07.17.08

Conversion Economy

She sits in a hospital waiting room, scissors in her hand, snipping up old men’s shirts. Plaid ones, cotton.
The man three chairs down is wearing one the same shade of brown as the one she’s shearing. I wonder if he notices.
He’s reading an outdated Reader’s Digest, glancing at his watch now and then, listening for his name to be called next for that escorting down the hall.

A man wearing a cap emblazoned with Molson Canadian wheels a woman with a bandaged foot into the room. He sits to wait their turn, one hand on the back of the wheelchair; she grimaces, arches her back to escape the pain rocketing from swelling ankle, turns our way. I look up from my book, cringe at her wincing, watch her watching Mama cut up shirts, distracted from the throbbing. I look over at Mama.

In one hand, the one with the truncated finger, she’s holding a slender metal ruler, white numbers fading on black. She’s measuring. And then, quite precisely, those scissors clip woven threads, sharp blades flashing. Cutting edge turns at a plaid intersection. And in a moment, another square falls atop the stack growing on the chair beside her.
She’s cutting quilt squares out of thrifted men’s shirts, a bag to be had for $5.00 the second Wednesday of every month. A Spirit-sensitive conscience made her ask one of the Wednesday volunteers if she might roll them up like sleeping bags so she can fit dozens of shirts in a bag. (Yes, of course.)

And now wherever she sits, hospital waiting rooms, deckside with grandchildren splashing about, at the kitchen table, receiver cradled to ear, she’s always with scissors in hand, her bag of abandoned shirts within reach, cutting out identical squares. Plazas of plaids from shirts that once backed broad shoulders bent under sizzling July sun, that old men wore to the pharmacy to fill this week’s prescription, that wives slid steaming irons over then slipped onto waiting hangers.

And then time and fashion discarded them to crinkled balls at the bottom of black garbage bags, an empty curb in front of the Sally Ann, a sagging rack for the monthly bag sale.

I reach over and smooth out the last square on a pile atop a chair in this surgery waiting room. This is the touching of the discarded revived, the ugly-beautiful, pieces of pain transformed, waiting to be stitched into a thing of exquisite usefulness.
For nothing’s wasted in the economy of He who redeems.

Lord, thank you. You waste not my pain, my sadness, my ugly brokenness. In Your hands, all is pieced together into a thing of beauty. Wrap me and warm me today in the scraps of what’s been.

Photo: a quilt Mama made for me, unwanted pieces redeemed

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© 2010 Ann Voskamp

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