THE GOOD OVEN *Wattpad Featured* (aka 'Re Ply')

She was born...

She was born in the 1890's, the lady I loved like a soul mother. Her name was, well, should I say her name? This is a little personal. Perhaps I should wait.

She was the first child of her young and hopeful parents, and she was the first of many. 

 'Never mind,' the grandfather had said when he was told she was a girl, 'She can help with the others.'

'Never mind!' Sarah muttered. What does he mean with his 'Never mind'? I laboured fourteen hours to give him his first grandchild. Blood of my blood, the bone of my bone, and of his. The sweetest creature!

Sarah wrapped the mite in her shawl as she went about the house, keeping her close and warm, sharing their heartbeats as they had for nine months. Sarah would sit and feed her gurgling bundle with the big big blue eyes. And Sarah would completely forget herself, gazing. She was lost in those big blue eyes.

At night they kept their bairn between them, she and her handsome husband, each only half-sleeping, keeping one eye open, tenderly making space for the tiny one between them. They kept her warm, safe from the drafts as the temperature plummeted outside, and the shaky windows rattled with winter storms.

Little blue eyes smiled and slept and woke and smiled again. She may have had the odd bad day with colic, but no-one remembered that. As spring came on, in a few short weeks, and the weather was better, and baby was rather noticeably bigger, time came to move her from the dip in their bed to an old wooden drawer, close by them.

It was the Bottom Drawer of the dressing table. Now, if you had grown up when I grew up, you would know the magic of those words. All young girls began to collect treasures, and make and embroider linens for their bottom drawer as soon as they had the skills.  I began with tray cloths, when I was nine as Sarah had. I embroidered a blue flower with a leaf on either side of it, in one corner of the rectangular cloth that was edged in white. Sarah had done the same.

We all we had these things to take to our new home when we married. We imagined our very own sideboard in a dimly lit Victorian dining room, just like our grandmothers'. We supposed being grown up equated with being old.

Sarah's bottom drawer was truly Victorian. It moved now into to its next phase. The table linens were removed and stored in the kitchen. Bed linens rested in the warm airing cupboard close to the chimney. Now the drawer was gathering baby linens. Napkins and bibs and gowns had been sewn and embroidered in white, maybe with decoupage or a little cotton lace that would withstand boiling. 

Baby passed daytime hours in a moses basket, like a kind of musical box in reverse, that fell silent whenever it was opened and the bairn was lifted out. Why then the drawer was in constant use as little knitted items flew out, tiny mittens and ribboned bootees, and gowns and shawls, all to be gently replaced in a day or two, sweet smelling and fresh again.

When the harshest weather was passed, the bottom drawer came full circle. They had lined it with cotton blankets, knitted by everyone while together, the mothers and their mothers too, with neighbour ladies and relatives who had sat and talked and reassured. To the music of their voices and the clicking of their needles, Sarah had begun to embody the acceptance of process. She had learned to realise, really start to realise the being of the baby yet unseen, already preparing to give her her own space. Not that anyone had much space to themselves back then. At last the blankets were ready to be placed in cushioned layers in the long bottom drawer which became the cradle, a place of her own,  for little blue eyes.

She lay snug and half-swaddled, reflecting on life, twiddling her fingers while the birds sang, and her mother sang, and the week's work revolved around her. Laundry, pots and cooking, coals and fires, and laundry, and more laundry.  

What is change? Today a kick, today a sense of peace. A wave of fear, with an impossibility of saying, it will be like this. Change. Is it holding hope, holding love? Letting the whole lot go at the same time? 

We live in change.

And so the little one in the dappled light where sun fell, filtered through rose leaves, seemed to show reflections of a thousand generations in her sweet cheeks. Here a grandad, there a cousin, here again and again her mother. Sometimes faces that seemed so well known for a millisecond, so vividly present and then gone, reminded whoever saw that there were truly a thousand generations or more of family history here in this precious little carrier. And all the while, she was in process, making her own uniqueness, filtering in and out the genes that made her while creating her own particular self.