I knocked the plug loose in my workshop. When I saw what my aunt had hidden in that wheel all those years, I had to steady myself, because it was full of paper, and the first thing I got hold of had a gold seal on it.
A United States patent. Number 2,841,362, issued the eighth of July, 1958, for a bobbin tension regulator for continuous-spun synthetic yarn.
Issued to Vera Ann Kolodziej. My aunt. Twenty-six years old at the time and working the third shift at a rayon plant outside Parkersburg.
Rolled up with it was her working notebook. Graph paper, four years of it, sketches and math and dates, and in the back a column of failures with the reason for each written beside it in that thin fountain pen hand she had until she died.
The wheel is not an heirloom. She built it, in 1955, out of a wagon axle and a chair and a piece of a treadle machine, in a rented room, so she could test tension at home when she could not use the plant floor. She never used it as a spinning wheel because it was never a spinning wheel.
On the first page of the notebook, above everything:
Nobody at that plant will read a drawing with my name on it. So I will get the paper first and let them argue with the paper. If you are reading this you have opened the base and you already know what I was, so do not let anybody tell you I was a woman who kept a pretty wheel in the corner.
She licensed it in 1959 to a mill supply company in Charlotte and it stayed in production, in one form or another, until 1991.
There were also thirty years of royalty statements in that base, and this is the part my mother has not gotten over.
The Kolodziej Family Educational Fund paid for my mother’s nursing school. It paid for two of my cousins. It paid three semesters of mine in 1998, and I wrote my thank-you letter to a lawyer’s office in Charleston, which is where all of us wrote them, because there was no fund and no committee. There was an aunt in a sitting room with a hollow wheel in the corner.
She never married and that family treated her like a woman something had failed to happen to. She sat through Thanksgivings while men explained things to her.
The patent is framed in my mother’s front hall where you cannot miss it. She is seventy-six and she has told the story to every person who has come through that door for two years.
The wheel is in my shop. I put the plug back in and I did not glue it.
The state historical society wanted it. They can have it when I am done, and I am not done, because my daughter is nine and she is going to grow up in a house with that thing in the corner of it and know exactly what it is.
Some people keep the proof of themselves sealed inside the furniture. Not because they were ashamed of it. Because they got tired of arguing, and they trusted somebody to come along later with a chisel.