I'm not very good at titles. I can write all day, create worlds and people - but when it comes to names, for characters and for books, I struggle. So an explanation for this blog's enigmatic handle:
Decades ago I ran across a little book in a junk shop, Modern Clothing: A Text For The High School Girl. Publishing date 1938.
Quaint, I thought - but I was an avid beginning seamstress, and this book had what I wanted. Rather than mystifying sewing with a lot of bunkum, Modern Clothing was a basic but extremely thorough grounding in making clothing, from mending to tailoring, from a time when most women's clothing was made in the home.
For fifty cents it was mine, and it taught me how to sew. But more importantly, it taught me about life.
Remember the publishing date? 1938. The world was poised between two great cataclysms, the horror of the Great Depression and the horror of the Second World War. Most people had no money to lash out on clothing, and plentiful cheap Third-World-made garments available in big box stores was something of a faraway future. You learned to sew. You mended - and you remade.
The remaking pages fascinated me. Directions were there for tearing apart a garment, or several garments, and making something wonderful out of clothing we would simply fling in the charity bin or garbage can in today's throwaway society. Cloth was nothing to waste; you made something usable out of what scraps you had.
Many changes, losses, joys and heartbreaks, moves across the world and back again, epiphanies and revelations later, I thought of that book for the first time in years. It went by the wayside, oh, about five moves ago in an adult life where I have moved over twenty times. That's where the Wayfaring part of the blog title comes in.
You see, I never intended to move so many times in my life. It just happened. Sometimes the life you thought you would have isn't the life you get. That's what happened for me, and being of an inquiring and adventurous turn of mind, I took chances and opportunities that seem reasonable to me, but daunting to many people I know. "You went where? You did what? Weren't you afraid?"
No. I wasn't afraid. Often the moves were necessity - circumstances, job changes, economic situations dictated another move. All were to rental properties. A succession of landlords, none of them worth a pot to piss in. Some worse than others. Some rentals worse than others.
Over time I began to think of an American traditional song I knew well, The Wayfaring Stranger. It's the lament of a person who wanders through the world, yearning to join lost loved ones in a spiritual home. That song would run through my head every time I began packing up for yet another move. Not that I considered my life the "world of woe" the Wayfaring Stranger describes, but the endless shifting of homes, the lack of permanence - that began to wear after forty years of roaming.
Changes came with this roaming - some good, some bad. Some changes I thought were bad turned out to be good - and vice versa. There have been losses, many of them heartbreaking ones - but there have been many gains as well. And yes, like the changes, some of those losses turned out to be gains.
I know who I am now - the person who always said she still didn't know what she wanted to be when she grew up - in her twenties, her thirties, her forties, her early fifties. A lifetime of wayfaring and remaking has come home - literally, with my owning a home at last, as well as figuratively, with the peace that comes with the realization that living alone is not a failure or a thing to be lamented.
I've come home. I remake my life every day from the scraps of fifty-five years of loss, gain and living. I am what I want to be when I grow up.
Has the journey ended - hell no, it's just beginning! I invite you to come along.
Oh, and by the way - Modern Clothing: A Text For The High School Girl is coming home as well. I ordered a used copy of it while writing this post. It'll be here in a few days. I shall welcome it.
Funny what textbooks for life turn up in a wayfaring existence.
Joy to you.
Tove
