I say this with all deference and courteous regard to those
who share her bloodline, her name, or more hours of her life than I. I know how
gracefully she sits on that holy throne of matriarchal power, where masses of
people surround her with love and reverence… people who have deep roots that
have grown under her seat and wrapped themselves around her. I was a stranger
who popped into her already-full life less than five years ago.
Margaret's family at the 50 year anniversary celebration for Margaret's School of Custom Dressmaking and Design |
Still, without apology, I claim her as my own.
I know - just about everyone else who knows her feels the same,
at least those who know her well - but we have our very own recipe, Margaret and
I: simple, and relatively plain, and uniquely ours. I suppose the beauty of it
comes out in the context, much the same way two notes played on the piano can
be rather boring alone, but sparkle and pop when wrapped in divine
orchestration.
Margaret Bingham Farmer and I met in her safe place, which
soon became my safe place, down there under the garage, tucked into the eastern
ridge of the foothills of Centerville, Utah, nearly five years ago. My mother
had passed away that summer, and my heart was heavy with absence and longing.
My friend Suzanne suggested one day that I join her in the sewing class she
attended Wednesday mornings. I looked at Suzanne and chuckled, reminding her
that the closest I came to ever sewing anything, past the age of thirteen, was
the Fuzzy Wuzzy Bear costume I glued together with a hot glue gun for my five-year
old’s tap recital. Suzanne reassured me that this was not your typical sewing
class, that I would fit right in, and I would especially love the teacher, who had taught Suzanne how to sew forty years ago, and was still teaching. Plus, I could learn
how to alter the blouses that never fit properly around my hips. I agreed to
give it a go, partly because I was curious about this ancient sewing guru, but mostly because I wanted to spend a bit of time with Suzanne.
Eight-thirty Wednesday morning Suz picked me up. We wove
through the streets of Farmington and Centerville up to Margaret’s house; a
funky vintage-y looking place which had to have been super hip when it was
built in the early 1960’s. The separate two car garage sat at road level, as did
the entrance to the house, but the lot sloped down to the west, offering awesome
views, and a walk-out basement under both structures. We waddled down a flight
of cement steps between the house and garage, opened the screen and plain wood
doors and entered the sacred space. I knew right away it was holy. It smelled
of clean laundry starch and faint machine oil, the air was soft and warm on our
skin, moist with the steam from the commercial grade steam iron sitting always
at attention there in the hallway. The room buzzed with conversation, sentences
rising with questions and falling with answers. There were sounds of thin brown
pattern paper rattling, round metal weights clunking down on the cutting table,
scissors snipping, and always underneath everything, was the faithful churning
of machines working in earnest. The room was filled with women, probably seven
or eight of them, some sitting at machines, some standing at tables.
In the
center of it all was a white-haired Yoda-like-guru-master-of-a-woman, with a yellow
tape measure hung around her neck along with a black lanyard at the bottom of
which was attached a small sharp pair of scissors. A blue denim apron hung from
her waist, filled with marking pens and seam rippers and hem chalk. All the
energy in the frenetic, colorful space swirled around her, like bees in a hive.
I try, at this moment, to recall that very first meeting; the moment itself
when I first met Margaret face to face, but I have lost it somewhere in my
brain. Instead I see her eyes light up when they see me, her lips turn readily
upward at the edges, and her soft, able hands rise to embrace me. It seems to
me that this has always been our welcome dance, but I know logically that it
cannot be true…that there was once a time when we were strangers to each other,
but it must have been so short lived that it disappeared like the flash of a
lightening bug on a dark summer night.
For her 90th birthday I got her a selfie stick. Suzanne made her famous almond cherry cake topped with very cool Hanukkah candles |
My Margaret is full of stories, and always interested in
mine as well. We sit knee to knee, sometimes sewing, sometimes not, because
sewing was always secondary to me. We sit and talk and talk and talk: about
Preston, Idaho when she was small and fatherless, the youngest in a big ole
batch of sisters; about Traphagen, the design school in New York City where she
mastered her craft, with its eccentric schoolmistress whose large portrait hung
in the entrance to the school – a woman dressed in strange ornate male medieval
garb. Escapades in the big city, designing Boy Scout film costumes, long trips
on the subway, getting the best wool in the Lower East Side by being the first
to purchase in the morning from immigrant shop owners. My Margaret told of dinners
in elegant places with elegant people, chance encounters and streets filled
with returning soldiers at the end of WWII. Stories of that character she
married named Jay; of her boys covered in tar and trapped in phone booths, of
her girls, at least one of whom was born in that very sewing room when it first
served as a temporary home until the real house was built. Unwed mothers
nurtured privately and shamelessly in her home. Goats milked daily in her back
yard. A pear tree chopped down by her young son in the neighbor’s yard which
Jay insisted be used as a Christmas tree later that year. The day another neighbor
boy’s horse foaled and they all watched. Mornings memorizing as she laid her
feet in her chi machine, and seven push-ups every night, even at ninety years
old, after prayers. “I’m already down there you know, on my knees, so I just do
my pushups then go to bed.”
Each year, in early fall, Margaret begins the monumental
task of creating the Christmas gifts for her large brood. When you live to be
nearly a hundred, the number of ducklings following you becomes herd-like. It
became a team project to figure out those fabric banks she designed and stitched
for all her posterity. None of us touched them, but we all owned them
emotionally, we who called ourselves her sewing minions. (Few of us can figure
out how to use that computerized machine. We all, except for Linda, default to
those trusty Bernina’s that line the classroom.) Then there were the
sweatshirts, which used up maybe half an inch of fabric out of the miles and
miles she has in the fabric room.
Last year I suggested to Margaret that she record some of
those stories and give them as her Christmas gift. Her kids had bought her a
newfangled iPhone. Each Wednesday she taught me a little sewing and I taught
her a new thing to do on her smart phone. “Here’s how you take a picture.” And…
“If you push this icon then you can record your voice and the phone will write
it out for you. Or if you push this one you will have a recording of your
voice, and you can label and save it like this.” I was always amazed at how
much she could retain, and how quick she was to learn this technical stuff when
she had been born in the days when the preferred mode of transportation was
horse, and maybe a buggy.
Look at those sparkly eyes! |
Each Wednesday I set my phone on the table in front
of her and let her talk, or we asked her questions. She was a storyteller extraordinaire,
and part of her charm was that she didn’t know it. By late November I made an
appointment in the recording studio to download, mix and master all those
stories from my phone and her phone. I picked Margaret up and drove her to the
studio. She had not been feeling too well. Her ankles were awfully swollen, and
they thought maybe something was wrong with her heart, because it wasn’t doing
its regular stellar job of pumping for her. She was recovering from pneumonia
perhaps, though I don’t remember clearly, because every time Margaret wasn’t
feeling top notch, she knew what to do, what voodoo concoction to assemble, or
Klixi took her to the doctor, and she came out of it good as new. I sat her
next to me on the couch in the studio while my friend Mark engineered. It took
hours. I lifted Margaret’s feet onto the coffee table in front of us and placed
a pillow behind her head. She dozed while we worked. That’s when I knew that
someone holier than any of us was tugging at a thread in the fabric of her
supernatural life. It caused a pit to grow in my stomach.
Not Margaret. Not Margaret! Margaret represented…I don’t
know… something endless… ageless… never changing. She was that room under the
garage, where nothing looks like it has changed since 1963, where we are all
young girls and she is our mothers, and time is kind and gentle and nothing
hurts, at least not for very long, and we might have to pause and be sick for a
minute but no one is allowed to die!
The recording of Margaret’s stories required two compact
discs. I think her family really cherishes that Christmas gift. We who shared
the time and space when she recorded them certainly do. Those stories make us
laugh out loud, and clutch our hearts at the same time. They make me feel like
we are right there in the sewing room, listening to our teacher show us how to
live, and maybe how to sew as well.
Three months ago … was it three months ago? I am messed up
by the way time hurled itself into our sacred space under the garage! Something
like three months ago Margaret announced, matter-of-factly, that the doctor had
told her she has cancer. Colon cancer, to be exact. And she had decided that
she wasn’t going to do any of that stuff to fight it off. “No one can say I
didn’t live to be ninety-one, can they?” she said. We threw our arms around her
and wept like schoolgirls. She patted our backs and reassured us that she felt
fine and she trusted that God would do what he needed to do and we shouldn’t
fret too much about it, and now let’s get that seam surged!
Wednesday mornings, like sacraments, came rotating through,
and I found myself inhaling my moments with Margaret … almost hyperventilating
with the inhaling. Each week her clothes hung looser, and her steps shorter,
until two weeks ago she walked up from the sewing school and never walked back
down.
A few days later, after Margaret took a bad fall in the
driveway, Linda arranged a schedule for her sewing minions to take turns
sitting with her. I spoke for Wednesday mornings. It was a holy day anyway, by
now. Klixi-of-the-golden-heart, Margaret’s youngest who had been born in the
sewing room, spent every morning helping her mom rise and dress and eat breakfast,
along with her first dose of Morphine for the day. When I came into the
kitchen, regardless of where she was physically or emotionally, those eyes lit
up and her hands lifted to my neck. I realized, just this past Wednesday, that
the sparkle in her eyes was that of my own mother, and somehow I suspected that
there was a pact divinely orchestrated where God allowed me an extra five years
of shimmer.
My friend Carla, who sewed beside me on many a Wednesday
morning, and whose voice and musicianship is beyond compare, came to spend this
past Wednesday with Margaret and me. I pulled the long black zipper on my gig bag
and released my guitar, and Carla did the same to her autoharp case. We planted
ourselves at Margaret’s bedside and began to sing. How Great Thou Art, and
Nearer My God to Thee. Idaho Wind, and I’ll Fly Away. Song after song we
breathed our love into her room. Klixi, for reasons known only to God’s angels,
could not bring herself to leave her mother that day and go to work. Instead
she sat beside her Margaret, stroking her hair while we played. Carla’s
Margaret turned to her and thanked her. Marsha came into the room for her
afternoon shift, and the chaplain from hospice. We all huddled there around her
bed, exhaling our love. Carla and I left at 3 pm.
The next morning, while the cool air of the night still
hovered at her windowsill, Margaret let the fabric of the veil tear in two and
leapt into Heaven.
Two weeks ago my daughter Kate called on Sunday evening. We
had just cleaned up after a delightful evening with Margaret’s family, where
our sewing class had made dinner and Carla, her husband Dave, and I had put on
an intimate acoustic house concert, all in Margaret’s honor. I told Kate about
the lovely gathering, and how sad we were to think of losing Margaret.
“What’s wrong with Margaret?” Kate asked.
I know these hands. |
Kate lives in New York, and I had neglected to tell her
about the cancer. Kate became silent, and when she finally spoke again, I could
hear the tears over the phone. That’s when My Margaret appeared. I felt her
voice rise from my aching chest, her reassuring hands reaching across all those
miles of America, patting my daughter’s back.
“It’s OK Kate. Margaret is OK. She says no one can ever say
she didn’t live till she was ninety-one. And I mean live till she was
ninety-one. Something has to kill us, or we’d never get Home.”
That next Wednesday, at breakfast in Margaret’s kitchen, I
told her about my conversation with Kate. Margaret nodded, reached her hands up
to pull me in, gave me a kiss, then whispered in my ear, “Thanks for being
here. There’s no one I’d rather die with.”
Wherever she is, whomever she is with, and whatever stories
she may be telling at this moment, I think somehow this woman who changed my
life is changing someone else’s. Somewhere. And that person will end up
thinking that this is their Margaret,
because of her power to possess hearts. But I tell you, unequivocally and in
all honesty, she is … and always will be… my
Margaret.
For her birthday one year I ordered these tags for her creations. I am a Margaret Farmer original, too. |
My friend Suzanne could never bring herself to call her Margaret, “Margaret”. To her she was always “Mrs. Farmer”. I always thought it was a sign of respect, but looking from a distance, I suppose it could also be that when Suzanne is in that space, she is twelve years old, her father is still alive and she will have a groovy new pair of plaid bell bottoms before school starts next month. The girl in her who is still a vulnerable, hopeful, well-loved child feels at home there, like I do.
Thank you, Margaret.