Sitting in my mother’s living room yesterday, it hit me that her design aesthetic could be interpreted as her take on a 1970s cocktail room.

It is not an aesthetic I particularly appreciate. Honor, a neighbor of my mother’s, appreciates it, though. It reminded her of her grandmother, she said, turning and admiring my mother’s living room, taking in the mirrored wall, the dark green carpet, golden drapes.

Honor left with a 1990s era ceramic wall decoration and a couple of brass figures that I have a story about, but not for today.

Before our weekly visit to the Valley to empty out my mother’s house yesterday, my family took a sewing class together. I’ve taken one sewing class that I can remember—I was 17 or 18, and I took a class where I made a very loose cotton sweatshirt with an iron-on print. I did not go on to sew another thing, until yesterday, when I made a tote bag with three different fabrics in two and a half hours alongside my partner and our kid. We all agreed that we’d like to take more classes, watch some videos online, buy a basic sewing machine and some basic tools, learn to make actual clothes.

The sewing teacher’s name was Liberty. My mom’s neighbor, who I opened this post writing of, is named Honor. It’s almost laughable, that my life is populating with people whose names are these words as these conditions, or states, are receding, or have receded, for many.

Talking to my mother yesterday at the residential board and care she’s living in, I told her we were there in the afternoon instead of the morning because we’d spent the morning learning to sew.

“Imagine if the baby turns out to love sewing,” she said. The baby, who is fifteen, did seem to get lost in the flow of sewing, in a way that made me quietly excited for her.

I don’t have to imagine. I think the baby might turn out to love sewing. And this feels significant to me, and to my mother, which is why she would even mention it. The significance being that my mother’s mother, the only grandmother I had a relationship with, was a gifted seamstress. I grew up knowing that my grandmother had sewn most of my mother’s school clothes growing up, as well as the numerous fancy dresses my mother would wear to the many dances she liked to go to in high school. My mother, who is getting a cognitive assessment this week, who told me last week that her brother (who’s been deceased since 1959) was calling her, described to us yesterday one of the many dresses her mother made for her, with tassels and fringe, completely by her own hand. My grandmother’s skills were also what earned her a living in the garment district of Los Angeles for many years before she retired. By the time I was born, she had also retired from sewing, spending what time she had left with arthritic but workable hands to crochet and knit. When I was an infant she crocheted clothes for my future child. Her cabinets were filled with arts and crafts supplies, my favorite being the plethora of sequins in various colors and sizes and the push pins I used to attach the sequins to styrofoam shapes. My grandmother never officially met my baby. My grandmother was unconscious in a hospital room when I brought my five-month-old baby to see her. My grandmother died not long after, on the day she was to move to hospice.

The baby might love sewing, and I, so far, love sewing. The baby might not realize the connection to her great-grandmother, but I do.

Amid the daily chaos all around us, it felt pretty wholesome and centering to spend a couple hours working with our hands, touching fabrics, learning a new machine well enough to have some facility with it. I want more of those kinds of hours.

The chaos created by the current regime and its enablers is, in some part, meant to steal: time, energy, peace, a sense of solidarity. And hope. It’s meant to steal hope. Let’s not let it.

“Wendy C. Ortiz is a writer of memoirs, and a writer who changes memoir…Excavation offers stunning proof that what we are told not to write is always what we need to write. Hollywood Notebook examines breakdown and breakthrough inside and outside the creative process…Bruja reveals dream logic by refusing to make dreams logical, presenting a narrative without direct interpretation, except for the analysis that exists within the dreams themselves. She calls this a dreamoir, placing the text beyond conventional definitions of nonfiction. All of Ortiz’s books, in fact, allow the reader to roam through the minutia of everyday experience to conjure the sweetness, sorrow, craving, loss, inspiration, brutality, intimacy and frustration of living. Feeling. Flailing. Failing. And, yes, dreaming, in spite of (or because of) it all.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Foglifter Journal, 2025.

Buy Excavation now.

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Come work with me in a nonfiction workshop this summer in Portland with McCormack Writing Center’s Oregon Summer Workshop (formerly the summer Tin House Workshop). Applications are due February 9th and numerous scholarships are available.