Ancestors quite ably darned their own

My grandmother was not the only person in the family who knew how to wield a needle. My grandfather Guy Hamlin darned.

In the early 1900s, as a young man, Guy worked as a brakeman on the railroad, making runs to Vanceboro. He’d done a stint on a long log drive down the Penobscot. He never earned much money as a woodsman, guide or fire warden assigned to Kelly Mountain in Brighton from 1926 to 1946, but that didn’t bother him any. He knew how to make do with what he had and was content with that.

He possessed a fine sense of order – stacks of firewood in his barn attested to that. All the outdated number plates that ever had been displayed on his Ford truck since 1936 were tacked up in an orderly display in the barn. He believed a job worth doing was worth doing well.

Guy wore a green wool felt hat creased into a peak in all seasons, dark green cotton work pants and shirt in the warmer months, and dark green wool pants and flannel shirts in the colder ones. The green wool pants were where he showed off his darning skill.

Guy was a smoker and sometimes dropped burning ash in his lap, leaving holes. And as an outdoorsman, his pants were always up for grabs by sharp brambles and twigs. Any hole, rent or tear in his clothing spurred in him an urge to mend it.

To darn his pants, Guy usually used the green wool yarn he found in my grandmother’s knitting bag. The bright color did not match his pants, but that didn’t bother him. He had his own darning needle and darned while sitting in a platform rocking chair placed beside the kitchen window overlooking the road – where in the 1950s few cars went by, but if any did, he knew about it.

My grandfather darned his own clothing because he believed he did a better job than my grandmother. I don’t recall that he ever mentioned who taught him to darn.

He would thread the big needle, knot the end of the yarn and outline the hole with a circle of running stitches. Then he made a series of long stitches laid closely side by side across the hole. For his next step, he worked at right angles to the long stitches laid across the hole. He wove the needle over and under the long stitches, in and out, in and out, until he had fashioned a mend that resembled a piece of coarsely woven fabric.

I don’t recall that my grandparents ever had the following conversation, but I suspect they did – given the fact that like many Mainers of their time, they were straightforward of speech and quite capable of pungent language.

“Your grandmother can’t darn worth a damn,” my grandfather says, in a matter of fact way that contains no malice.

My grandmother replies, I imagine, quite complacently, as she crochets a lacy white baby bonnet, “And he couldn’t crochet if he went to hell for it.”

“Makes us even,” my grandfather confides, with a grin, and goes on darning.

Darning, I fear, is passing into oblivion.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, stores still sold cards of darning wool or cotton intended for mending socks and sweaters. Every home had a darning needle stuck in a pincushion. Darning was a necessary skill. It was a thrifty thing to do. It saved money and extended the life of clothing.

And it gave my grandfather one more neatly done thing to take pride in.

Snippets

. Doris Allen of Hudson called to say that she has made three yo-yo quilts and has done other yo-yo projects, such as vests for her grandchildren. She said her grandson cuts out the circles for her. He traces around an old tea canister lid and cuts the circles from scraps left over from the patchwork quilting done by Allen’s sister.

. Visit www.lionbrand.com to read about a team at the Houston Center for Contemporary Art in Texas who knit a sweater for a Volkswagen Beetle. It took about seven miles of yarn to accomplish the deed.

Ardeana Hamlin can be reached at 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.