to: Craft > #20 - The Sheets: A Pandemic Landscape

The Sheets: A Pandemic Landscape

Amy Meissner

The Sheets: A Pandemic Landscape

The sheets fit a twin bed. Its wooden frame seemed enormous when transitioning from a crib, but now barely holds my son’s wiry body, all push-ups and sit-ups and sly flexing before the mirror. The household joke: The pandemic would go on so long that the 14-year-old would be taller than me before it was over. Silly. Of course this wouldn’t happen. And then it did.

The sheets get washed (almost) every week, hauled upstairs, dumped from the basket, and tucked in place around the mattress. I used to do this job with him, explaining: Grandpa calls them “army corners,” but it’s more like wrapping a present. Now he’s supposed to do this task alone. I don’t check to see if corners are folded, bunched, or puddled on the floor. I stopped nagging. Not making the bed isn’t laziness, or disrespect, or irresponsibility (I tell myself), but what my husband calls Boy Brain—the walking away from one unfinished task to laser focus on another, unrelated one: firing up the air compressor to blast grit from the bike’s brake pads, or contemplating 105 push-ups, or wondering how many well-chucked rocks will finally break the sheath of backyard creek ice.

The sheets are covered in a pattern of blocky dark red animals on a bright red field, design elements stacked and fitted like a puzzle—a bird standing on a bear, another on a horse, a spiral squirrel tail, a fox’s pointed chin, an otter curled around a stag’s antler—characters designed by the Finnish company Marimekko, drawn from the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala.[1] When I bought the sheets 10 years ago, after Christmas, I googled Kalevala and envisioned a flashlight glowing in a sheet tent, reading a long story to my son, pointing out and naming all these red-on-red characters. But then I realized the poem includes over 22,000 verses. And I never erected a tent. I got distracted by the new baby, or dinner, or the phone, or another Lego sucked into the vacuum. And every day for years, I made a twin-sized bed. Until I didn’t.

The sheets have worn unevenly. I’ve been watching this, first noticing the color fade, then feeling the texture change. The top sheet rustles; so does the outer edge of the fitted sheet where it snaps all around the mattress sides, but the center of that sheet is a quiet space now. Its movement isn’t the crisp certainty of cotton percale but has transitioned to the liquid undulation of brushed suede. The curl of my son’s growing body has worn a pale oval imprint, a red animal dreamscape made vague by the press and turn and roll, night after night, for a decade. The center, having held his body the longest, is the thinnest. All the inevitabilities of life come together in one womb-red space.

The sheets, he says. There’s a rip.

The sheets are frail in two places. One rip is two inches long, the other not quite a rip yet, more a yawning apart of warp and weft. We hold the sheet vertically and point: there and there. The light filters through threadbare spaces and I anticipate a toe or knee will catch, then tear an L-shaped slash or ragged hole.

The sheets are so familiar they’ve become invisible in the landscape of my home until the breakage brought them to the forefront. I test the strength around the disrupted fibers and thread strands, gentle directional tugs around each hole, a test of my own will to yank just a little harder until I might hear the inflection of a rip gaining speed, fibers tearing smartly across the grainline. A brief moment of satisfaction for a ruin. Within my own home, even with all this pandemic-together working and eating and learning and laughing and moping and talking and crying or not talking at all, one on top of another like cooped-up jigsaw animals, our family members’ everyday perceptions and experiences are certainly not the same. My son’s understanding and world view is that I will fix this sheet and it will fit his bed like normal. An everyday return to childhood. My perception of this now vulnerable object is that it requires a mend more complex than an ordinary patch in order to ensure longevity.

And what is my perception of longevity anyway? Six months? One year? Two years? (Will we all still be housebound animals stacked on top of one another in two years?) Maybe I will look back on this repair as a marker of a certain time and home. Here was a fix we could make to an everyday object despite the seemingly unfixable landscape outside. Here was a mend defamiliarizing and bringing attention to the everyday thing, but also showing a level of care that happened in our own small world, an intimacy with tender surroundings and an “affective bond” with this domestic version of a landscape and place that Yi-Fu Tuan called “topophilia.”[2] Our interaction with this environment of home highlights a slowing down and close assessment I know I’m engaged in, but see my son is too. He found the hole, but years from now, will he remember it? What about explaining slope-intercept form to his sister when her online teacher couldn’t? Burning his hand on an oven rack, again? Folding and folding and folding his laundry? A world that should have been expanding for him is now limited to long-limbed ranging in a shrunken world-space, the uncertainty of outside shaping memories attached to the objects within.

The sheets, all the sheets, are crawled into every night, untangled every morning. Ongoing.

The sheets have always been my landscape, snapping from home to home to home: yellow polka-dot crib and olive-green stripes and embroidered by my Mormor and heavy-wet and hung to dry and wind-blown and hurriedly unclipped because desert thunderheads are building and warm from the dryer and wrinkling in the basket for days and hauled from coin-operated washers in dank basements and tucked around the rump of a hiding orange tabby and then, decades later, around an elderly, yawning Siamese. 

The sheets are the embodiment of Bourdieu’s habitus, a “structuring structure”[3] and the folding and unfolding of time: Tuesdays set aside for ironing and my mother staying up until midnight so she could announce Wednesday morning to none of us listening into our cereal that her work was finished; the basket of folded sheets that fit her linen closet’s shelf dimensions exactly; the vintage Kenmore pressing machine on the enclosed back porch of the double-wide trailer I grew up in; handmade clothes in the mending pile; hearing her approvingly say “Marimekko” when flipping through the months-old magazines her sister sent from Sweden. I’d be nearly 30 before I realized Marimekko was Finnish, not Swedish. I’d assumed this because she’d ensured I knew the textiles from her home country were expensive, the “best quality,” and “lasted longest.” Marimekko felt like an aspiration, not an affordable reality. This is the structure that has shaped my current home, my mending practice, my own mending pile. It is the structure that has me pulling all the sheets from the linen closet and refolding so they fit better. The structure that insists on longevity and prolonging and commitment to a broken thing, sometimes well past the time when it’s deserved. The structure that would have me excitedly order a set of clearance-marked, red-on-red Kalevala Marimekko sheets from Pottery Barn for a four-year-old in the middle of a dark winter. And the structure that now insists I mend them.

The sheet needs an old-style repair, a double-sided and inset patch, a technique I saw once visiting the family farm in Sweden—either on a rough sheet or a bleached kitchen towel—or maybe on a cloth at my mother’s house in Nevada, or maybe in the stack of my own inherited textiles. When finished, it will look like a small, filled window on one side and a cleanly finished patch on the other. Years ago, I mended a flannel sheet poorly with the sewing machine, overlapping the fabric edges and sturdily zig zagging back and forth over top. The fabric and stitching pulled together into a hard, ragged lump I felt each time my leg brushed across it, a brutal mend that wasn’t fair to the sheet or to the sleeper. This is a learning from doing. So I will maneuver around this new mend with a practiced set of gestures informed by what I’ve seen, experienced, been taught, what Bourdieu expresses as a groundedness in the body,[4] informed by a history I carry with me into the present, an embodiment of practice that allows me to approach a type of repair I’ve never performed before. Part memory, part understanding, part cultural experience, part care.

The sheets are straightened with swipes of the iron, hits of steam activating the tang of detergent and thicker under-smell of boy body. Taking time to press is the first roadblock in a sewing practice, especially for an impatient newcomer. The iron isn’t instantly hot, the board piled with wrinkled shirts that must be moved. The sewing machine is the more exciting tool, a powerful anticipation of speed (a pedal, after all), but under the guise of material preparation, pressing is actually an opportunity to squeeze more time for strategic assessment. Here, sensorial perception allows me to see the areas of damage, but also feel for and even hear the thinness, orient my body to the changes in the fibers, understand how far this new fineness has reached across the width of cloth, a space nearly spanning mattress edge to mattress edge. Bourdieu’s “socially informed body” encompasses senses beyond the traditional five: “…the sense of necessity and the sense of duty, the sense of direction and the sense of reality, the sense of balance and the sense of beauty, common sense and the sense of the sacred, tactical sense and the sense of responsibility…”[5] So much of this is wrapped up in home and caregiving, particularly during a time of uncertainty, panic, and political defiance outside. It’s a comfort to hold something I feel confident tending, a sense of my own capability and sense for care. I don’t believe I’m alone in this. The actions of the women in my family are a testament to seizing control over a domestic situation, often to the point of ignoring the other chaos: tantrums, sour words, confrontations between men and women, women and women, women and children, children and children. The space of their control was held within the repetition of the hand and the tools—iron, needle, thread,[6] even while the space of their competency was devalued and taken for granted, their work the invisible viscosity that allowed a farm or home to operate smoothly.[7]

The sheet is smoothed on the cutting table, which is also covered in a sheet with padding beneath and competent staple gun work on the underside, a technique I learned from a career in the clothing industry. This padding will take an iron’s heat, but also cushions the tip of the tailor’s scissors, a slight cradling that provides more control than a slippery tabletop. I use a clear ruler and air-soluble ink to mark a plan on the sheet, first tracing a rectangle that extends at least a quarter of an inch beyond the rip on all sides to establish what will become fold lines, then marking cutting lines in the shape of an X from corner to corner. I insert the scissors into the rip and snip directionally to each inside corner of the rectangle, which results in four floppy triangles with fraying tips, evidence of the original rip. Folding and pressing these toward the back of the sheet along the marked rectangle creates a clean-edged window. Measuring one inch all around this opening provides the measurement for the actual patch, cut from a similar weight cotton. I’d held several fabric scraps in my right hand while feeling the sheet in my left to determine what multiple layers might feel like once the patch is completed. Too thick and the patch will be too strong, pulling against the fragile fibers and generating a new weak perimeter. I pin the patch in place, filling the window with a span of bright new fabric, a foreign footprint in this red forest of familiar creatures.

The sheet’s volume bunches around the area where I need to work, so I try stabilizing the section with an embroidery hoop, but this is tricky. The two-part hoop in tension pulls the rectangular window open and stresses the soft grain lines leading to and from this new hole. Loosening the metal screw at the top of the hoop releases the grip, but the fabric is still stressed. I pin perpendicularly to the fold of the window opening every half an inch, stabilizing the area while catching the patch on the reverse. I don’t think about positioning and repositioning pins in advance, but I can see and feel the way the fabric wants to move, so I adjust out of habit. This is a familiarity with tools that Merleau-Ponty describes as incorporating “into the bulk of our own body.”[8] The pins are bodily extensions that I don’t regard after decades-worth of inserting, pulling, and inserting again. My intention doesn’t stop at my fingers, or even at the pins, or with the threaded needle I now hold, or with the hoop I’ve discarded upon recognizing its false support system (my hands support better, moving with, repositioning, and reacting to the liquidity of the material). My intention lies somewhere within the fabric and the mend and constantly adjusting my tools and my body to complete the task. This is a habitual set of actions Merleau-Ponty refers to as “our power of dilating our being-in-the-world,”[9] or, in this case, abandoning a tool because I trust my own hands so much more, while simultaneously reaching for the same fine, bent needle, just the right length, its slight curve created by my own use over time.

The sheet is layered in the crook of my left elbow, the patch pinched in my left hand, thumb against the pressed edge of the little window; my right hand probes with needle and red thread from behind, finding the correct place to emerge along the fold. The weave of the fabric in the patch is tight compared to the sheet’s, but soon a familiar rhythm takes hold: pierce from behind along the folded window edge, pull the length of thread away from the hole using my entire arm, tug with my right pinkie to adjust the tension, poke the needle down very near where it emerged to create a small stitch along the edge, rock the needle to angle for the next approach, scrape across the pad of my left middle finger, which waits beneath to guide the tip into position, then repeat, each stitch as far apart as the width of a grain of rice, each pull of thread a steady scrape of fibers against fibers. I make my way around, anchoring each corner of the window with several stitches because the fabric is more vulnerable there. Ending where I began takes less than seven minutes.

The sheet now has an inset patch on the front, also red, but brighter, a scrap from an older project. I steam it lightly, fussing a little with my fingers, a swiping, tapping motion that might be mistaken for brushing stray threads or dust, but is actually an authoritative body statement coming after the iron’s work, another moment of assessment before moving on and a personal reminder of who is in control of the equipment. This habit was incorporated after years in factories learning from and watching other women’s bodies competently do the work of finishing garments at pressing stations and learning, myself, how to work with hissing industrial machines—a leftover gesture picked up in the landscape outside of the home that I’ve carried with me back into the domestic.

The sheet’s reverse side still has to be finished. Here the patch is secured with a rectangle of stitches from the front, but the edges are still raw. Separating them from the sheet with fingertips reveals the triangles of cut cloth embedded between, one on each of four sides, flopping behind the patch, but sturdily held at their bases. I carefully trim these ragged tips. Here is an easy place to make a mistake—I’ve done it before—an inadvertent snip of the sheet if not paying attention to where the rest of the fabric is at all times. I press the raw edges of the patch under one quarter of an inch, insert pins perpendicular to the new folded edge, and stitch this down by hand as well.

The sheet, now repaired, has an inset window of new fabric on the top and a patch on the reverse. If I hold it to the light, the multiple thicknesses of fabric create a little frame around the window, a double set of hand stitching that has floated with the sheet and patch this entire time, adjusting for the soft movement and tension against the tighter weave of patch cloth. The temptation may have been to stitch this on the machine, a promise of speed and efficiency, but not the right tool for the sheet’s sake. In this case, the machine would have generated a stitch too sure of itself, too hard, too penetrating and regular, even perforating the perimeter of the patch and building in the next weakness, the next point of failure.

The sheets will return to the bed—all red animals and a boy too big for its frame—and I will take on the additional vigilance of the long-term keeping of the mend, wondering how much time we have before the next rip erupts in this now aging fabric, a small landscape, within a landscape, within a world of landscapes moving into sleep and then waking into something unknown, outside, that we can only hold together with all that we know.

[1] Marimekko’s oversized patterns, botanical prints, and florals have been circulating since the late 1960s. The “Kalevala” print was designed by Sanna Annukka in 2008. https://www.marimekko.com/us_en/.

[2] Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 99.

[3] Karl Maton, “Habitus,” in Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts, ed. Michael Grenfell (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2008), 51.

[4] Thomas J. Csordas, “Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology,” Ethos 18, no. 1 (March 1990): 11.

[5] Csordas, “Embodiment,” 11.

[6] While it’s now been shown that this kind of somatic experiencing contributes to psychological, cognitive, and social wellbeing, I don’t know if the women in my Swedish family would have expressed this if asked. Likely, any sense of pleasure would have been attributed to knowing the housework was getting done. See Savneet Talwar, “The Sweetness of Money: The Creatively Empowered Women (CEW) Design Studio, Feminist Pedagogy and Art Therapy,” in Art Therapy for Social Justice: Radical Intersections, ed. Savneet Talwar (New York: Routledge, 2019), 183.

[7] María Puis de la Bellacasa, “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 85 (2011): 93.

[8] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1965), 166.

[9] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 166.