My Grandmother's Sewing Tine

My mother passed in 2022. For a variety of reasons, we did not go through my parents' house until last summer. I spent a week up there with four of my siblings, emptying drawers and closets, shredding papers and going through the effects of two long lives.  Not only was the house full of stuff, my parents also had a huge shop crammed with tools and a basement stacked with boxes. Even after the week we were there, a few things turned up. One find was this tine, which my brother discovered in the basement (we did not have time to go through every box down there).

A tine (pronounced tee-nah) is a traditional Norwegian box constructed of bent wood. Often they were used for carrying food--like a lunch pail. You open it by pulling the little ear-shaped handles at the side, which flexes the wood so the lid comes off. 

My grandmother was a folk painter, her work inspired by traditional rosemaling. In her kitchen, she painted the cupboard doors with flowers and had a round table with a sunflower in the middle. When I was a girl, her kitchen was one of my favorite places. (I wrote a bit about her painting in a previous blog post).

My mother had a sewing tine like this that my grandmother painted. This tine is not my mother's--hers had a different design and also had a broken side handle. I'm speculating that this tine may have been my grandmother's personal tine. However, we don't know. We don't even know for sure that she painted it, although it looks very much like her other work. My mother's is signed, and this one is unsigned.

I remember my mother's tine--not just the outside, but her tomato/strawberry pincushion, and especially the collection of buttons scavenged from old clothes. I loved to slide my fingers over the smooth buttons, squeeze the sandy-textured pincushion, fumble the thimble onto my thumb. So for me, getting this tine stirred up many memories. 

Because this tine was found after the week I was at my parents' house, I didn't get it until this Christmas. I planned to use it as a sewing tine myself, but I was unaware until I opened it that it was still full.

It contained a pincushion, homemade, by the looks of it. Needles and pins. Some blue yarn (half crocheted), twine, spools of thread, a thimble. Some old buttons (notice the ones in the picture are marked as "Germany, US zone," which gives us an idea of how old they are!). It also contained other items unrelated to sewing, as if she'd just put them in there during a cleanup.

​This tine is a box of memories. The blue yarn reminded me that my grandmother was prolific maker of zigzag afghans similar to the one below:

photo from Bonnie Bay Crochet on Etsy

But why the little ballet dancer figurine, like one broken from a jewelry/music box? Why the lightbulb? And can I even take these things as relics of hers, since I am not 100% sure this was her tine? 

Getting this tine reminded me of how mysterious the lives of others are. No one knows anyone's full story. My grandmother died when I was in college. My parents, who might have been able to positively identify the tine, are both gone. 

My father's younger brother, my uncle David, passed over a year ago. He was a photographer and became a caretaker of many family photos. One of my cousins uploaded old photos he scanned. There are many pictures of my grandparents as well as of my father and his brothers. But the photos contain many more photos of people I cannot identify. And even the ones I can recognize are in contexts I can't fathom. Where and when and why were they taken? It's all mysterious.  

Writing fiction is a way to try to understand others as well as myself. But it's all guesswork. I could make up a story about why my grandmother saved that broken ballerina figure, but it would be fiction. Everyone I could ask is gone.

This picture from that trove of scanned photos is my grandmother as a young woman. It captures some of her humor and liveliness and the flair of a budding artist.​