Monday, February 4, 2013  Grandma's Sewing Machine   By the time
I was old enough to observe a sewing machine in Grandma's
apartment, or even know what one was, Grandma had given her
Domestic treadle machine to her youngest daughter, my Aunt
Clara, the one who sewed.  I do remember the machine at Aunt
Clara's house, because she took in some of her own clothes,
widening the seams and shortening the hems, to fit me.  I was
about 10 at the time.  I remember one summer she sewed one of
her bathing suits to fit me.  She was a pretty talented
seamstress.  When I was 14 and  taking "sewing" class in
Catholic high school, Aunt Clara and Uncle Ray brought the old
Domestic to our house in Mt. Auburn and placed it in my room, a
narrow, walled-in, unheated back porch that I'd claimed for
myself.  I was the oldest, and we only had one bedroom in the
house for a family of eight.  A hot water bottle froze solid in
that back-porch room in the winter, but it was my own private
retreat, for reading, writing, listening to '50s