Thread.

I was putting away some clean clothes in Chan’s closet early this week when I saw a white thread dangling from one of his sweaters on a shelf, and I pulled it. I kept pulling, it was very long, and it turned out to be elastic thread, so it stretched even longer. I realized that as I pulled the thread it was unwinding from a spool on an upper shelf in a small plastic set of drawers that Mom had kept her sewing thread in — one of the few objects of Mom’s, along with her sewing machine, that I claimed after her death. I don’t know what to do with it, but I can’t imagine not keeping it.

To get to the spool and rewind the elastic thread, I had to take the whole unit down, set it on the bed, and remove the duct tape my father had put across the drawers to keep them shut when I shipped it here from Indiana. There are dozens of little drawers in the unit holding at least a hundred spools of thread of all colors, each of them partly used. When I took the tape off, the drawer containing the elastic thread slid out, dumping the spool on the bed. Also in that drawer and also landing on the bed was a small spool of bright peacock-colored thread.

One of my first Christmases after moving to New York — not the very first one because I didn’t go home to Indiana that year — I did all my Christmas shopping at Pearl River. For Mom, I bought 2 or 3 yards of a heavy peacock-colored silk with a pattern of a bird embroidered in gold. She loved the fabric. She made a beautiful, very dressy vest out of it that she wore on special occasions for many years. The thread that popped out onto my bed in front of me was the exact color of the fabric, and I have no doubt she bought the thread to sew the vest.

I think Mom would find it silly that I’ve kept this drawer full of spools of thread. She was not sentimental about objects. (There were exceptions — also among the few things of hers I kept is a tiny Saint Teresa medal on a delicate silver chain that she’d had since she was a girl. Mom hated organized religion and she used to scoff at her Catholic school upbringing — but she kept the little Saint Teresa medal on a silver chain. I also have no fondness for the Catholic Church, but that medal she wore against her skin feels charged with her presence.)