jobs or at home rearing children, tending rabbits (the family owned a rabbitry), canning fruits, cleaning, cooking, slaughtering. Scouring and sharpening the knives. Only at day’s end did they sit, but not for rest. That’s when they made those linens, not just for daily use, but special occasions, too: baptismal gowns and holiday tablecloths, and bridal accessories. Those hands wielded small, sharp embroidery scissors, knitting needles, and crochet hooks of every size.

     Those scissors, needles, and hooks had another purpose. They could all double as inconspicuous surgical tools. My great-grandmother gave herself abortions in the bathtub, at least three, with crochet hooks. My mother told me this the way one tells family lore: slightly lowered voice, part matter-of-fact, part gossipy. Can you believe it? She was a tough one.

     From all I’ve heard, it’s true. It’s likely that Ma Hall, as we called her, decided she’d had enough children, five of them in quick succession, starting when she was sixteen and married off to a man she barely knew, a man twice her age. And it probably was enough: she was left to raise those children after her husband died of tuberculosis and the money ran out. Times were hard. And Ma Hall was hard enough, and skilled enough, to make sure that ending a pregnancy didn’t go wrong: a tub full of the hottest water she could stand, the hook, the embroidery floss, the slow pulling out of everything that tried to nest inside. The cleaning up afterwards, made easier by the hot water.

     She did what she had to do, my mother said. They all did.

     This same great-grandmother fell from the balcony of the family apartment building onto the concrete courtyard. She might have lost a baby in that fall, an aunt told me, though she couldn’t be sure; this aunt seemed to mix up all the pregnancies gone missing, including one of her own—an abortion engineered by her own mother, a nurse. But Ma Hall recovered soon enough, went back to her favorite chair in the living room, sewing, embroidering, crocheting. The sole photograph I have of my great-grandmother is of her at age ninety or so, sitting in that chair, handwork in her lap.

     I no longer save those linens for special occasions, but use them daily, touch them, linger over them. When the edges begin to fray, or holes appear in the fabric, I consider which implement is best for repair from my selection of shiny new needles and pins. I have the linens, but did not inherit the crochet hooks, the tiny embroidery scissors, all the sharp and straight and crooked things, all the metal and hard things that women employed for every imaginable task. In my mind, I inventory what might have been resting in my great-grandmother’s sewing basket, those blameless, everyday tools lying gleaming and clean, ready to be picked up and used at any moment.

Adrienne Pilon is a poet, essayist, educator, and booster of literary magazines. Recent work appears in Tendon; The New Verse News, Solstice, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. She lives with her family in North Carolina and sometimes California.