Mask Making
FIRST PUBLISHED: 5/6/2020
Madi’s face is framed in the mudroom window, peering in to see if I’m around. She knows she can’t come in these days, so we’re counting more on telepathy. I had a feeling Madi would be showing up—which caused me to come into the kitchen—and she had a hunch she could find me.
I wave and tell her I’ll be out in a minute. The yard was quiet today, and Madi supplies the reason. She and Owen rode to Butte, an hour drive each way, with their dad to pick up his work computer. “How’s it going for your mom, working at home?” I ask. “Good, if we’re quiet,” Madi responds.
Our first stop is the chicken coop; a ritual Madi relishes. Except now Madi goes in alone and calls back what she finds. “One egg is broke,” she reports. “Just leave it,” I tell her. She gathers the rest, counting them as she tucks them in the New England egg basket, which is as old as Ryann is. Then she puts the basket on top of the flowerbed and wanders off to look for the peahen.
I start to rake, one ear tuned in her direction. Sure enough, Madi calls out when she finds Pina Colada. After a bit, she comes around the corner of the house to tell me she’s found a fake nest. A shallow divot with a pinecone and twigs scattered within, it is well sheltered under the blue spruce in the front yard. I’m doubtful that any self-respecting bird would make this nest; Madi sees that I’m skeptical.
“Pina Colada was under this tree,” Madi explains her thinking. I nod, loving the possibility that Madi imagines.
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This morning, after a good cry, I dig my sewing machine out of the closet and unpack it onto the dining room table. It’s been 20 years since I’ve done anything other than knit or sewn by hand. Nonetheless, I recently had the machine tuned because I want to give it to Ryann, who learned to sew in my friend Ann’s summertime sewing camps. Ryann’s not a precise seamstress, but she makes up for it in creativity. These days she paints landscapes and builds ducks out of dried flora. Her first word was “duck,” and it was she who talked us into keeping ducks as part of our menagerie. It was watching her stitch up a duck our new pup had mangled that made us wonder if she’d become a doctor—her fingers so dexterous and knowing.
My machine looks new, even though it’s 45 years old and well used. Like many women of my generation, I received my Viking Husqvarna as a high school graduation present. It isn’t complicated, but it has a buttonhole attachment, which my grandma’s Singer didn’t have. Seeing it again is like seeing an old friend; as a teenager I spent hours sewing. Our home economics teacher was one of the best teachers in our high school.
I’m setting up to sew masks. Another friend has been making masks for her husband, a surgeon at the Veteran’s Hospital. I know I want her pattern. Ann gives me cloth imprinted with corn kernels, veggies, seed packets, wolves and bears—she knows my daughters well. I dig out support hose and old tights for the ties. In a couple of days, I’m ready. I situate myself to see out the front door, looking west at Jon’s spent corn patch, to catch the late afternoon light. When I sit down, my grandma reappears, instructing me. I wonder if I’ll remember how to thread the machine, catch the bobbin thread, set the stitch length. It all comes back.
Shauna, who is home for a visit, stretches out in her favorite chair in the corner of the living room. I sew to keep Shauna company; after her week of quarantine it is nice to see her cozy with a blanket over her legs. When she flew home from Arizona last week, Ryann insisted that Shauna live in our camper and use the outside toilet, long a part of this old homestead. Shauna is headed to California for three years of family medicine residency, where there’s a careful governor yet a lot of coronavirus. Not knowing when we’ll see her again, we savor our time with her.
I find my grandma’s old scissors and cut a pattern from a paper bag, a pattern material I learned from the Yup’ik skin sewers I once lived among. As I pin and cut squares, I remember some of my favorite projects from the past: the yellow down vest for my little brother, which Ryann now wears; the flowery summer dresses for a family friend, one of which she wore to my wedding; the red-and-grey wool pantsuit for my mom, which is now part of a quilt. In our fourth year of home economics, Mrs. McMullen instructed us in coat making.
I’ve forgotten how soothing sewing can be. The hum of the machine comforts me, and there is the sense of doing something, when my dominant emotion has been one of frustration. Why didn’t we prepare in this country? We now know there was ample opportunity to. In writing a biography on an early 20th century photographer, I researched the 1918 pandemic. Even though few people lived in Eastern Montana, Evelyn Cameron wore a mask when she went into the grocery store, as did the shopkeepers. And again when she went to vote for the first time, her U.S. naturalization coinciding with the pandemic. The early settlers didn’t have to be told to social distance, they knew to stay away from one another. There wasn’t this rankling of who was right—there was common sense.
Early 21st century, we are a spoiled people who have grown accustomed to our comforts. The spring before Ryann began medical school the two of us traveled to Vietnam. After a while Ryann began teasing me that as soon as we reached our hotel, I made us at home. I laughed, she was right. I dislike being too cold or too hot or not knowing where I’ll lay my head. I take precautions.
In Vietnam, Ryann and I were struck by how most of the people wore masks. They wore them riding scooters, walking the streets of Hanoi, working in the fields. Masks were ubiquitous. Eventually we asked someone, why? There were the obvious reasons of air pollution and dust from the streets—we always felt poorly during our stops in Hanoi from the pollution. But why so many rural people in masks? We were told the face coverings protected their skin from the sun. What was true, is it was completely acceptable to wear a mask, no one was embarrassed. And could it be they were looking out for one another? After all, in 2003, Vietnam was the first country to contain the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak. Outbreaks are recent history.
I sew late some nights, hurrying to get a few masks mailed to Ryann, then to make a few more to send with Shauna. Shauna has decided to volunteer on the Navajo Nation, her old stomping grounds from when she did public health work after college. She wants the corn pattern for her mask.
The sun has long set, yet I’m mesmerized by the task and the prospect of finishing a few more. By day I’ve been reading of collective efforts to make protective equipment for medical workers. One of Montana’s head nurses of a pandemic unit says we have it wrong. The medical workers aren’t the frontline, and shouldn’t be referred to as such. The public is. It is we who have to take responsibility. We who need to take precautions, so we don’t needlessly expose medical workers through our carelessness. They, too, want to return safely to their homes and families.
Later, when Shauna is in Gallup, which borders the Navajo reservation, she reports that everyone is wearing a mask, even on the streets. “It’s a tight-knit community,” she says. “Everyone knows someone who is sick—the word’s out. And people here sew.” Shauna adds that part of the reason the Navajo Nation has so many cases of COVID-19 is because it’s an area that historically is medically underserved and underfunded, and now with a pandemic those disparities are more apparent.
New Mexico’s governor urged its residents to wear face masks in early April to help prevent the spread of the virus. My husband and I wear masks into stores, but it’s not a common sight in Montana. Jon says he’ll start wearing his on the streets, to acclimate people to seeing masked people. He suggests there is a lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the pandemic in Montana. True, we have few reported cases, but neither have we tested broadly for lack of tests. Indian peoples, however, are more community oriented. I know this from living in a Yup’ik village; Shauna knows it from living on the Apache reservation; Ryann’s life would benefit from such cohesion.
Will this experience make us more public-health minded, as I hear people predicting? Will it remind us of how interdependent we are, as early European settlers understood and indigenous peoples have practiced? These possibilities, I love to imagine.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/04/who-vietnam-may-defeat-sars-and-world-has-chance-follow-suit
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/04/america-asia-face-mask-coronavirus/609283/?utm_source=atl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share
https://helenair.com/news/local/watch-this-state-to-test-all-nursing-home-residents-sets-monthly-testing-target/article_1c9eb9dd-fa44-5e89-830e-ad36b3298c96.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/opinion/new-mexico-coronavirus-curve.html?smid=em-share