Every essay begins with white space. White space is the essay entitled “Essay” looking for its opening line, the writer looking for the new way into her old material. White space is the slit in the body marked “Self.”

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White space is a possibility. The writer sorts herself. Pine needles on a sidewalk so orange they could only be called undead. The sidewalk was in the better part of my neighborhood, single-family homes with careful lawns surrounding a wooded island of trees and brambles. / The pine needles that browned our yard when I was a girl. The winter search for a pine cone not too misshapen for boughs of school glue and glitter. My mother saying, This one. / The box of photos on the shelf, the only place other than me where that yard with my mother is a space to be stepped into. The writer chooses a remnant from the scrap pile to become a section hemmed by white space.

In fact, every space is a possibility. The space between one word and the next is where the writer weaves memory onto the page. In this yard, between me and the pine needles, my mother. The writer knits narrative into the space between sentences. In this yard, my mother. The yard so green it was like it had been planted, the needles on the trees just backdrop. In this yard, my mother. 

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White space is neither the moment before or after but the decision itself, the needle pushing through the fabric of time. The writer pulls the thread already in the needle forward. In this yard, my mother. Or she lets it slip and unspools another. This yard had no shade. In this yard, it was fall, summer dying. In this yard.

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Is white space a pause or a stop? White space is a mouth embroidered on the body marked “Self,” a seam that can be ripped. White space says, “Cut” or “Join.” White space is the stitch on the other side, the writer striking through type with pen. A pile of needles is called a drop. Needles are full-grown photosynthetic pine leaves. Their bundles are called fascicles.

White space says to the writer, “Remember.” My mother sewed a tote bag in which she placed a five-subject notebook where she had written memories and criticisms, her memory of my life. White space says to the writer, “You can start over.” I thought I wanted to learn to sew and got a machine from a friend. In the end I moved it by the front door where my husband, also a writer, put things that were never going anywhere. What I had wanted was my mother’s sewing machine. White space says to the writer, “You might be done already.” “My mother was a seamstress, too,” my poetry professor said. Seamstress—a word I had never heard any of the women at the H.D. Lee plant use.

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Backstories fall back into the past in white space. Every fun thing I ruined with fear. I was afraid of the swinging bridge. I was afraid I wouldn’t get through Fat Man’s Squeeze. In the middle my mother quoted the verse about the rich man and the eye of the needle. I thought heaven would be like this, dark and cold, rocks edging you. I could not be small enough. The writer licks her finger and knots the thread. White space is scissors to the body marked “Self.”

White space is the mending bag. My finger held in my mother’s one hand, the needle that had been heated with a match in her other. The needle seeking the splinter, drawing and drawing it to the surface.

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White space is pattern or the disruption of pattern. It is the patchwork itself. The writer joins section to section, joins beginning to end, through white space. White space stands in front of the writer and beckons. It pushes the writer from behind. The night my mother died, I pulled the quilt at the bottom of the bed up over my feet, pulled the bedspread over the quilt. Everything my mother had sewn was hidden beneath the store-bought spread.

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Every essay ends with white space.

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Jennifer Gravley’s essays have appeared in North American Review, Sweet, Pithead Chapel and other journals. She works as a research and instruction librarian in Columbia, Mo.