carolyn

Simone and I land at Carolyn’s Valley Tailor Shop. The space inside is small and we are greeted by two ladies busy sewing and going about daily business. While we set up an a woman comes inside and hands Carolyn a jacket. She wants a pillow made. The jacket belonged to her deceased son and she has come in with similar requests before. During my short visit one thing I observed about Carolyn’s job is that she has a direct line of sight into the intimate world of almost everyone that walks through the door.

Carolyn is originally from seventy-five miles from here. She learned to sew when she was nine and had the feeling that she was good for the first time when she was twelve. She married and had three children young. The relationship turned abusing and she eventually he managed to leave with the kids and moved to the Conway area to start anew. She opened the doors to her tailor shop more than thirty-seven years ago and when she first got there she knew no one.

“If you buy it and it’s close, I can make it perfect.” Carloyn remains modest but it’s obvious she’s very skilled and has been busy for a long time just by word of mouth: “People come from all the way down in New York.” Carolyn has no computer or smartphone and so I will print and hand deliver her this text and the image. She’s a motivational speaker and has a long-term, deep relationship with an amish family who she bought a quilt from many years ago. There’s a photograph hanging in the sewing room where Carolyn is in the middle of the family and the only person not wearing a form of head covering. She sells quilts that the amish family make. They cost around one thousand dollars and the proceeds go to missions in Haiti. The quilts are made of thousands and thousands of stitches that were individually made by hand holding together complex colorful patterns –– and the wait can be up to a year.

Carolyn struck me as lively, direct, funny, and very warm. Her advice to young women who way be in similar situations as she was in is to always keep picking yourself up and find the strength within you to not wait as long as she did.

[71] July 22, 2021