Thursday, February 4, 2010

Domestic Duties

I was so darned domestic I can hardly stand it. Richard has a favorite winter jacket that he wears every day that’s even moderately cool. It’s black and reversible, so he can wear it a long time before I insist on throwing it into the washer.

On his recent trip to the emergency room, he wore that jacket with the quilted side, what I consider the work side, of the jacket on the outside. As I sat with him, I noticed that there was a rip in a pocket seam. I didn’t want the staff to think we were vagrants who would stiff them for the bill, so I turned the jacket to the smooth, dressier side. To my horror, three of the seams of that side were in shreds. I turned it back to the “better” side, and decided that that jacket was getting downgraded to painting wear as soon as we got home. I had bought the jacket at a thrift store, so it’s not like it was a huge investment.

Well, Richard really gets attached to his beloved things. His twenty-year-old Bronco II is testament to that. I’m not complaining; it’s to my advantage that he doesn’t like to part with his old raggedy things. I’m not getting any younger or less raggedy. He implored me to fix his favorite outerwear. I couldn’t refuse him; he had already suffered the loss, in Hurricane Katrina, of his favorite down vest, given to him by our friend who introduced us. Besides, how many of my disasters does he rescue?

I set to work sewing, but you know how difficult remodeling can be. Before I could repair the seams, I had to rip more of them. And because the jacket is reversible, all the sewing had to be done by hand. What would have taken thirty minutes on a sewing machine became a two-hour project.

In the infinite regression of steps, I was searching my fabric stash for fusible webbing to back a rip, when I came upon a pair of Richard’s shoes that he’d asked me to save months ago. This pair of shoes he’d worn while roofing the root cellar. As he pointed out, the shoes were still good; he only broken the stitching on one shoe as he dragged his feet across the shingles. He really believes in “Waste not; want not.”

I figured, “What the heck. While I’m being domestic, I just as well go full bore into good wife mode.” Upon Richard’s return from his errands, I had managed to repair his jacket and his shoe. His real reward isn’t the repaired items of clothing; it’s a much calmer wife. I found the sitting and sewing very relaxing, and with my recent bout of pressure cooker blood pressure that has to be a good thing.