A Thimble of Nan’s

The sewing box was hers, and now it was mine, and I didn’t know what to do with any of it.

I sat on the floor of Nan’s bedroom and opened the lid. Everything smelled of her: dust and lavender and old thread. On top lay a thimble, a little silver one, worn smooth. A thimble of Nan’s. She had worn it on her middle finger for as long as I could remember. That, I decided, I would keep.

Under the reels of cotton I found a photograph, curled at the edges. A photo of my mother’s, from before I was born, Mum at maybe nineteen, laughing at something off to the side. Nan must have taken it and never given it back. A habit of hers, keeping things. Now I understood where I got it from.

There was a button tin that rattled, a pair of aged scissors gone stiff at the hinge, and a birthday card signed by an old friend of hers I had never met. The questions rose up: whose card, whose friend? But I didn’t frame a single one out loud, because there was no one left to answer.

I kept the thimble and the photo. The rest went into a bag for the charity shop. Nan wouldn’t have minded. She wasn’t a sentimental woman; crying was a habit of mine, not hers.

She had taught herself to sew as a girl, and then she taught me, sitting me on her lap, guiding my fingers, the silver thimble warm from her hand. So I put it on. It was far too big. I let myself cry, just a little, there on the floor, and then I got up, because she would have told me to get on with it.

Some things you keep because they’re useful. The thimble isn’t. I kept it anyway.