RETIRED

Diane Roesing O’Brien

For 25 years I was a rag weaver, the ultimate recycler, taking people’s worn out and discarded clothes, I cut them into strips and wove them into rugs. It’s a simple concept, and it yields a homely, useful product – a scatter rug, a bathroom or kitchen sink rug, a rug to go by the fireplace or back door. Like all simple things there is an underlying complexity and richness to rag rug weaving that only becomes apparent after years of practice. Now my husband is deep into it.

My husband was a teacher of science and math, grades 5-8 in a tiny coastal school. When, two and a half years ago he retired after 33 years in the profession, I worried that he’d miss it. He assured me that he wouldn’t. “But your very identity is as a teacher,” I insisted; “it’s who you are.” “No,” he said firmly, “it isn’t.”

He spent the first months in the usual way, mowing several lawns and a cemetery and tending our large vegetable garden. Afternoons he read under the apple trees; evenings he hung out on the deck with our sons who were home for the summer. I secretly worried what fall would bring. Remembering how lost I’d been the year I quit teaching to wait for the birth of our first child, I warned him he’d be devastated when school started. He promised he wouldn’t be.

The yellow buses rolled on time that September, but my husband hardly noticed. By this time he was completely entangled in the mysteries of our old barn loom. “Teach me to weave,” he’d said one day. Or that’s how I remember it. Maybe I said, “Get over here! I’m teaching you to weave.” However it happened, before long he had the basics down, and started his sometimes rocky relationship with my 1820-era barn loom.

This loom, I should add, was his idea. It was the summer of 1974 when he spotted an ad for an auction in Union. “They’ve got a loom. You should learn to weave,” he said enthusiastically, always eager to find something meaningful for me to do -- so I’d be happy staying home, he said. I’d already gone through the dark room outfit and potters wheel he’d bought for me. At that point in my life with a three year old and another on the way, I wasn’t exactly lacking for things to do. To make a long story short, we got the loom, a huge affair built along the same principles as a post and beam barn. We set it up in the back room, and surprise! I was too pregnant to fit on the built-in seat.

Eventually, the baby was born, and I learned to weave. With no money to buy yarns I started cutting up old clothes and making rugs. The rugs sold, so I made more; we insulated part of the barn and moved the loom out there, and hung up a sign. People came, rugs sold, and I never went back to work. He’d done it; he’d kept me home.

Now rag weaving may be economical since the main material -- old clothes, are free. But, boy, is it a mess! Because the clothes come in randomly, I’ve rarely been prepared to deal with them. We find anonymous black garbage bags on our front step. Or people come in and say, “I have a few things for you out in the car,” which turns out to be half a dozen large cardboard boxes full of clothes. Summer customers even mail us their cast-offs or sewing scraps or a complete set of faded draperies. If there’s no time to cut it up when it comes in, and there never is, the stuff is shoved in a corner. It’s an untidy craft at best.Now it’s his turn. He’s cutting up the clothing that I’ve allowed to collect for years, under tables, on top of cupboards, in the attic stuffed in corners, the bags of clothes that are piled on laundry baskets, and those on top of boxes, the whole a tipsy tower. He’s made this his winter’s work, to drag out each and every last dusty receptacle of cast-off clothes and turn it into the stuff of rugs.

Every morning, before the wood stove has raised the temperature even above 50, he’s slicing up shirts and pants and sweaters, standing at the table with a razor sharp cutter and a determined look. All around him are the garbage bags he’s hauled down from the attic, while the seams and zippers, cuffs and collars he’s discarded form a growing drift under his feet. He gets faster every day, stretching out an Oxford cloth shirt, deciding where to make the first cut, then zip —off comes first one, then the other sleeve. Then zip, zip, zip and the collar’s gone, the yoke’s discarded and he turns the remaining pieces into long, narrow strips of blue cotton cloth. He rolls the strips into a ball and tosses it into a box on the floor, and reaches for a pair of brown corduroy pants.

He talks about cloth a lot, telling me he sees character in it. This, he says, holding up a lambswool sweater, is soft and subtle, while the fabric in a pair of work pants is bold and crude. He calls me in to admire cushy velours and plush fleece, worn cotton flannel and thick wools. Cloth, the infinite variety of cloth, has grabbed him.

He picked up weaving quickly, though has managed to avoid learning to warp, a tedious day-long process only I can do. Hmmmm. Now every day he weaves one rug no matter what else he does. To my astonishment, he sits down at the loom and actually stays there until it’s done. That same rug would take me three days between stirring the soup, answering the phone, hanging a load of laundry. I tell him it’s biology, men being so focused at a task that they don’t notice the baby is drinking the dog water, while women can keep an eye on the kid, cook the dinner AND weave a rug. You can see where that conversation goes.

Staying at a job until it’s done is nothing new for him, but the hours at the loom have made a change in him neither of us could have predicted. His work life had been all about people – his students, their parents, school committees, administrators. Imagine the many decisions, the assessments a teacher makes every day, tuning into the nuances of a student’s difficulty with math, managing a roomful of adolescents, or reassuring an anxious parent. People jobs are all-consuming taking most of a person’s emotional if not intellectual energy just to get through the day.

Now, handling these hundreds of fabrics, laying colors side by side, watching a rug grow out of his own choices – it’s as if a new part of his brain has clicked on. Color swirls behind his eyes, even when he’s away from the loom. For a time it was all he talked about. Though he doesn’t wake me in the middle of the night anymore to ask if he should use a little yellow with the rug he’s planning for the next day, there’s no doubt he’s become preoccupied with decisions of a different sort. It’s his turn to be home now, and I think he’s getting the hang of it.