The Singer That Came Back Home

When I grew up I kept sewing. I’m a home health aide now, thirty-four years old, and I spend my days helping older people in and around Elbow Lake with baths and pills and breakfast. At night I sew, because it settles me.

Grandma knew that. In her last year she couldn’t work the foot pedal anymore, and her hands shook too much for the presser foot, so on Sunday afternoons I would sit at her Singer and sew while she watched and told me I was going too fast.

She died in August, at ninety-one, in her own bed in that white farmhouse, with the window open and the corn rattling outside.

My aunt Connie was holding one of her hands and I was holding the other.

Here is the part I have to be honest about, because people always ask.

Grandma’s will was written in 2009 at the lawyer’s office in Elbow Lake. It split the land between her two children, Connie and my dad.

Since Dad passed in 2019, his share went to me and my brother, and that part was settled fine.

The household goods, everything inside the house and the sheds, went to Connie.

Connie was also the executor, which the court in Minnesota calls the personal representative. She had the say over every dish and every tool.

The note card was not in the will. It wasn’t signed by witnesses or attached to anything.

It was a card Grandma wrote at her kitchen table, probably the winter before she died, and tucked under the bobbins in the sewing drawer.

I had found it when Connie asked me to help sort the sewing room for the sale.

I read it standing up, and then I had to sit down on the bed for a while. I showed it to Connie that same day, or I tried to.

She was on the phone with the sale company in Fergus Falls about pricing.

She waved at me with the card in her hand like she’d look later, and then she set it on the dresser, and I put it in my pocket so it wouldn’t get thrown out.

I knew what a lawyer would say. A note like that isn’t binding here. The things were Connie’s.

I was not going to sue my aunt over a sewing machine.

I would not do that to Grandma, and I would not do that to myself. Some things you lose rather than win the wrong way.

So I stood there in the yard in my barn coat and my gray knit hat, with that card in my hand, and watched it go.

My husband, Nate, wasn’t there that afternoon. It was the middle of harvest, and he was running the grain cart for his brother on the section north of Barrett, sun up to well past dark.

He called on his break around four. I told him what happened, and there was a long quiet on the line, the kind Nate does when he’s working something out instead of talking.

“You want me to go talk to her?” he said.

“No,” I said. “That would make it worse. She’s not doing it to be mean. I just need to figure out what I’m going to do.”

“Whatever you decide, I’m behind you,” he said. “But don’t decide while you’re crying, Ab. Get some supper in you first.”

That was good advice, and I didn’t take it. Instead I went and found Connie by the coffee pot on the porch, where the church ladies had set up bars and egg salad sandwiches for the volunteers.

She saw me coming and her shoulders went up a little.