MY MARGARET

She is mine.

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.

36. MEASURE TWICE - CUT ONCE

Quincey is a delightful old soul currently residing in a three year old body.  She’s chock full of love, and wit, and tenacity (which is the up side of being stubborn). We enjoyed a Sunday dinner at her new house in Salt Lake City the other day.  She opened the door and welcomed us to her castle, twirling around in the entry way.  Her pink polka dotted dress swirled around like a frothy umbrella, floating forward and then reverse around her legs when she stopped. 

“Sure is a pretty dress you have there, Miss Q!”  We clapped for her dance as she giggled. Her Momma, Katie, walked us into the kitchen, commenting that this was Quincey’s latest dress du-jour.  “I have to wash it every night.  Serious obsession here,” Katie sighed. “I wonder if Gummy might take a look at the dress and see how hard it might be to make another one so she can rotate and Mommy doesn’t have to stay up every night waiting for the laundry to finish?” She looked at me with tired, hopeful eyes.

My family has a somewhat unrealistic opinion of my sewing skills. I get the same thing from people about my ability to sing, or play guitar. I don’t read music, and if the chords of a song aren’t simple open chords that can be capoed up, I’m out of the picture. But hey, it’s nice to be considered capable, even if it’s not my truth. My sewing classes, every Wednesday morning, are really not your typical “class” situation.  
My teacher, Margaret Farmer, is what one might consider a PhD of Stitchery.  She’s taught people to sew for over 50 years.  Her classroom is the sewing room under her garage in Centerville, UT. When my friend Suzanne invited me to join her in Margaret’s class, I agreed, partly because I was intrigued about a woman who taught Suzanne to sew when she was twelve years old, and who was still teaching her forty years later.

Margaret is ninety years old.  Did I mention that?  She teaches class from 8 am till one, takes an hour lunch break, then teaches again until 5 or 6.  Four days a week. The fifth day she goes to the temple. I did mention that Margaret is ninety years old, didn’t I? I think Margaret might be described, at this point, as a young soul in an old body.  She is as in-tune with her human existence as anyone I’ve ever met.  But she’s not obsessed with it.  Balance.

I asked her the other day how she stays so healthy and sharp.  “Well, as long as I start my day on my Chi machine I do pretty well.”  Apparently she lays down on the floor and puts her feet in this machine that rotates her feet in a figure 8, aligning her spine and chakras. She uses that time to memorize. Last summer she recited the whole Declaration of Independence for me.  And the Gettysburg address.  She has a poem for any subject that ever comes up in class.  And her storytelling skills are the quality that would receive accolades at a storytelling festival.  

Margaret was an earth child before it was hip. She and her husband Jay, who by all accounts was a character among characters, wanted their boys to learn the value of steady hard work when they were young. So they bought goats and had the boys raise them.  The whole family drank goat's milk. She ground her own wheat, and ate from their large organic garden. She housed unwed mothers for years, when it was the way of society to move away and deliver the child anonymously. And she worked. Never afraid of work.

Margaret was schooled in the art and craft of dressmaking and design in New York City. She was there when WWII ended, in fact, and indeed, a sailor grabbed her in the street and kissed her, just like in the famous photograph.

The best part of sewing is not the sewing…it’s Margaret!  Oh the stories she can tell! 

Today would be our sewing day, Wednesday; except that Margaret’s grandson was getting married, so she cancelled class to attend the wedding in Logan. I have made a last minute trip to Spokane to be with my Annie after some emergency surgery, so it worked out fine that there was no class.  Monday morning I texted Margaret to see if she was teaching, and if there might be room for me to come sew.  “Class” is simply a place to sew, many machines available and much, much thread, fabric and notions.  We work on our own projects, with Margaret there to lead us.  Last week she taught me how to install an invisible zipper.  I did it twice to try to embed it in my memory, but I am afraid I will never be able to sew anything without Margaret, so she is just going to have to live to be 130 years old. Heck, I don’t even have a sewing machine at home. Well, at least not one that is set up and working.  Cindy Gardner, who took her sewing skills up to heaven with her, gave me a sewing machine for my birthday a few years before she died.  She had cancer at the time, and wrote on the top of the box: “To Cori, for when you’re feeling domestic and I’m not here. Love, Cindy”  I cry when I see the box, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to open the box and set it up yet.  I feel…I don’t know… unworthy.  I will get there…I’m just not there yet.

Margaret texted back that there was room in the Monday morning class, so I grabbed the pink polka dot dress that Quincey begrudgingly loaned me and drove to Centerville. When I got there Margaret was alone in the sewing room.  Lucky me, no one else had come to class that morning!  I got Margaret all to myself!

I handed her Miss Q’s dress and asked if she would make a pattern.  Of course, she is always accommodating that way.  She unrolled a piece of pattern paper, grabbed a pencil, and cleared the wedding dress she had been working on from the cutting table. I stood beside her, watching…learning.  There is a comforting lilt in Margaret’s voice, a calmness, warm but matter-of-fact. Her hands remind me of my mother’s.  Perhaps that is one of the magnetic things that keeps me yearning to be in Margaret’s space.  She represents a time and place that is rare and ageless, like all of us in that space are caught in a time-warp.  We are all there in the 1960’s, the colors and sounds and energy are vintage.  When the door squeaks open there is a warm waft of ironing starch, mixed with a hint of engine oil like the scent that rose from my mother’s old Singer sewing machine, or my brother’s Lionel train set. The steady rhythm of Bernina’s answering the call: “Forward, March!” Like an army of dedicated soldiers. There is conversation floating around the hum of the machines, the whoosh of the steam iron in the hallway, and faithfully weaving through all of it is Margaret’s beautiful voice.

“So, you’ll need to cut the skirt almost in a circle,” she said as she laid that pink dress out on the table.  She used her arsenal of tools as she taught me, measuring the pink dress, then gently sketching the curve onto the thin brown pattern paper. She used four different measuring devices for different aspects of the pattern she was creating.  I commented that there was an awful lot of math involved in sewing and designing.  She nodded as she measured, the yellow measuring tape pulled from around her neck, her lovely fingers working the tape around the pencil marks on the paper.  I watched in awe, grateful it was her doing it, and grateful I was there to watch.

“Measure twice - Cut once”. She repeated the rule of thumb my own mother had taught me… the rule she tried to teach me.  I am impatient, and think I can eye things pretty close to the mark.  But I am almost always wrong.  “You think you know where the center is”, Margaret will say, “But you’d be surprised how wrong you usually are.”

So I try to follow her advice, though it is surely a test of my patience. When Annie was on the Viewmont High Basketball team, she brought her gold warm up pants home to have me hem them.  This was before Margaret, and after my mom had given away that old Singer sewing machine.  I made the mistake of measuring the pants from the snap near the ankle on the trousers.  I have no idea what my thinking was.  Of course the pants ended up 6 inches shorter on one leg.  Poor Annie was teased that whole season because of the hilarious warm up pants she wore before each game.  Mother shame!

Margaret is slowly teaching me, in her calm loving voice, how to work my way through the process of sewing.  I’m not the best, but I actually know how to thread the machine, and how to surge competently, and how to sew a straight line and a zig zag on actual true blue fabric. 

I’m going to make that dress for Miss Q when I get home from Spokane, at some point. Margaret and I already have the pieces cut out.  I’ve already hemmed the sleeves with a double needle. And surged the two pieces of that swirly skirt together.  We are on our way.

One day, when Margaret is done teaching, I will have to do this on my own.  Or not.  But if I decide to give it a go, I will hear her whispering in my ear “Think.  Measure. Think again. Measure again.  Then cut.  Good.  Good job, you did it!” 

Thanks, Margaret.

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