THE SOUVENIR PINCUSHION
“At the time, it seemed a funny gift.…”
The swan was a gift from my first landlady, Audrey. She owned many properties in Champaign-Urbana in the 1970s, but she was never too busy for a long talk when I stopped by to pay my rent. In her late sixties, about five feet tall with a well-padded figure, she’d sink deep into her worn armchair, her tiny feet barely touching the floor, and ask me about school, boyfriends, how my poems were coming along.
She had a severe stutter, but it never kept her from offering advice. Or making jokes—she was prone to giggling fits. Her red hair had faded and thinned so she wore a hairpiece; it must have itched because several times each visit she would reach up with one finger and delicately scratch the top of her head, making the hair shift from side to side.
Sometimes she talked about the past, alluding to a factory job, an injury, an operation. She would look at the photo of her late husband, Carey, handsome in his Air Force uniform, on the table at her side: “Everyone said he was a saint for marrying me because I couldn’t have children.” She repeated the comment without a crumb of self-pity; she still adored Carey and hadn’t lost her awe at the fact he’d loved her back.
We had three years of talks. When I graduated, I thought we’d parted for the last time, but late one night weeks later, I found myself on her doorstep weeping over my first heartbreak and feeling as though I had nowhere else to go. She didn’t pry, only folded me in a long, pillowy hug. Together we made up the dormer room upstairs, a pretty space papered in pale yellow, with a narrow iron bedstead. Under the window was a desk; she looked at me and said I could do my writing there. I remember how startling those words were—I don’t think anyone else had ever suggested I needed such a place—and her pride when she spoke them.
In the end, I stayed only a few nights; it wasn’t long before I left town for good. We wrote each other for a while, but I was moving a lot and eventually we lost touch.
The pincushion is a souvenir she brought me from a visit to her family in North Carolina. At the time, it seemed a funny gift for a twenty-year-old, but perhaps she’d taken note of the homemade curtains in my apartment. Whatever her reasons, it proved a happy choice: Each home since, each new stage of life, has occasioned a sewing project requiring the swan and thus reminding me of Audrey. Years ago, I heard she’d passed away. She had no immediate family to mourn her, but I imagine there must be many like me who are grateful to have been touched by her generous and loving soul. In any case, she was a staunch Baptist, certain of a heaven with Carey waiting for her there.
—Ann Aspell
Ann Aspell is a book designer in Vermont. Her fiction has appeared in One Story and her poems in many journals, including Spillway, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International and La Presa.