Greetings, friends. (XLII)

Greetings, friends. Boy, it’s been a tough weekend. Adah and I have been hard at work, sorting through antique garments, vintage garments, replica garments, just plain old garments, textiles, yarn, sewing paraphernalia, knitting paraphernalia, jewelry making paraphernalia, academic research notes, opened mail, unopened mail, linens, towels, more garments, and, oh look, here’s another closet containing still more handmade garments.

Are they replica or antique? Are they valuable or commonplace? Are they useful in any sense or too worn to be of any use at all? Should they go to a friend, a re-enacting group, a museum, a thrift store, or the dump? Who can say!

We must. Every single item must be kept, sold, donated, or discarded. Sometimes the decision is easy, but, if it requires even a moment’s further thought, those moments add up. Many items we set aside for our mother's re-enactor friends to examine and hopefully claim. We work for six or seven hours a day with a short break for lunch, sneezing from the dust. My threshold for what is worth keeping or donating spirals upwards and upwards.

Decision fatigue is real, my friends. So is back fatigue. I am feeling both.

We have so many replica or contemporary gowns, dresses, skirts, shifts, petticoats, shirts, weskits, britches, coats, caps, hats, stockings, socks, sweaters, quilts, lacework, embroidery, and cross-stitch, all hand-made by our mother, that it is almost impossible to catalog it all, and absolutely impossible to keep most of it.

Our mother was, in a very real sense, a genius. She was very talented, and, moreover, she worked hard on her craft, and even harder to make her reproductions as authentic as the historical knowledge of the time allowed.

She also had a sense of humor, as evidenced by a particularly lurid bolt of fabric that Adah found. You really want to watch the whole reel, ideally with the sound on.

adahemurr

A post shared by Adah Elizabeth (@adahemurr)

I would be utterly lost without Adah’s involvement in this unpacking and sorting. I ask my sister, who is a child psychologist, how she is so adept at identifying types of textiles, or the relative worth of a replica garment.

“Mom tried to train me to be a miniature version of herself,” Adah said. “She didn’t succeed but some of it stuck.”

Adah has stashed away in a closet a few of Mom’s magnum opera. These items mostly involve needlework of breathtaking intricacy, comprising thousands of invested hours. Even I, an absolute tyro, can tell that these garments are something special. They are bound for specific historical museums.

By contrast, Adah today found what she believes to be Mom’s very first attempt at a replica gown, which was probably 50 years ago now. Maybe more. Adah pronounced the gown “terrible,” which is to say, terrible by our mother’s very lofty subsequent standards, inexpertly made, and out-of-date with regard to current knowledge about clothing history.

“Mom wasn’t judgmental of her earlier work, though,” Adah said. “She always said you had to start somewhere. When other re-enactors would jump on newbies in online forums for everything they were doing wrong, Mom would come to their defense.”

“‘You have to meet people where they’re at,’ she would say.”

The only thing Mom couldn’t stand in historical re-enactment was willful inaccuracy. She had no use for SCA or Ren Faire or other kinds of invented historical-ish role play.

While we cleaned and sorted, Adah and I talked for a while about how this was a major point of philosophical belief for our mother. One of the most common words that comes up the various expressions of memory and grief shared by the people who knew her, particularly in historical costuming, was that she was “generous”.

Our mother was not particularly generous financially, or for that matter, emotionally. She had a stingy side, probably from growing up relatively poor. But she was widely regarded by those who knew her as being intellectually generous. She truly loved to share what she knew, to educate others, and to spread an accurate understanding of historical culture, styles, and usage.

To some extent, this was a kind of validation seeking for her, a way to show off her intellect and skill. But it also stemmed from a genuine belief in, and desire for, historical knowledge to be accessible to everyone.

She influenced both me and Adah in this. I have spent a lot of my life working on Free and Open Source software and geographic data. Adah is a school psychologist, working for a local school district to make mental health care available to anyone in her schools who need it. Both of us believe that knowledge and skill are a thing to be shared freely.

And I’ve seen that kind of sneering, wiser-than-thou behavior in Open Source software communities, too. That readiness on the part of self-proclaimed experts to jump on newcomers and their ignorance, to showboat their knowledge and deride those lacking it. Every community of skilled amateurs needs a healthy influx of new participants to grow and thrive, and that kinda crap chases away excited noobs, and can send a community into a death spiral if you’re not careful. (I’m looking at you, OpenStreetMap.)

So Mom always stuck up for noobs in the historical re-enactor forums. She had started out haltingly, making reproductions that were inexact or clumsy. She knew that you had to start somewhere. And she tried gently to offer constructive criticism, to help others in learning how to improve in their future work.

Later in the day, in a random drawer, I found an incomplete piece of pocket-sized needlepoint, with what was evidently meant to be a felt backing of some kind. It looked like she had been making a kind of badge.

The text of the needlepoint read:

Even a poor costumer is entitled to some happiness

Damn right, Mom. You tell ‘em.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Don’t forget to go easy on the noobs in your community. We all have to start somewhere.

Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. Tonight it snows! Tomorrow I rest.