GRANDMOTHER’s DOILY
by Charles Busby
The best Christmas present that I have ever seen was presented to my mother by my brother (Glenn) and his wife (Donna).
The gift was a single doily that was handmade by our maternal grandmother (Ida Maude). A doily is an ornamental mat made from cloth strings. They are used on end tables and coffee tables or any flat top surface to decorate the room. This particular doily had been a wedding gift from my grandmother to Glenn and Donna. She was not able to afford to buy them a gift so she gave them the only gift that she could which was something that she had made years earlier.
Donna had the doily placed in a shadow box, wrapped it and gave it to my mother as a present the Christmas of the year that our grandmother passed away. Obviously anything that your mother makes is going to be very special and precious to anyone. Donna and Glenn knew this. The doily was special and treasured by Glenn and Donna. However, they knew that the doily would have a much greater and more significant importance to our mother. That shadow box with the doily inside currently hangs on a prominent wall in my mother’s house. I doubt that any soldier from any special forces unit could convince her to take it down.
Our grandmother was a very poor lady. Life had been very difficult, hard and extremely painful for Ida Maude. She was a divorced woman in her late twenties with six children. Her existence was compounded and made much more difficult because of her own very poor life decisions. Those decisions resulted in her living as a single mom and surviving as a share cropper in Northeast Alabama in the 1940’s and 1950’s. The requirements of her landlords were extremely demanding and physically exhausting. She and all of her children were expected to pick at least 100 lbs. of cotton by noon each day. The cotton boils would always cut their fingers. The summer heat and humidity was scorching. The only shade or relief each day would be an occasional passing cloud. My mother has told me on multiple occasions that during the winters there would not be enough money to even buy salt. Salt is the most inexpensive item that we can buy. Yet they frequently only had popcorn for supper without salt. Sometimes they would eat boiled pumpkin just to have something to have in their stomachs. To this day my mother cannot stand to smell a pumpkin. Malnutrition caused all of the children to be slight of build and very lean.
My grandmother’s circumstances in life required that she be very resourceful! Every item coming was precious. Everything had to be used with absolutely no waste. Any empty can such as a coffee can became a storage vessel, empty glass jars became drinking glasses until they were used for canning purposes again the next summer. Flour sacks had multiple purposes after the flour was used up. But the greatest example of the resourcefulness of my grandmother was the way she would save the strings used to sew the flour sacks closed.
A flour sack always had a string sewn across the top of the sack. When a flour sack was to be opened for the first time it was necessary to pull the string through the bag. When the string was removed it would yield a 12 to 15 inch long piece of string. Ida Maude would save those strings until she had enough to make a doily.
It would take our grandmother untold hours to craft each doily. She would take each string and weave it into a handmade pattern that she crafted. She would do this with fading eyesight and little light. When the doily was finished it was a piece of art. Those doilies were extremely intricate and ornate with designs so beautiful that is hard to describe.
Our grandmother took worthless strings and turned them into works of art. Grandmother’s doilies were amazingly beautiful.
I am always amazed at how incredibly brilliant all of my grandparents were to live and survive in such dire circumstances. They did not complain or whine. They would get up each day with little to eat and small expectations for any relief and then do what it took to make a living and survive the realities of their lives.
What is so, so incredible is that someone in those circumstances could see the potential of those tiny and seemingly worthless flour strings. How impressive is it that someone could devise a way to weave those strings into anything as ornate, clever and beautiful as those doilies!
I believe that God gave my grandmother her resourcefulness. He inspired her to make something beautiful out of essentially nothing – those worthless flour sack strings.
Isn’t that what The Lord does with people? He is able to take a worthless and broken human life and with the Holy Spirit craft and transform them into persons with significant meaning and a great purpose. A life that is used to serve and glorify God is beautiful. God prefers to take nothing (a total void) and create a world out of it. The Lord used only dirt to make Adam. You are exactly what God wants to work with when you feel worthless and of no value. That is when God redeem their souls thru the blood of Jesus Christ and turns a person into a masterpiece for his glory. I sincerely hope that The Lord views me as a flour sack string. I would be thrilled for God to use me to make one of his doilies.
