A couple of weeks ago while at breakfast I was listening to my friends, Maren and Amy, discuss handicraft and the special little gifts their mothers made.

Thursday, October 18, 2001

A couple of weeks ago while at breakfast I was listening to my friends, Maren and Amy, discuss handicraft and the special little gifts their mothers made. I have heard of people who when talking to a legless man can’t speak of anything but shoes, but knowing my problems it does seem to me that my friends ought to be able to converse on something besides handicraft.

There’s always the on-going war, the anthrax scare and whether or not it’s a violation of the Constitution for children to sing &uot;God Bless America.&uot; Why must I be singled out for persecution?

After all, I’ve always made an effort. My maternal grandmother, who lived with us until her death when I was six, was 15 years old when the Civil War ended. I adored her, but I probably know more about the Victorian concept of what children should be than most people alive today.

By the time I was four I could thread a needle with the best of them. True, it was a needle with a very large eye. In view of my subsequent history I still wonder whether I threaded with my left or right hand.

Until I was school age I had very few little girls to play with and while boys are better than nothing, there are many little subtle refinements that are to be learned only from other girls. God knows I was willing.

Part of the problem, I suspect, was that the girls that eventually moved into the neighborhood were for the most part older than I. They embroidered. EMBROIDERED! You cannot believe the amount of envy that stirred up in my childish heart.

At that time of my life I was not a big eater, but in face of this frustration I stopped eating altogether and whimpered around the house about the necessity of my learning to embroider.

It was the dead of summer in an era when air conditioning was still unknown.

I was not yet six years old and my mother thought I should be outdoors enjoying whatever breeze might come my way. She even suggested that I put on my bathing suit and she’d come out doors and turn the hose on me. It was an offer I’d never have refused under normal conditions. My passionate desire to embroider as the big girls did made the prospect of dancing around under a stream from the hose nothing short of revolting.

Fearing no doubt for my sanity my mother took one of my father’s fine linen handkerchiefs, sketched a rabbit peering out of a bucket, from an illustration in one of my books, on it, and enclosed it with an embroidery hoop.

She showed me how to outline it with red embroidery silk and went back to her gardening, leaving me, needle in one hand, hoop in the other. She should have stuck around. Not entirely comfortable holding the embroidery, I hooked my feet over the rounds of the chair I was sitting on, laid the embroidery in my lap, and had at it.

Strangely enough it wasn’t quite as dismal a failure as most of my handicraft efforts. A simple outline stitch around a clearly depicted drawing isn’t too complicated. Unless, of course, as you’re plunging the needle up and down through the piece you’re working on into your skirt.

It was a long afternoon, but, tongue protruding from one corner of my mouth, I stuck it out. By time my mother returned to the scene it lacked only eight or nine stitches of being finished.

She was unstinting in her praise. Said it was well done for the first attempt and would probably be even better when I did it the next time. The next time? Why the next time? I was hot and exhausted. If I’d done all that well with it, why do it over?

I was too stricken even to cry when my mother pointed out that I’d sewn the whole thing to my dress and that we’d have to cut the stitches to get it off. She was ever so sympathetic, but I think she was somewhat upset, too. I never doubted my mother’s affection, but I sensed she tended to believe that I was a bit &uot;wanting.&uot;

Fortunately my father arrived home about that time and as he did every summer afternoon, loaded up everyone in the neighborhood to cross the river and swim.

&uot;You’re getting to be a good swimmer,&uot; he told me, &uot;Why in the name of all that’s holy would you want to sit around embroidering? Not that I mind your using my handkerchiefs for your project. Should make an interesting topic for conversation at the lodge when I pull out a clean handkerchief with a rabbit embroidered on it.&uot;

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.