Badly.
But well enough.
The sewing box lives in my house now.
Lily is too young to understand any of this yet.
One day she will.
I’ll show her the photograph of her great-great-grandmother at 101, sitting under an apple tree with a birthday girl on her lap.
I’ll show her the letter.
I’ll tell her about the six years we tried to have her.
Maybe not all at once.
Some stories belong to children later.
And I’ll tell her that before she existed, an old woman began making her a dress without knowing whether anyone would ever wear it.
On Lily’s second birthday, we kept the party smaller.
Just family.
Cake.
A paddling pool.
Too many balloons.
At one point, Lily ran through the garden wearing nothing but a diaper and one of Grandma’s old necklaces.
My mother started to say, “Careful with that.”
Then she stopped.
We looked at each other.
Grandma would have hated us hovering.
So Mom sighed.
“Fine.”
Lily took off laughing.
Later, after everyone went home, I sat in the garden with the sewing box beside me.
At the bottom, under the dresses, I found something I had somehow missed.
A tiny scrap of cream fabric.
On it, Grandma had practiced the green leaf pattern she’d eventually stitched onto Lily’s hem.
The first leaf was crooked.
The second was worse.
The third was almost right.
I stared at it for a long time.
Grandma had been sewing for nearly 90 years when she made that dress.
