Threads

This summer, my husband, who teaches third grade, took a week-long seminar on teaching reading. He came home completely fired up for the method and knew he wanted to implement it in his classroom. It would be a lot of work, but he had a vision for how it could be accomplished, and with enthusiasm like that, there is bound to be success.

The kids would all read books specific to them, and Bill wanted some sacks to hang on the backs of the students’ chairs to hold these reading materials. Earlier in the year I had bought several yards of fun fabric at a great price that turned out to be perfect for this. (And just to be clear: buying eight yards of fabric with no project in mind when I already have a craft room full of stuff does not make me a hoarder.)I put together a prototype, which Bill approved, and I got going on the other 23 sacks.

The multicolored fabric had a jungle pattern/theme, so I threaded my machine with green thread. I almost never buy thread; I seem to have an abundance of it, some of it older than my kids. I inherited a lot from my mom (she wasn’t a hoarder, either) and over the years I’ve used much of it, but some colors are time-specific. I have a ton of green spools, so green must not have been popular over the past couple of decades, at least not with me. That was about to change.

My mom taught me to sew, so I often think of her while at the machine. My mom worked her way through college and graduated with a teaching degree. She taught for several years, but I’m not sure she was a great teacher or that she enjoyed it. In those days no one really talked about doing a job that you loved; work was work. She was in it for the paycheck, and as a woman in that day, it was a career that was open to her. When she began teaching in the early days of the baby boom, she easily found employment in the classroom.

When the job market shifted, she took a job as a social worker for the state of Michigan, working with abused and neglected children. I think she was good at protective services, but it also ate her alive. She saw horrible abuse and neglect and had to testify in court about what she saw. She had to take children away from their parents and was spit on and assaulted because of it. The paperwork was formidable and, as with every job, she had coworkers she loved and others she didn’t. She wanted to help children and society, but her work must have felt like emptying the ocean with a teacup. And she could never speak of these things, since all records were confidential. It was a heavy load.

Mom found outlets for coping with stress, and one of them was sewing, although I’m not sure she ever saw it as a creative outlet but more a method to acquire more clothing (still doesn’t make her a hoarder). Over time mom sewed less and turned her creative efforts to other things, like cooking. By the time she died at the very young age of 51, her machine had sat idle for a few years. I inherited it, along with a box of fabric and over a hundred spools of thread.

I used up three spools of mom’s green thread making the book sacks. It seems fitting that the thread of a former teacher and children’s advocate lives on in my husband’s classroom. Green is the color of life, of renewal, of fresh beginnings. Even old thread can provide a supporting role in a new year full of promise and potential.