The wind shakes the shutters like an impatient guest.

 

She whispers to it, “not yet.”

 

Fingers come together, mottled and curled with age. In one hand a glittering needle, the other, the end of a thread.

 

It’s here that she finds herself now, she thinks: the long strand that’s woven through all of her years is reaching the end of its reel. Not stork-scissor-severed with loose ends tied up, but fraying and falling apart.

 

She curses and fails to pass cotton through steel, the tremor that’s marked her movements of late all wrong for this kind of fine work. She reaches across to the sewing box, lid warped and loosened with age, and rummages for her old threader, tin stamped with a nameless face.

 

The box had belonged to her mother, and her mother’s mother before, passed down the line a whisper - a wonder - filled with a century’s spools. Strong as sinew, fine as hair, they lie like sleeping serpents there, awaiting fated seams. Faded with age - only odds and ends really - but too good to throw away. A beautiful burden begotten by forebears convinced that they’d soon find a use.

 

And did her own thread find its purpose, through all of its labours and loves? The name tapes sewn into gym knickers, the lovingly monogrammed handkerchiefs, the everyday spinning and washing of fleece, only to end it all here: alone in the old farmhouse again, her body bent and fingers frail.

 

She shakes the thought from her silvery head and squints at the task at hand: a glint gives away the threader, buried beneath the coloured whorls, and she threads the needle at last with colour plucked from years long past.

 

She’d used it to darn her husband’s coat the week before he died. Her mother embroidered a blanket that she keeps at her bedside. Her grandma had bought it at discount price to use on her wedding gown, and now she will use it for a shroud.

 

The word makes her think of a flimsy thing, all winding white linen and silk. Her coat is nothing of the sort: it is heavy, lined and warm, smelling of woodsmoke and lanolin and something she can’t quite recall. She reckons she’ll want something practical for whatever the next journey holds.

 

She thumbs the nearly-finished fabric, woven of memories and wool: an unravelled jumper her daughter once wore, a strand from her mother’s old shawl. Things torn and mended, lost and found, given new life and new form.

​

With shaking hands she starts to sew, her stitches neat and small, marking out her last design, time pulled through the needle’s eye. And in her work she finds release, the pain and strain of later years flowing through the weave, the tug of old scars, white and raised, wounds knit closed as she finds peace: a life transcribed in thread and fleece.

​

At last with a laugh that might be a gasp, the last stitch is tied off and bitten away. She holds the coat up before her, beautiful in its own handwoven way: no delicate gown for a dowager queen, but sturdy and strong like a shepherd’s wife, a fitting end to a simple life.

​

The wind falls silent beyond the door. She uncurls her fingers from the garment’s warmth, but the funeral coat doesn’t fall. The fabric holds its upright form, as if worn by an unseen guest. Shoulders firm, back unbowed, sleeves pushed back above the wrist. 

​

She stands back to admire her work, one hand against her silent chest, and nods approval at its stance - its simple cut, unbroken lines, the way it bears the weight of time.

​

The thing of thread and empty space reaches out a sleeve: not to take, but to offer reprieve. She greets it with a smile, and slips her hand into the space where another’s might have been.

The door flies open on its hinge, and lets the cold rush in. But the wind does not bite, the frost does not cling.

​

Side by side with the life she wove, she walks into the snow.