by: Carisa Peterson

My mother made all of my clothes while I was growing up. But it didn’t embarrass me in the way that some homemade clothes are known to turn out. That is, badly enough that they make the kid wearing the clothes want to look down and dig their toes in the dirt once someone notices a lopsided cut, or one sleeve longer than the other and asks them if someone made whatever it is. She easily could have built a profession out of her custom-made clothes, such was her tailoring perfection and insistence upon beautiful, old-world detailing.

There was the occasional slight misfit. For example, she probably erred on the side of roomier than the skin-tight of some of the patterns I picked out in my earlier teen years. But overall, I was proud to wear what she made. It helped that I got to go with her to the fabric store to pick out exactly what I wanted, from pattern to fabric to the notions. I parked myself at the slightly inclined tables with pattern books stacked up on either side, and page through until I’d found my next fabulous outfit. These trips sometimes corresponded with a forthcoming event, like the first day of school or Easter, or the prom (yes, I even wanted my mom to make my prom dress). But sometimes, it was just because I had grown and I needed new clothes.

My mom made my whole family’s clothes—my dad’s, my brother’s, mine, and even winter coats for our dogs. A lot of our garments had qualities I didn’t know weren’t normally part of mass-produced clothing, like linings and lace trim ribbon sewn on top of the hem’s inner seam to create a smooth, elegant finish. My grandmother would take us shopping at the mall twice a year as a treat, and to help fortify our closets in hopes of relieving my mom’s sewing load a bit. I liked the instant gratification of these excursions, but I didn’t notice the differences, nor miss the difference between store-bought clothes and my mother’s clothes until years after leaving the house when my closet’s ratio began to shift. I missed the fine details, and the exceptional quality of some of her items that outlasted others which I could afford to buy myself, and which I was constantly replacing as they’d wear or tear. My mother’s sewn clothes, bathmats, and bags still live on. I use many of them today.

I knew she kept some of the scraps of fabric after she had finished making something. I remember there always being a large bag of them, kept underneath her sewing machine. She’d pull from it to cut blankets for my Barbie house, or to make tiny little fuzzy crib liners for my Sylvanian Family’s baby bunny crib. My mother also quilted. I am sure she kept her scraps for these occasions when she didn’t have a growing child to spend her time making clothes for, and the scraps would end up quilted into throw pillows or actual quilts. I liked going through them as a young child, in conjunction with dumping and sorting the tin of loose extra buttons she kept—my first brush with pee-wee graphic design as I’d notice the different colors, patterns, textures and shapes and decide what I liked, and what I didn’t.

It wasn’t until after my mother had passed away (relatively shortly after my dad had) and my brother and I began the humbling task of sorting through my parents’ life together in the things they’d left behind within our home, that it became clear that my mom never got rid of any of the scraps. That bag of scraps that would sit underneath the sewing machine? There were actually bags of scraps.

There were not just bags of scraps, stored, either. I knew we had a sizable task ahead of us to make some sense of, and sort and clean what was left after we’d spent the last many years focused on escorting both of my parents through their respective unduly robust ailments.

When the condolences faded and the flowers wilted and had been put in the compost, everything else remained. Once the eerie, slightly freeing feeling of being orphaned at middle-age had begun to take root in our evolving identities, there was everything from my life to pick through—in bags, in stacks, in piles, in corners, and boxes. I could not come up with any item from my memory that didn’t eventually surface as we tried to give due process and consideration to the, well—the process. A bean-weighted monkey that came from Avon—which I’d loved, and that could do tricks like hang by itself from my shoulders once I’d tossed it up joyfully to land in a hug around my neck— was there. Also, there was my Oh Jenny! Playset, which I remember begging for for months and placing at the very top of my Christmas List. I was relieved that I could retrieve it for my daughter. There was a dog Halloween costume, made by my mom for my brother’s toddler-hood and which subsequently costumed me. I’d only seen it in pictures, the hundreds of times I’d go through our photo albums for fun. It was tucked in with the rest of my brother’s and my greatest costume hits, spanning maybe 15 years until we’d grown too old and too busy to dress up for Halloween. Cookie cutters, the sight of which instantly triggered the memory of the taste of the cookies my mom would always make with them. My dad’s Army uniform. The china my mother would actually use, and which we ate our meals from on special days and which she would have the time to carefully wash and put safely away.  It was an archaeological dig, layer by layer revealing our family memories by way of what would appear to anyone else as just clutter.

My dad had become fairly sedentary over the last many years of his life while dealing with Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia, so my mom was in charge of which things went where as children grew up and out of the house, and evidently—she kept it all. She stored, and stored, and put, and put…until she didn’t, anymore. She just stopped. There was nothing more to store. She quit all of her sewing and fiber arts, and letter-writing, and handicrafts and quickly settled into dementia, which she had been diagnosed with just as we were beginning to get a handle on my dad’s worsening physical condition.

Up until their bodies were each overtaken by their different diseases, they lived an understated, beautifully traditional life together in what appears to me in hindsight to be near-perfect balance and symbiosis, borne out of cyclical respect for each other’s gifts, unique strengths, and differing sacrifices and resulting contributions to our family’s well-being and its ultimate success. My brother and I learned a work ethic from both of them, as they each gave their all within their respective roles, and the results from each of their efforts were visible, and acutely felt.

They were both part of the Silent Generation, though I am a Xennial. I have yet to know anyone my age who lives with having known a bit of life as it once was. Those even a couple of decades or more years older than I am, but younger than my parents, have a hard time admitting what my parents’ generation did was better than how they went on to do things.  My dad worked in mid-level mineral research, and my mom retired from nursing early to focus on motherhood. They made a point to live within their means, but structured their family life to prioritize undistracted time together. They would go on to help my brother and me with college expenses and to have some funds available to pay for their own in-home assisted medical care as the curtain was coming down. They did this with simple, and homegrown (whenever possible) food—iceberg honeymoon salads with homemade dressing as the rule to accompany simple dinners; occasionally a fresh garden tomato slice on a lettuce leaf, a pear garnished with a bit of candied ginger, or carrot slaw. My mother hung clothes to dry on a line. They bought a tiny brick home on a large fenced, grassy lot with “woods” providing room for my brother and me to run freely without any agenda or prescribed activities, and with a little kitchen window from which my mom could see us as she went about her tasks. They culled strength from the mundane, and found their bearings in routine as life continued to swirl around them, increasing its pace to today’s mad, disorienting pitch.

Today, we like to pay lip service to money being time. But for my parents, this was a heavily weighted guiding principle. I’m sure they were keenly aware of the opportunity cost of setting their life up the way they did, but in the end—there was time to do things mindfully and with joyful consideration because both parents weren’t incessantly occupied, leaving the kids’ care and attention and home management as just those many more things on the self-propagating “to do” list. As is so often the case—for everything we try to do and delegate to make life easier, up crops a string of tasks which surround it to support it. Want your house cleaned? Find and hire a housekeeper and tend to the ensuing bills and paperwork, but that one’s probably not very good for one reason or another, so find and hire another. Want your kids out of your hair so you can work? Punch the numbers and apply for the financial support programs, spend double the time of a commute to drop-off and pick-up and tend to the regulatory guidelines, and be ready to emotionally finesse and gimmick all of your kids’ transitions to try to ensure proper social-emotional development. Want to save money on food because you’re spending so much on housekeeping and child care? Try to covertly meal plan and coupon-hunt at your desk, meanwhile both forgetting what you have at home and getting home too late to cook with the produce you actually bought, before it goes bad and you have to come up with something else for the rest of the week because you don’t have time to go to the store.

Shortcuts aside, family life then and now is, and will always be, a series of things that still need to be done. This is to say nothing of budget hacks often being only achievable with real time to execute them, like effective meal planning and hanging clothes on a line to dry.

The things in my parents’ home were able to get done in-time and under budget, leaving evenings for bike rides, homework, sewing and discussions spurred from watching Nova on PBS while my mom wet-braided my hair after a bath so I would have crimps the next day. That’s just what my parents were into; think of the untapped trove of guilt-free time for modern pursuits, if our modern priorities were rearranged and we let go of our concept of what it means to be “modern,” which is seeming to fail our children and our society at-large in so many ways. Sundays were honored after church as family leisure days, not as laundry days. Memories weren’t something that waited to be made during the few days at Disneyland if parents had saved up enough money and vacation time. We made ours together as a family. . . every day (and I still made it to Disneyland as part of a church youth trip).

As I opened bag after bag of fabric scraps, I looked and saw that these were the scraps of memories. There was the pink and white striped puff-graphic knit from which my mom had made matching sweatshirts for my best friend and me. There was her black knit with roses woven into the tapestry of the threads from which she’d sewn one of her dressier winter tops. It would appear in a handful of various milestone-event photographs. There was the dark-blue-on-light-blue striped polyester that she’d made one of my dad’s Saturday polo shirts out of, just before they’d figured out how to re-texture polyester. It’s graininess feels like my dad’s shoulders on a warm summer afternoon, and smells like his fresh cut grass and iced tea on the porch. There was the plaid from one of my mom’s skirts she’d wear when teaching my Sunday School class. And there was the soft, printed fleece that had been made into a baby bunting (now called a “sleep sack”) that I’d seen us as babies wearing in photos, but that had an even more solid place in my heart as my own baby-dolls’ bunting.

Just as people tend to bury their worst memories, so too, I realized it is possible to bury good ones. Perhaps as culture, and values, and the way we spend our collective time continued to rapidly modernize and devolve in the swirling sea lapping at the edges of the bucolic life my parents had enjoyed, my mother felt her children being pulled into the undertow, once we were set free to make our own decisions. Maybe my mother didn’t know what else to do but store the memories in a physical way, knowing she wouldn’t be able to keep them very well for us otherwise, if she didn’t. As a working mother of two young children, I am relentlessly pulled in all directions, and the problems of today’s world weigh heavily on my mind. Revisiting the good memories through my family’s possessions as I picked them up, one by one, was almost too much to bear. It was like unleashing the Spirit of Family Past and he smells like sunscreen and almond spritz and is accompanied by the John Rutter music my mom would have spinning away on her CD player.

It opened a wound—only somehow, the pain is felt on the outside while looking into it.

I suspect it was difficult for my brother, too, as we went about deciding to finally get rid of many of the physical vestiges of our familial memories, because he didn’t really participate if I wasn’t there. Bags left to go through, or to be taken to the thrift store or thrown away at the end of each of my visits would just be moved to fill in the space made by the ones we already had.

They say that grief is similar. It never really goes away; you just learn to live with it, and to move it around in different ways. I grieve my dad; I grieve my mom. I know I always will. But I also grieve the loss of their mindful way of being in the world, which had a way of revealing meaning itself, by simplifying to focus on what matters, and giving themselves time and investing their few resources to curate a vibrant, full life. They cultivated and were steadfast stewards to just what (and who) they loved in a way that is rare today. The light that still emanates from their choices seeps through the cracks of my modern world-shaped and hardened life, illuminating everything that it touches in a way that makes the trappings of living—like family, work, and leisure— breathtakingly poignant and heartbreakingly indistinct as they each whiz by in my view like a This Is Your Life overexposed and on speed, and without time to properly experience any of it. I consider this illumination to be a gift, which is mine from having known, and now as I remember, a bit of their way of living; that is—life, as it once was.

Carisa Peterson is a mother of two, a worker bee, a published writer, and a produced playwright who writes in the wee hours from her home in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Her work can be seen on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Summit County Home,  Her View from Home, The Wisdom Daily, Real Mom Daily, Elephant Journal, and in the successful 4 week-run of Curves Ahead at Breckenridge, Colorado’s Backstage Theatre (2015).

She enjoys doodling topiary trees in her spare time. Follow Carisa on Twitter @LynnoType or visit www.carisapeterson.com.