4

“‘What are you doing up there, Charlotte?’ ‘Oh, making something.’ she said. ‘Making something, as usual.'”

Charlotte’s Web has been running through my mind lately, not only because the audiobook is still the daily soundtrack around here, but also because I’ve been feeling a little like Charlotte recently. After Sam has gone to bed, I make things. Usually it’s writing, but for the past few nights it’s been sewing. Yes, sewing! I have the sewing skills of an 8 year old, but despite that, I made Sam a sparkly pink cape for her birthday. All by hand.

There’s really no excuse for that. I have a perfectly good sewing machine. I have a great friend who is a seamstress extraordinaire who would have loved to help me. AC is also very handy with a sewing machine. But I wanted to do it myself, and frankly, the sewing machine terrifies me. Its loud, relentless hammering. The creaking noise it makes when you lift your foot off the pedal. Winding the bobbin! Just thinking about winding the bobbin makes my fingertips sweaty. Give me a needle and a spool of thread. I’ll make my own crooked, uneven stitches, thank you, with less noise and moisture.

Indeed, I found last night’s stitchery very meditative. Earlier I had helped AC make Sam’s birthday cake and I was thinking about how 4 years ago we were similarly engaged in a messy collaborative project. Getting a baby born is hard work and there’s no bowl of chocolate batter to lick afterward. Then I thought about Charlotte and her egg sac. Her congratulatory announcement about the birth of the baby goslings early in the book foreshadows her later maternal predicament: “After four weeks of unremitting effort and patience on the part of our friend the goose, she now has something to show for it.” Charlotte, of course, will never get to see the outcome of her final night’s work. She never gets to see her 514 baby spiders.

I’ve listened to Charlotte’s Web easily 20 times over the past month and there is always a reason to cry for the spider.

My sewing last night involved neither unremitting effort nor patience. I didn’t even measure! But for once I had something to show for a night’s work. Not a morass of words that refuse to congeal into the story I heard in my head. Not another “draft” or fragment of something that I might use in a narrative someday. But an actual, physical object. A pink sparkly object that my little birthday girl can wear.

My little birthday girl.

Not as little anymore.

Happy Birthday, Sam. I’m so happy that I get to see you grow up.

And down.

I think having a 4 year old is going to rock.