Rebekah Gets a Hobby, Or, Lots of Embroidery Ahead

For the last five years, “I need a hobby” has been my mantra.

“You’re a writer,” my former roommate once told me, “writing is your hobby.” 

And I corrected her: “No. Writing is my career.” 

It is also my hobby, but what I was going for was if I was going to school to be a Writing major, a Professional Writer, a Person Who Writes Long Academic Articles And Also Bad Novels That Will Never Be Published Or See The Light of Day, I needed to do something that wasn’t writing. 

Friends tried to interest me in everything from belly dancing, to baseball, to Catholic Youth Groups, to opera, to making bear claws, to yoga. Most of these failed. (I never went to the Catholic Youth Group. I never went to the opera, either. I sat at home and read North & South.) 

In short, my hobbies included writing academic articles and really bad novels that would never be published, and reading books for school and for fun. Never mind the fact that sometimes I read so much Spenser and Spenser-related material that I couldn’t read Maggie Stiefvater without pronouncing the /v/s like /u/s; this was all I had, and I was going to take it for what it was worth. 

Then summer happened. 

And I could not stop thinking about my 4th grade sampler. 

My mother is a crafty person. She and my sister both are. They bake things, and then wonder why I can’t make Texas Sheet Cake without messing it up beyond recognition. My sister has more than ten trophies from 4-H for things she has baked, or sewn, or drawn. 

I write things, like this blog, which people generally do not read. (I’m looking at you, dad.) I own a lot of books. I have read almost all of them. 

But for some reason, I kept imagining the kiddie cross stitch my mom had given me as a child. I don’t know why I had one; maybe my mom thought it was a good skill for her elementary school daughter to have. Maybe it was because we’d been to Greenfield Village so many times I thought I was living in a world where guests would come over for tea and marriage proposals and would want to see my sampler, which would be my only qualification of how good of a wife and human being I was. 

I never finished this cross stitch, because I was an elementary school girl with better things to do than thread needles. I’m not sure what those better things were. Playing Pocahontas and reading, I expect. Definitely not doing my homework. 

So I brought this up to my mother, who took me to Hobby Lobby, and I bought a set of kitty-patterned tea towels and a Queen Bee counted cross stitch. 

My first tea towel did not go so well. I will spare you the back, because it looks like Armageddon happened. Or like my elementary school self sewed it.

The second tea towel looked a lot nicer.

Back of the tea towel

And Queen Bee turned out pretty well, too.

So today I went to Pat Catan’s with my mom, and I bought a sewing box. I kept calling it a “cubby,” which made no sense to my mother for obvious reasons, and I decided a name was necessary. (Names are always necessary.) 

I put all of my needles, and my future cross-stitch patterns, and the little bits of thread I have accumulated in the last few weeks into the sewing box. And as I looked at it something whispered the name Josephine, and I thought, oh, like Josephine and Napoleon? Yeah, sure, that seems to fit. It clicks. 

I went downstairs and said, “I have named the sewing thing” (because I do not have, in speaking, the same feature I have in typing, which is, that I can stop for five minutes and go, “What’s the cubby called again??”). 

“Oh?” mom said, once she remembered what, exactly, her oldest daughter was on about. 

“I have decided to name it Josephine.” 

“Oh!” mom said, the same sound that people who like babies make when they see a baby and are allowed to hold the baby and then the baby does something, like gurgle, or smile, or take the person’s finger in their little hand. 

It is the same noise I make when I see puppies. 

...and also babies. 

“Why Josephine?” mom asked, and I couldn’t tell her. The Voice said to, and the Voice is almost always right. 

I asked my mom what the fuss was about, and she said, “Josephine; Great-Aunt Josephine, she was the quilter. She must be smiling down on you.” 

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the fun part about Catholicism: Your relatives never leave you alone. They come to you in dreams, and in strange lights, and in phone calls from the electric company, and in sewing boxes. They are like Saints, but a little bit less well meaning (I’m looking at you, Grandpa) and certainly less powerful than God. 

Anyway. Writing is still my career. I still spend 80% of my life writing. But now I spend the other 20% watching UEFA Euro soccer and doing cross stitch. 

Speaking of which, Germany is playing Italy in half an hour.