I saw him there as I hauled clothes back and forth between the laundry room and my closet; he had spread out like a picnic on my by-chance made bed. The Tupperware bowl I use for a “sewing kit” was part of his spread. “I’m making covers for my ring collection.”
“Fine. Fine,” I say, wondering why he’s doing it on my bed, and then I remember that sometimes, still, he wants to be where I am.
I continue to fold laundry and move in a worn path past the bed. “Can I use this material from Halloween?” he asks. “Fine. Fine,” I say.
We unfold and refold our activities around him the next hour — his brother, his dad, me. I move to other reaches of the house. I forget about him, there, on the bed.
When he shows up at my elbow he speaks in a wave, spilling, “Umm. I cut your red bed-cover-thing. But it’s OK. I sewed it up.”
“You what?” I ask.
“I cut the bed cover thing,” and then the rush of “but, it’s-OK-I-sewed-it-up.”
Of course he cut it. I know this instantly as I remember my required sewing class in seventh grade and the feel of the scissors cutting down through two layers too many because a fold had gotten caught in the path of my shears. And I remember the pinch-faced sewing teacher preaching, “Avoid the ‘Drat!’ Smooth your fabric perfectly flat, check twice before you cut, and keep your scissors against the mat!”
I say to my son, “show me.”
And he does. He’s taken jet-black buttonhole thread and sewed a 2-inch Frankenstein scar smack up the middle of the red king-sized bed cover.
“OK,” I say because I’m mostly speechless and staring.
He didn’t tie a knot in either end of the thread; it joins the cut edges like train track trailing off to a single rail. Strings dangle at either end of the gash.
Already feeling retrospectively peacock-proud of myself for not yelling at him, I send him from the room, and call my mom. She’s a quilter and made quilts with both boys this summer, so I figure this sewing thing is her fault.
“It’s called an honest patch,” she tells me. She explains that some antique quilts contain them — smack in the middle — an off-color, off-shape splat patched in to cover a hole and keep the blanket functional. An honest patch. “It looks like a tarantula leg in the middle of the bed,” I tell her.
“You can buy a new one,” she says. “Or let it show.”
Hmmm. This story would end perfectly if I wrote that I let his knotless black gash remain. But true stories rarely tie up so neatly, and I am very far from perfect.
I pulled my son back to the bedside and showed him the colored spools rolling around the bottom of the Tupperware bowl. He said he’d picked black because he was only using needles that were already threaded and he’d used all the other colors.
I show him how to thread. We choose a bright red and replace the surgical black stitches. I knot the end. The new red thread and the pale red material don’t match at all. The cut shows. An honest patch.
And I write about this today because it is New Year’s week — a time of lists and resolutions, a time to ponder our lack of perfection. How can we better hide our flaws?
It is also a night, this last of 2008, when our world ripped wide in too many places.
I’m referring to much more than a blanket here when I say, we all have spots that are cut and jagged and in need of deep repair.
I wish I believed that joy and thanksgiving are what teach us of God — but I don’t.
We learn of God, and hope and light, by moving through darkness. Our marred edges, our failures and breaks, our attempts at rejoining, healing, mending and our coming up again and again out of the sludge are why we know the light.
We can’t replace everything. Sometimes we just have to work with what we have, fix what we can, adjust. Pray for patches this year — honest ones. They show some — and it’s OK.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
