The Warmth of Wool

[For a year, I worked as a home service librarian at a small library in rural Ohio. My job consisted of choosing, checking out (and in), bagging in canvas bags, and hauling books to 70 Amish families. This atypical librarian's job allowed me access to a community that is largely stereotyped, and this peek into my patrons' lives led me to write a number of pieces about them. This one was originally published in Ozark's Senior Living Newspaper.]

Somewhere in America, in some kitchen or living room or bedroom, the wool skirts I wore in high school have gained new life. Good wool is hard to give up. For a decade I kept the earth-tone skirts on a multi-tiered hanger at the back of my closet. Church rummage sales came and went while the skirts slept cosily in their hideout.

Then I met Mrs. Miller, number 42 on my route of home-service deliveries to the Amish patrons of a small, rural library. Despite living in a tiny, white house adjacent to her daughter and son-in-law’s farmhouse, the elderly Mrs. Miller seemed lonely. For company, she had two border collies that she had trained to herd a small flock of sheep, she had a flower garden full of brightly colored perennials, she had Mr. Miller, who suffered from dementia--and she had me. On delivery days I always spent some extra time at her house. I asked if the books I had delivered the month before suited her. I asked about her health. I smelled her flowers.

One day I arrived while she was braiding a rug. Her arthritic hands carefully worked the two-inch wide strips of blue fabric that she had sewed together in continuous strips and wound into balls. As I looked closer, I saw that the cloth strips were not cut from the cotton or wool fabric I had expected. They were polyester. I knew that the local Amish women liked to make their dresses out of the synthetic fabric. Even though it didn’t breathe as well as cotton, the polyester didn’t wrinkle or fray. Yet I had never imagined someone making rugs from it.

Mrs. Miller made rugs to keep busy and to sell. When I expressed interest in her work, she showed me how she made long braids. Then she sewed them together to make round or oval rugs. She had a wool rug half done, but affordable wool was scarce—even at the resale shops where she went to buy wool items to recycle. Then I thought of my old skirts. The next day I made a special trip to her house, my cache of wool in a bag, satisfied that my skirts would have a useful, and perhaps beautiful, second life.