- Photograph Courtesy of Karen Kirchhoff

My grandmother recently died.  Verna had lived with her husband in the same house for over 50 years. When she died at 92, emptying the house was a huge project for her children.  They discovered Verna was quite the hoarder.  Amongst shoeboxes full of letters dating as far back as 1945 (sometimes envelopes without even a letter inside), there were receipts from the dairy farm, sewing store, and old bills.  She stowed many an old magazine under her bed and had dozens of sewing patterns from the decades of her craft… After the many days of sorting and divvying, my mother sent me a few boxes with select belongings of grandma’s.  My mother, being a woman of her own mysterious ways sometimes not to be understood, sent me a few items that had no practical application: like threaded bobbins to a sewing machine 4 states and 22 hours away.  I nearly threw them out, but it seemed so tragic and almost offensive to dispense of them with grandma so recently transformed into ash and atmosphere.  There was a romantic, mysterious aura to these newly displaced and reclaimed objects.  The bobbins are sleek and shiny encircled by unexplained layers of different colored thread—packed tightly like rock stratum— suggesting the archeology of her attire.  Various other sewing tools accompany: old needles piercing their original, quaint and tiny envelope packages; hand knitted laces torn from a garment; a sewing machine foot and screw; wooden tubes that once housed new needles.  These items wonderfully embody Verna and have captured and frozen a history of her motions: wrapping, pinning, uncapping, tightening, unlatching, her hands flowing forward, drawing back like the tides.  Pinching a needle, she wove her ever-aging hand to and fro directing the orchestra.  These are the miniature instruments and stage of her life: the whir of the sewing machine dredging up yards and yards of gold.

- Gifted Object and story from Shinara

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