Push Pins

My grandmother was a beautiful seamstress. My whole life I have been told the stories of her impeccable taste, eye for fabrics, perfect hems, and amazing seams. I’ve been told she would stay up all hours to complete to perfection a detailed prom dress or even the small task of mending a shirt. Her attention to detail made the inside of her garments just as beautiful as the outside.

Now like any good seamstress, my grandma required the appropriate tools to be successful. Because after all - you can’t sew without pins. It is important to note here that on any ordinary day in my grandma’s home, you were guaranteed to see, if not be pricked by, at least one sewing pin. Between the arms of her chair or her pink bathroom carpet, they were everywhere.

So today I bring with me a collection of pins; a straight sewing pin, a quilting pin, a thumb-tac and a push pin. I bring them with me because for the last three days, I seem to keep running into them. It started on Saturday at midnight, when my mother stood in my bedroom and showed me my grandmother’s bible that she had brought from the care center. It has a red cover with gold accents and its large print pages are ink’ed with hand drawn circles, underlines, and notes in the margin. My mom wanted to show me that there was a passage that my grandma had left specially marked. Why she marked the particular page, we don’t know, but what made me laugh out loud was the fact that she didn’t mark it with any ordinary bookmark. The page was marked with a long silver and green quilting pin stitched through the pages. How very appropriate of a seamstress.

I thought about this pin all night and decided at 7:00 am to head to my laptop to start drafting notes for the service today. As I passed through the living room, I stopped to look at the bulletin board of photos my grandma had kept in her room for the last few years. The board captures all of the most recent and important moments in our family; Christopher and Bailey at his wedding, Payton with her bunny, my mom as a grandma. As I reached for my computer, not 1 inch from my bare foot, was a clear plastic thumb-tac. Glancing up I noted that each photo was attached to her board with what else – a clear plastic thumb-tac.

Pins I thought, “again with the pins.” My mind got to spinning, and I decided it was a sign. As I started to write, I drifted to yet another set of pins, and scurried to my mother’s attic to find them. You see, my grandma and grandpa had a map of the United States in their basement full of multi colored push pins.

If you haven’t seen it, this map was chalk full of small, round, metal, colored pins that marked the places my grandparents visited on their travels through life. There was a pin for Spring Valley, Minneapolis, and a pin for Neenah, one for Washington, DC and one for the far off mystery of Alaska; one pin for each destination of their many travels.

When I was 9 years old, Autumn just 6, my grandparents took the two of us on a road trip. We got to share with them our own special place on the map, our own special adventure, our own special push pin. With the Memories on the tape player, we headed west to the Dakotas, the Badlands, a Petrified Forest, and Wall Drug. We turned south to Branson to a passion play and the experience of the bright lights of the theaters. My grandpa drove, my grandma his gracious co-pilot, and their two little blonde passengers prayed in the back seat that maybe the next time we stopped for dinner, instead of stopping at a nice “sit-down” restaurant, just maybe, we could have McDonald’s. And at the end of our trip, like the best grandma in the world, my grandma ate McDonald’s.

My mom tells me that on Friday night, my grandma pursed her lips for a brief moment as she drew her last breath. I’d like to think that meant that she was once again with my grandpa. That he kissed her on those pursed lips, and the two of them jitterbugged off to heaven, and finally together again, my grandpa and his seamstress placed their most wonderful pushpin into the most wonderful map to mark their very best journey yet.

E. McLaughlin

May 7, 2008