A Day in the Country: Feeling the absence of loved ones during the pandemic, Maggie Mackellar finds comfort in precious handmade family treasures and long-held traditions.
WITH HER MOTHER’S SISTER UNABLE TO VISIT, MAGGIE MACKELLAR CHERISHES HER HANDCRAFTED TREASURES.
MY MOTHER WOULD HAVE TURNED 80 THIS YEAR. It pinches at me, the thought of the woman who she would have become. In the 16 years since she died, I’ve watched her sisters and close friends growing older. I’m lucky to have these women who have stepped into the intake of breath where my mother should be. They’re the voice on the end of the phone, the birthday present in the letterbox, the card out of the blue, and, even more, they’re the example of how to live a full life if one is given the chance.
This year, because of the virus, my aunt who usually visits annually, hasn’t been able to make the trip. I’ve felt her absence like a snag, like something else is not quite right. Usually, when I meet her at the airport, she brings some trace of the woman my mother might have become. I hug her and study her face. She’s lived all her life out of cities. She’s an artist, a passionate gardener and observer of nature. She’s a doer.
Without her here, I find myself treasuring the things she’s made over the years – and there are many, for she is never without something in her hands. There’s the handspun, hand-dyed, knitted woollen blanket I sleep under every night. The rug is the colours of Australia’s inland, deep red clays, muted greens and inky blues. There’s also my favourite work jumper, which she had taken one look at last year and demanded I take off for her to mend. She patched it with a tartan on the elbows and darned it with red wool and really I should have put it away to preserve, but instead I wear it every day. There was also the slowly dying pot of thyme outside the laundry door, which I was always too busy to save. It was given a haircut, its roots gently eased out and a dose of manure and compost mixed up, and now it’s transformed from a woody ugly plant to a fuzz of green leaves. It releases a scent hinting of summer every time I brush past it to hang clothes on the line.
In this age, where our points of connection with people and place are increasingly digital, I’m struck by the usefulness of all the things she’s made, whether they last a season, like the mulberries she picked and froze in small batches to get us through the winter, or a lifetime, like the ceramic bowl she made for my mother, which holds a salad of bitter greens from my garden every night.
With our travel restricted and all our worlds made smaller, I’m more acutely tuned to the presence in my life of those women who have laid down a template, showing me how to notice, how to look beyond myself and trace meaning across time and distance. Domestic work is mostly transitory: hours spent cooking a meal eaten in minutes; clothes washed, hung, folded, put away only to be back in the laundry basket the next day; floors swept and mopped; carpets vacuumed; and toilets scrubbed, all of it needing to be done again and again. Such work is the stuff of our existence, but not of our connection. What I feel when I pull that rug up under my chin every night, shrug myself into my patched jumper, or pluck leaves of thyme from the back door is something deeper. These physical things are made by loving hands, and, in this, they are antidotes to the sterility of our digital world.