© Yuki Inoue

The Fabric of Our Lives by Peggy Bird Cotton. The fabric of our lives. That’s what the ad says. My sewing room says otherwise. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

The Fabric of Our Lives
Cotton. The fabric of our lives. That’s what the ad says. My sewing room says otherwise. I had decided that the room needed yellow walls. But before I could paint, I had to clean. After weeks of mental preparation I was finally ready. I gathered plastic garbage bags, a mug of coffee, and classic rock tapes and descended the steps to my sewing room. The first task was sorting through the fabric I had stashed away, just in case. As in—just in case you have to clothe the population of a small town from materials on hand. The preliminary sort produced three piles: projects I intended to make, pieces for the quilt ladies, and I’m-not-sure.

Then came the hard work: reducing the size of the stash. The first pile was small and done quickly. Pile two was not small but went fast, too. Pile three was neither small nor fast. Which of the pieces of cloth heaped around me could I shed? The green and blue patterned wool I bought in Wales? Granted, that was 1971. I wanted it for a miniskirt to wear with knee high leather boots and a poor boy turtleneck I’d bought in London that fall. Since then, time and my young figure have slipped away from me. The purple Ultra-Suede I bought with Margaret? It was expensive. I’ve always been afraid to cut it but I can still envision a vest. The extra ten yards of lace from Meg’s wedding? I didn’t want to run out when I was making pew markers. There was half a silk skirt—the first project Becky and I did together. We got to be friends faster than we could sew. And loose woven wool with a man’s vest pattern tucked into the folds. Elizabeth’s boyfriend. What was his name?

I found what I needed for the crazy quilt pillow top I was making as the ring bearer’s pillow in a daughter’s upcoming wedding. I also found a swatch of embroidery on banana cloth cut from a shirt my husband had worn when he lived in the Philippines, embroidered linen, a handkerchief, and spidery lace once owned by grandmothers, and the sash from a sister’s tea dress.

I stroked and rearranged pile three several times before I gave up and decided to store it in the garage while I painted my sewing room. "The fabric of my life isn’t cotton," I thought. "It’s wool and Ultra-Suede, silk, lace, banana cloth, linen. Cotton’s there someplace but so’s polyester."

The fabric of my life isn’t one fiber or one strand. Like the ring bearer’s pillow, my life is pieced from different fabrics, oddly shaped, unmatched—held together by thread and careful stitching.

Profile
Summer at the Oregon coast 1994: bright, breezy days and cool, star-flecked nights. The constant, heavy-breathing surf. And we’re all indoors, sitting in attention at our desks, alert, a little nervous.

I’m the teacher. So what? I’m nervous, too. I have fifteen adult students; one is twenty-four, one is seventy-three. A lawyer, an accountant, a real estate agent. They all want to be writers, and I haven’t the faintest idea if they can write their way out of a paper bag.

I learn quickly enough. These guys could write their way out of Houdini’s straightjacket. We hastily construct a circle of tables, escaping the desks, and the one who sits in the middle of the circle every day, without a hint of reserve, is Peggy Bird. Peggy reminds me of my mother in all the important ways. She is a seemingly conventional woman of a certain age, pragmatic, blunt, gruffly maternal. I watch her and think "Her love is tough love."

Day by day, the radical inside emerges. She has insights. Quick solutions, secret lusts. Dangerous dreams. She writes and writes all week, and a year later she comes back and writes some more, and keeps writing. She has claimed for her territory the power of the mundane, the terror of the daily—ordinary miracles. She isn’t going to quit, and if I were you, I’d get out of her way.

—Sallie Tisdale

Bio
Peggy Bird
Place of residence: Vancouver, Washington. Spends time each year with family in Philadelphia.
Birthplace: Philadelphia.
Grew up in: Pennsylvania and the Pacific Northwest.
Day job: Meeting facilitator.
Education: R.N., Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. B.S., Portland State University.
Serial publication: Georgetown Magazine—essay.
Awards: Columbia Scholastic Press Award. "Best Girl" Title—courtesy of Jas Whitehill Baziuk.
Current project: A correspondence between two young women in 1870.
Favorite books: Whatever is on my bedside table, which at the moment includes Eloise by Kay Thompson, Liar’s Club by Mary Karr, Fire at Eden’s Gate by Brent Walth, and The Forest House by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
Beliefs: I believe much of what I learned in catechism class at Holy Spirit Lutheran Church, most of what my daughter told me about her teenage years, and all of the words of "Amazing Grace."
Cravings: The usual—love, chocolate, peace, respect, Starbucks frappachino, and, occasionally, a Philadelphia sticky bun.

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