"Converse"ations with Meg

To Honor Them

If you have not figured this out yet, let me let you in on something. Bailey and I LOVE a good project. We love a list and an organized assignment that gives us something to do. We sometimes have grand ideas and about half way through them we think “what are we doing, what were we thinking,” but none the less, we press on with our idea. We both fully believe if you work hard enough, and are organized enough, no task is really too big, especially if you do it together! So, when our local hospital, Forrest General put out a call for people to make cloth masks for nurses and doctors in Hattiesburg, we were all over it! One of our good friends, Kristi works at the hospital, so we started thinking how we would make her a MS State (go dawgs) mask and go from there. We carved out our “busy” schedule and decided Friday was the day to sew!

Bailey found scraps of cloth her grandmother had, she brought out her sewing machine and we got to work. I did the cutting, elastic pinning, and ironing, Bailey, the one with actual skill, did the sewing. We worked for HOURS on masks. We matched colors and made them as fun and bright as we possibly could. We made some for men and some for women, hoping that the fabrics would bring a little joy into a pretty dull reason for a fabric mask. We totally enjoyed doing it, and after our efforts were able to donate 30 masks to the local donation bins downtown. We were excited we could do a small part in helping our community, and both just thankful we could pull together and have skills enough to help.

A really cool tie in to this mask story is our grandmothers. Both of our mom’s moms, our maternal grandmothers loved to sew and were both nurses. They both worked in the hospital where we made our donation for the masks. As we were cutting and sewing, we told stories about our grandmothers and went through memories we had of them sewing or things they had made for us and it was so good just to remember and laugh! We also both got pretty teary eyed thinking about how full circle it was that they sewed and were nurses, and in a way, we had a cool project to honor them. We know they both would be SO proud of us! This COVID-19 has been scary, and I am somewhat worried this is only the beginning. I think we can all choose fear or anxiety, or we can find ways to spread joy and live our faith. On that Friday, in honor of Bailey’s grandmother and with a thought of my Granny, we chose joy!