The Family of Patchwork

Her short, glossy heels still hung casually in her left hand, Chelsea opened the smallest closet of her and her wife’s bedroom. It was piled high with baskets and bins, and any kind of material that could hang out from a drawer, was. There were lengths of yarn reaching down to the floor from top drawers, a block of fabric lounging on a handle, knitting needles peeking out from the corner of a drawer, held in place by the drawer being haphazardly pushed shut.

She tugged open a drawer nearing the top, balancing on her bare toes to reach it. She carefully lowered it down to her height, and then smiled a weary smile at the fabric squares of lively greens and dainty pinks within.

She realized she still held her business heels, and balancing the drawer in one hand, she tossed them onto the bed, and in a swift motion following this she took out the last clip holding her hair together, and it fell in a tired ginger mop. She tossed the clip aside, too, and made her way downstairs to collapse into her favorite chair in front of her sewing machine.

The utterly exhausted woman was at once at ease beside it. She sifted through the fabrics, pulling and setting out a pin cushion, an arrangement of threads, a small, half unwinded bundle of yarn. This was what she truly enjoyed- art. She was not a woman for accounting.

No other Lach-Leon had noticed it, but they were a family of patchwork. Of something old becoming something new, or of piecing something together that hadn’t been there before- Sure, one could easily note that on a surface level, their family was not one book so much as it was pages taken from varying volumes to make a new mix-matched story. A young witch, a woman with a foreign tongue, a boy who could not see but sing- not to mention two mothers, for starters. They were a family of patchwork.

The love of Chelsea’s life, her everything, was her Mireille. Born and raised in France, she loved language as she grew up. With paternal English speakers, she’d grown up with a some English mixed into her household, and by the time she had English classes, her French tongue could speak it quite well. She learned to write it and caught extraordinarily quickly, bilingual before she was 13.

She began to study both Latin and Russian, and three years later, she traveled out of her country to a teacher’s assistant job in Russia. She realized there that teaching was not her true passion- and as soon as she’d come to this revelation, she knew translating was her right path.

Years after changing a few things in her educational career to become an official translator, she was traveling to varying hospitals across America, a medical interpreter and translator. She worked smaller gigs at local business meetings where a last-minute translator was needed, and fell in love with her life.

And at one of these nick-of-time meetings, she met Chelsea.

Mireille brought people together where there had before been no bond. She fixed tears in a tapestry that otherwise wouldn’t go smoothly. She was a needle, her words a thread, connecting people where they had first been entirely different works of art.