Skip to main content

Sewing Machines Crashing Until they Find Work

We are an old-fashioned family, finally!

As if it were the Second Coming of Fruition,
news sources bombard us with evidence
that kids cannot afford independence,
and parents cannot escape from
the kids living at home with Mom and Dad
after college,
after work,
after all.

Mari and I, each having been married before,
have had complex opportunities
to extend our family ties.
Part of those opportunities has been a spare bedroom or two.

I have long been a fierce defender of the living room couch,
never granting--hardly ever granting:  reluctantly granting--
that it might become a bed.  I have stoutly defended my right
to stumble into my own living room, in the middle of the night,
and belch and scratch myself if I needed or wanted to;
where and as I wanted to.

The Lord of the Manor (I have always maintained)
should be free to get up in the morning,
ramble down the driveway to get the newspaper,
and make and drink coffee without having to do it
in what has become a makeshift bedroom annex
occupied by someone crashing on the couch.

Here in Tucson, we live in a small house
with a couple of those ten-foot-square "children's bedrooms"
in addition to our own more adequate room.
We stuffed a queen bed into one of them,
declared it to be for guests, and used the other
for cutting cloth, carding wool, sewing stuff,
googling patterns, and storing pencils and knitting needles.

"There is not room in here to sew!", Mari said,
so she moved the needlecraft and pattern guessing
out to the dining room table.  When it appeared
that she was going to move the couch to make room
for the bobbin racks, I declared upon the altar of God
eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
(I owe that line to Thomas Jefferson.)

The queen bed has gone into storage.
The sewing machines have gone to the guest room.
It is something like having the kids move back home.

It is, like having the kids move back in, just for the while,
a curiously mixed pleasure:  there is no longer a guest room,
but there hardly ever were any guests, anyway.
It is, on the whole, a much more sensible use of the space.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more