By Jung Lee
Someone small has placed a sock on my desk. I know why it’s there: a hole in the heel or the big toe. My child found it while getting dressed, saw their pale skin peeking through the cloth, rummaged through their drawer, found an intact sock, slipped it on, then plopped the holey sock on my desk for me, Mom, to mend. My daughter wants to learn to sew, too. She sidles up close to watch.
When I retrieve my sewing kit, I can’t help but picture my grandmother. After I lost my parents, she was the one who taught me how to darn holes. She never gave me step-by-step instructions. When I brought her my sock, she got out her sewing kit from the round, blue-and-silver Danish cookie tin and selected her thread. I watched as she wet the end of the thread in her mouth, then carefully poked it through the eye of the needle, pulling it through the fabric, inside and out, inside, and out: a rhythm to it, like breathing.
Just the two of us sitting there on the floor of her hanok in Seoul, her hands and my worn sock between us, the needle reminding me of the heart surgery I had when I was six, while Grandma waited to take me home. I wondered if the surgeon pulled the sutures in and out the same way Grandma did when she stitched up my sock and made me whole again.
Jung Lee is a Korean American writer from Seoul, now based in Connecticut by way of Manhattan. She studied creative nonfiction and media at George Washington University and is currently at work on a memoir about displacement, silence, and the search for belonging.
Image by Arturo Añez courtesy of Pexels
What a beautiful intergenerational snapshot of a quotidian task. I, too, find connection and joy in mending. Every sentence here exudes peace. Thank you!
A satisfying feeling of learning to sew by watching the simple mending of a sock. Took me back. Lovely weaving in of the heart mending surgery. Thanks Jung!
Dear Jung,
Greetings.
How are you?
Thank you for sharing.
Wonderful to receive your poem.
Love
Tashi
Lovely piece.
Exquisitely crafted.
Oh this is so good!
Such a surprise ending. Beautiful.
I felt like I was watching. ❤️
I like the merging of time and action, and person and sock, so moving and surprising.
This is beautiful. Sewing as an act of repair, in cloth and flesh. Love this piece, the title, and the words supporting the universal theme.
So poignant. Thank you for writing this.
Thank you. This was truly lovely and evocative. The negative spaces shown through powerfully. I will look forward to your memoir.
What a poignant story. I learned so much about you in so few words. I, too, learned to sew Sitting next to my grandmother bent over her Singer seing machine. Thanks for the memory.
That was just lovely. The circle of life in the most intimate and intricate of things.
Thank you,
Joan Hagy
What a beautiful piece of writing, so tender, and grounding. The homely act of sewing is brought to us in a deeply-felt memory that stitches together family, caring, connection. Just lovely!
Who still darns socks these days, when an hour otherwise devoted to darning can be turned into enough dollars to buy a year’s worth of socks? I still have the blown-glass blue-green darning egg I used as a teenager, inherited from my grandmother. A beautiful object in its own right, it lives on a shelf with other distinguished works of art, with which it converses. This poem, like a good weave of darning, elegantly combines necessity with craft.
so lovely!
Stunning! I love the connection at the end to your heart surgery and the feeling of wholeness. This piece felt like being wrapped in a warm sweater!
So beautiful and moving. I read this piece multiple times. Like others said, from the title to each sentence and image and emotion, like a poem in how it reads and how you feel after. Thank you Jung!
A lovely piece, Jung Lee. I read this piece returning home from a trip to Seoul. This work resonates on so many levels as I consider my own interactions with the beautiful Korean people. Thank you!