I Can’t Sew—Or Can I?

I can’t sew.

What I really mean is: I don’t want to sew. You sew and I’ll worry about some other stuff I feel confident doing.

The other night, I was smudging my apartment. (Smudging is when you light a bundle of dried sage and wander around with the burning stick through a space to cleanse the energy within it.)

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a tiny ember blew off the smudge stick and landed—on my gorgeous bright-white comforter. A fact which I didn’t discover until the following morning after waking up in horror to find a black hole about a half-centimeter wide.

So again, I don’t sew. But I also don’t love the idea of carrying my comforter through my neighborhood to a seamstress to have a little hole stitched up.

I trundled down to Rite Aid and bought a $2 sewing kit with white thread, and then with fumbling fingers threaded the ridiculously small needle (there was a lot of cross-eyed cursing at this point) and tied what seemed like a pointlessly small knot. I then tucked the cloth together to make it look like a pleat (or whatever the hell it’s called), and made a couple dozen tiny stitches, as evenly as I could, teeth gritted the whole time.

But I did it. And every time I spot that damn fake pleat, it makes me smile because you can’t tell the difference unless you know to look for it. And I’m sort of ridiculously proud of myself for pulling it off. Turns out I can sew.

In fact, it turns out I can say I can just as easily as I can say I can’t, as long as it seems worth it to try.