I remember the first time I stood on Grandma’s stool. I was very young, four or five. My Aunt Willie, aged and kind, lifted me onto the stool and told me to look in the mirror.
She said it was magical! I would see a little girl.
The mirror set atop an old walnut bureau and I think the mirror tilted. The top of the bureau was covered in stuff….trinkets, hair brushes, hairpins, hat pins, jars and bottles covered in dust. I leaned my elbows on the edge of the bureau and peered into the magical mirror. I could make out the ghostly little girl but somehow, it was ever so slightly frightening. I tiptoed up a bit higher and looked with all my might, still ghostly. As I spoke, timidly to Aunt Willie asking if it was a ghost; she cackled a bit like a witch and said, “why no! It’s you!” She took her bony hand and swiped the white dusting powder from the center of the mirror and asked me if I could see the little girl.
It took me years and years to work out the magic, white face powder and mirrors.
To this day, I have little or no interest in mirrors.
The second time I stood on the stool was in the parlor of the old house. The parlor was only opened 3 or 4 times a year. Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. My maiden Aunt Gladys had a town job. She could afford store bought things. She had a tin foil Christmas tree, each fake limb held a bank envelope with a dollar for each of us kids. It came at a bit of cost to actually get our hands on that envelope.
On the particular day of my standing on the stool, Moma took my hand with Joseph on her hip and walked us into the parlor. She took me to a long shiny box across the back corner of the room. Nary a beam of light was in the room save the flicker of a coal oil lamp and the last embers in the grate fire.
Moma took my hand and led me to the large box. I stepped on the footstool and looked in the box. My grandma was lying there in a black satin dress with a starched white collar. Her hands were folded near the waist of the dress. Her eyes were closed but her little round glasses were placed perfectly across her long, narrow nose.
My childish brain wondered why she had her ‘Sunday go to meeting dress’ on and where was her apron and why wasn’t she giving me my 1/2 stick of candy? All my siblings got 1/2 of the striped candy sticks but my Grandma always saved the solid white candy stick for me. She kept the pasteboard box of candy sticks on a shelf behind homespun cloth curtains. This was where Grandma kept her important things: sewing needles, thimbles, buttons, embroidery thread…her things. The three tiered curio cabinet was to the right of her rocking chair under the big window with gauzy white curtains and violets on the window sill.
Grandma’s footstools were a work of art. My Grandma was so very kind. She sewed beautifully.
Lapwork, my Moma called it.
She cut pieces from old woolen jackets, dresses and the occasional piece of finery, meaning silks, satin or linen. The mystery of the footstools is: where did she get those large juice cans that formed the stool?
Seven cans, strategically placed and stuffed with batting. Here I am, late in my life, contemplating how those juice cans were procured. Certainly, the Dutton’s never consumed store bought juice. Some weak, graying tea without a chip of ice was served on the aforementioned holiday occasions. My Moma would scoff all the way home about that wretched taste. Back to the juice cans. My other Aunt Gladys, Silas’s wife, was a born scavenger. The best I have ever known. She would summon one of us kids to accompany her to a country road she believed to have a great dumping site over a steep bank deep in the woods. Our job was to shimmy down the bank clinging onto saplings and tree branches to the hillside dump. When we reached the huge moldy piles, we were to sort through the many fabrics, sweaters, old rugs, large tin cans, unbroken jugs and jars and any other glistening item that would catch the Gladiator’s eye. She would guide with her voice, over there, go down a bit, what’s under that rug? It’s a wonder we lived through it.
The orange juice cans. I’ve been mulling this over and over in my mind.
My Grandma and Gladys, Silas’s wife, made many, many of these stools. Gladys never missed an opportunity to score freebies. I suspect that orange juice was served at Central School, a town school with far more resources for luxury items than our one room schoolhouse in Caney Fork. Gladiator was a teacher at Central for many years. Did she collect the juice cans once a week or once a month pitching them in her cellar until the footstool notion was seized upon?
Or did she stingily buy a tin of juice once in a blue moon and collect them for years?
I find the entire world of my youth a panoply of bits of unfinished seams. Gladiator unraveled sweaters to repurpose the yarns (seen in the footstool). My relatives tore strips of old woolen cloths to make rag rugs. Each scrap of cotton cloth was saved, recut and reused. Quilts and coverlets filled the Jackson Press in the sitting room.
Most valuable of all was flour sacks! Washed and sun dried on Saturday and by Sunday morning, a new dress for me!
I was a day dreamy child, I paid little attention to the sewing lessons and lap work. I still have no use for spending a day sitting still sewing or stitching.
However, it has recently dawned on me, I might have paid just a wee bit more attention.