Just One Thing (25 page)

I worked to finish the tapestry. It was as if I couldn’t completely be on the other side of the line until it was done.

I talked to Sam on the phone every day, but I didn’t go to the bar and I didn’t invite him to my house. I needed time to assimilate everything.

Instead, I wove.

When you’re weaving, the warp are the stationary threads that are held under tension. The weft are the threads you weave in and out of the warp. In traditional weaving, you see the warp and weft. When making a tapestry, the weaver hides the warp beneath the weft.

When I think tapestry, I think huge hangings on some castle wall. Scenes of kings and queens, maybe a unicorn or two.

My completed piece would be more like a quilt, small block pictures with a very impressionistic feel.

Five feet wide, seven feet long.

Pictures bordered by dusky-blue, traditional weaving, warp and weft both visible.

I finished the last image, and then finished the piece with a foot of regular weaving. There was something calming about the order of it. Using my foot, I depressed the treadle, which lifted half of the warp threads, creating a shed I pushed the shuttle through. I battened the yarn down, compressing it against the finished cloth, then raised the other half of the warp, passsed the shuttle through . . .

There was a certainty to this. When I’d created pictures, it had been free-form and each square had been highly individual. The resulting patches were very impressionistic pictures. The border was uniform and orderly, comforting in the rhythm of it.

Treadle, shuttle, batten.

Treadle, shuttle, batten.

The weft moved between the warp, tying everything together. Binding the pieces into a whole.

I finished the tapestry and took it inside the cottage. I tried to decide where to put it, and ultimately hung it over the fireplace. Months of my life had been spent working on this tapestry. It was imperfect, sure, but then so was my life. I sat on the couch, studying the piece.

I thought of the story that the Amish always put an imperfection in their quilts because only God is perfect. Maybe that’s wrong.

Maybe they put a flaw in their quilts because those imperfections are what make us who and what we are.

Our imperfections help define us as surely as our strengths.

I had finished the piece and knew that I had completely and finally moved to the other side of the line.

And I knew who I was.

I awoke on Christmas Eve morning feeling a childlike anticipation. Angus nuzzled my face, telling me he needed to go outside. He romped around the snow-covered woods while I started coffee. Angus returned, smelling of wet dog and waiting for his food.

I filled his bowl, took a cup of coffee, and went into the living room. I turned on the Christmas tree lights, then studied the tapestry hanging over the fireplace.

I spent the day getting ready for my Christmas Eve guests. Connie was coming down from Cleveland and spending the next four days with me. My mother and Conner were driving in from Erie in the afternoon, and Sam would arrive around the same time.

I cleaned and cooked. And when it was all ready, I sat down with Angus and simply enjoyed the festive look of the house.

Angus heard the first car to pull in. It was Sam. I kissed his cheek. “Merry Christmas, Sam.”

“Merry Christmas, Lexie.”

We waited in the kitchen and within an hour the kids and my mother arrived. “Before we eat, I want to show you what I’ve been working on since summer.”

I led them to the living room and pointed at my perfectly imperfect weaving.

“It will never win any awards,” I said. “But I spent the better part of the year working on it.” My mother, the kids, and Sam all studied it. Even Angus, sitting on the couch, seemed to be studying it.

I stared at it along with them, each of the pictures representing moments in my life and the lines I’d crossed without even realizing it until some time after. Rows and columns of one-things.

“Sam finally helped me understand the tapestry . . . more than that, he made me understand myself and my life.”

“Understand what, Mom?” Connie asked.

It was time to tell the kids my story. “I moved out here because I was hurt. Your father, right before he died, was going through another bad time.”

Connie and Conner both nodded. They had lived through their father’s bad times. “I know the police said his accident was an accident, but I wasn’t so sure. And that not knowing, the worrying that maybe he’d hurt himself because I hadn’t been able to save him . . . Well, it did me in.”

“Mom,” Connie said for both herself and her twin, even as my mother said, “Alexis.”

They hugged me, and I was wrapped in family, gaining strength from them, from their love. “I was lost, until Sam. He asked me to share one thing with him. At first I told him my name, and other small things, but gradually, I told him bigger things, and he taught me something profound.”

I looked at Sam Corner, a man who had his own baggage and was learning to deal with it. “Sam taught me that your dad was more than just one thing. He was more than what he did or didn’t do in those last moments. He was a compilation of many things. Many moments.

“He was brilliant, funny, driven, and sometimes . . .”

“Very sad,” Conner supplied.

I nodded. “Those sad moments, his last moment . . . he was more than that. I made this tapestry to show the moments in my life. The important moments.”

I pointed to the squares. “Mom, showing me you knew how to laugh, and how much you loved me. You kids, graduating. Your sister’s love of horses. All these represent something or someone—they represent one thing that has made me who I am. But I’m more than any of these big moments. I think I’m more the smaller ones. I am peanut butter sandwiches with you kids on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I am Scrabble games in a storm. I’m the mom who read you
Belinda Mae
, or scolded you for climbing on the garage roof. I am Sunday mornings at church—”

Connie caught on. “You are the one who held me when Brian Miller broke my heart.”

Conner nodded. “You are the one who taught me to drive because Dad wasn’t as good at it as he thought he’d be.”

My mother reached out and took my hand. “You are my daughter and you taught me how to express my feelings,” she grinned, “well, at least to express them better than I used to.”

Sam looked at me and smiled. He leaned in and whispered in my ear, “You are the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.”

I’d crossed another line. A big line. A good line.

Surrounded by my family, we shared dinner and a holiday. We played Christmas Scrabble, a family version that allows only words that are in some Christmas carol, or can be used in a sentence about Christmas. I still maintain that threnody—a song of lamentation—was a cheat. I mean, Sam’s sentence was, “The Christmas carol was the antithesis of the threnody I sang last month.” That’s not a very Christmasy word, but then I realized that my whole last year had been a threnody of sorts and that
Joy to the World
was definitely the antithesis of it, because there, arguing about a Scrabble word with Sam in front of the Christmas tree, with my mother and kids nearby . . . it was definitely joy.

I hate it when stories end without really sharing the rest. This is a memoir of sorts, but there’s so much more to my life. So many more one-things I’ve added to my tapestry of my life since this story ended.

We’re building a life, Sam, Angus, and me. I’m teaching again. Not at the school, but lessons at my workshop. Basket weaving. Pottery. Basic drawing lessons. I don’t teach weaving because I don’t know enough. I don’t know that I’ll ever weave another thing, but I’ve kept the loom. I hope that Lee knows what a gift it had been. That one piece—my tapestry—was as important to my healing as Sam and our one-things.

I still go to the bar on Mondays, and Sam, he comes home to me each night when it closes.

Chris, Sam’s new bartender, has been working more, which means on Saturdays, Sam has time to run a free clinic. He spent time jumping through the licensing hoops and more to pay for his insurance. He’s not ready to practice medicine again full-time, but he realizes his knowledge is a gift that shouldn’t be squandered because of old memories. One thing can’t stop the doctor in him. I work as his receptionist and assistant on those Saturday clinic days. Angus comes and sleeps on the floor. He seems to comfort the patients as much as he comforted me.

On Sundays, we both go to church down the street. Sometimes the kids or Mom come along. I sing hymns and listen to Reverend Bob. We’ve become part of the church community there and it has become an important part of our lives. Reverend Bob asked if I’d consider working with the youth group, supervising them as they paint a mural in the church basement, which serves as our gathering center. I said yes, so I am once again surrounded by kids and teens. It’s loud, and don’t even get me started about when Brian Langard spilled the paint down Eric Roberts’s pants. And last week, I caught a small cluster of kids discussing climbing the rope for the church bell. My thoughts immediately turned to the kids on the garage roof.

That made me wonder about the house in Erie. I went to Conner’s for dinner one night and drove by it. The lights were on in the living room. I’ll confess, I parked a bit up the road, then walked back and stood on the sidewalk, looking in at a family. Two adults and two children.

They seemed happy.

The house was now filling with their story, their memories, one thing at a time.

I walked away and haven’t driven up the street again since.

My life is good and getting better.

I know I will suffer other losses, but I can trust that I will mourn and recover. I know there will be other lines and tipping points. That things will happen. But I’m sure I’ll be fine because I realize now that I am always evolving—always becoming more. And I know that we’re all more than just one thing.

That I’m more than one thing.

That Sam’s more than one thing.

And maybe the one true thing is that together we are so much more than we are apart.

Sometimes the journey to forgiving yourself—to finding yourself—starts with one person, one step . . . with just one thing.

And I think now you have the real end of my story.

A happily-most-of-the-time sort of ending.

~Lexie Corner