Apr 17, 2020 3 min read

The sewing machine had been in the basement since we moved here, back in the scary corner where I’d found that desiccated mouse.

The farmer unearthed the sewing machine and put it on the dining room table.

“Do you still know how to work this thing,” he asked.

“Ha!” I said as I lifted its dusty cover. “Like riding a bike.”

And with that, my memory sailed back decades, to the time when I sat in front of that sewing machine almost as often as I now sit in front of a computer.

I spin out sentences now.

Back then, I would spin out tops with floppy sleeves and frocks made of black and orange pumpkin-themed fabric. From the time I learned basic sewing in eighth-grade home economics class to 1984, when I got my first TV job and a small wardrobe allowance, I sewed almost everything I wore.

Some things were a success: the simple summer dresses I turned out like Sunday morning pancakes. Less successful were my attempts at the zipper fly, or most memorably, the outfit that matched a red and white polka dotted top with red and white striped pants. The mean girls of ninth grade made fun of me the one time I wore it, bullies. Little did they know that Lady Gaga would one day wear outfits like that. I was ahead of my time.

But now, pandemic was calling. I would use castaway garments to make face masks.

I dug through my donate basket. There’s the cotton top with the embroidery on the sleeves. Each sleeve could make a mask, and I’d use the sleeve elastic for the ties. I hesitated for a moment – that was an $85 Anthropologie top – I exhaled and remembered I didn’t wear it anyway it because the sleeves made me look like a linebacker, and I cut.

The machine already had a spool of neon yellow thread pulled through and in the bobbin. We only had to thread the needle.

“I can’t see,” I squinted to the farmer. “You try.”

He couldn’t see either. In all those years of threading that needle, I’d never noticed how small that hole is.

“Get the flashlight,” he said.

“I’ll get my reading glasses,” I said.

“Maybe if I get my magnifying glass,” he said.

A visitor to this scene would have concluded we were trying to remove a splinter from the wing of a flea.

It took all those tools, about a gallon of saliva, plus a need threader, unearthed from the back of the junk drawer, to push the thread through. I was finally in business.

“I’m going to call them ‘Bethie’s Better-Than-Nothing Face Masks,'” I shouted as I ran the fabric through. My first tries looked more like stripper panties than face masks, but I got better as I went along. Four hours and as many shredded blouses later, I had made eight masks.

And then, trouble.

The bottom thread got tangled and when I pulled it out too aggressively, I broke the bobbin mechanism. It will take three weeks for the new part to arrive.

I gave one of the prettier embroidered masks to my neighbor, putting it in a bag and lobbing it over her deck railing. I haven’t seen her out and about in it yet. I went to a trail for a walk last weekend and wore the one with the pastel stripes. I could almost hear the passers by mumbling “homemade” through their own, perfect masks.

Bullies.