There is a sweater in a wooden drawer in Recife that has been there for twenty-six years. It belonged first to my grandmother. It became, at some point, my mother's. It is now, in some indeterminate way, mine — though I do not wear it, and have not worn it, and am not the right shape for it. The sweater is camel-colored, hand-knit, made from wool that was probably bought in São Paulo in the late 1980s. It has small holes near the right shoulder where moths got in during a bad summer. The cuffs are worn pale.
I have moved seven times in the years I have known the sweater. The drawer has moved with me, and the sweater has moved inside the drawer, and the drawer has been opened, on average, perhaps four times a year. The sweater is one of the most permanent objects in my life. I have taken nothing else with me through every move.
If I lost it, I am almost certain I would weep. Not for the wool, which is unremarkable, and not for the cut, which is dated. For the way the sweater holds time. For what its specific weight, against my hand, in the dim of a closet at three in the afternoon, returns to me about three women — my grandmother, my mother, myself — and the rooms in which I have known them.
This essay is about why a piece of cloth can do that, when very few of the other objects in a life can.
The sweater is still in the drawer. It will be there next time I visit.
I am not sure, in any of the ways one is supposed to be sure of oneself, what has formed me as a person — what combinations of place and accident and inheritance and decision. But I notice, in the small accounting of the things I have kept, that the cloth has been there longer than most of the people. A sweater that belonged to my grandmother, a shirt that belonged to a friend who has died, a coat I bought myself in a city I no longer live in — these have moved with me when nothing else has. They are not relics. They are the slow witnesses of a slow life.
We are building this house — PIMA WORLD WIDE — for the same reason. To produce cloth that, at the end of long lives, sits in the drawers of people who, when they touch it, remember more than what they paid for it.
That is the only kind of luxury we are interested in.