The Coat of Many Colours

It was a cold, grey Vancouver day in late October. The kind of day that carried a hint of the winter rains to come. A reprieve day, chilly but dry. It was the perfect kind of day to wear my precious coat of many colours, so I hauled it out of the bottom drawer of my closet where it resided, all by itself, in a cedar-lined drawer. I had shopping to do downtown that day, and as I was briskly walking along the north side of Georgia Street, having passed the Vancouver Art Gallery on my right, I suddenly heard a voice calling out behind me “Stop! Stop!”

Startled, I turned to see a slightly disheveled grey-haired woman running towards me. She didn’t have a coat on, and her white silk blouse clung to her skin as futile protection against the cold.

“I saw you pass by the gallery from my office window,” she explained a little breathlessly, catching up to me. “I noticed your coat. It’s so beautiful that I knew I had to have it for my show.”

“What show?” I asked bemused by this absolute stranger who had appeared out of nowhere with her peculiar request.

“I’m putting together a major exhibition of handmade objects as works of art,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of the gallery. “Will you let me have your coat?”

My Aunt Sylvia had made me that coat. She was my mother’s middle sister, and we all called her Aunty Sibby, because of my slip of the tongue as a child. She never had any children of her own, so she became a second mother to my sister and me. She was the magical person we always wanted to visit, as would our children after us, for she played with us as though she were a child herself. She was the master game creator, costume maker, and director for all of our impromptu performances. Aunty Sibby was also the storyteller in our family, and in the summer she would gather all the children in the neighbourhood in the early evening to read them stories before bed. Later, she carefully typed all of my essays for school on an IBM Selectric, redoing pages over and over again, using sheets of carbon paper between the extra copies that stained her fingertips black. Later still, she would stay up at night poring over the Chicago Manual of Style so that she could enter the correct versions of “ibid.” and “loc.cit.”—Latin abbreviations for the footnotes in my university research papers.

But more than all of this, Aunty Sibby was a gifted creator. She worked in the only mediums she had learned were acceptable for a woman growing up in a tiny prairie town in the 1920s. She learned to knit and sew and crochet and embroider, her hands skillfully looping thread and wool around needles. She created patterns in her head and then figured out the mathematical equations to produce them. While my mother was admired for her knitting and embroidering, Aunt Sibby became truly famous for her crocheting. The whole extended family would beg her to make them something. She made sweaters and long skirts, delicate vests and colourful bathing suit cover-ups. She made fancy lace aprons to go over formal dresses and entire outfits for small children. My niece still has the upside- down doll Aunty Sibby made her; when you flip it over, another doll appears. Best of all, Aunty Sibby sometimes made coats.

She was so much in demand that she kept a list of all the people who wanted her to make them something. Even if you were lucky enough to get on her list, you still had to wait until your name came up to the top—and that could be a long time. If she really liked you though, you got to jump the queue every now and then. I was one of those people, and my turn seemed to come up a lot.

“Okay Natalie, ” she would say with her sly smile. “What’s it to be this time?”

One day when I was in my late twenties, Aunty Sibby said out of the blue, “I’m going to make you a coat of many colours.” And so she did.

It took her six months to make that coat, probably one of her longest projects. She didn’t ask me what colours I wanted: nor did we discuss the style or size. She just did it, her face often trancelike as she measured and adjusted, sometimes ripping out a section and starting over, trying pieces on me at different stages as the garment took on its own miraculous shape.

It was an ankle-length coat composed of honey-brown thick wool. The wool had a mohair thread in it that made the coat slightly fuzzy and cozy and amazingly warm. But that was only the base layer. Interspersed all over the coat were large and small embroidered designs made of the same wool, but these were in gorgeous jewel colours—purple and red and orange—and inside these designs were tiny embroidered flowers and pink bud-like knots. A curly black three-inch fringe ran all around the coat’s outer edges.

It was a heavy coat, as you can imagine, with all that wool and fringe, so Aunty Sibby had to invent a way for me to keep it up. She braided soft skeins of the honey-brown wool into a tight strip of rope, and she wove that through the inside of the coat at the waist so I could tie the coat around me before closing it. Now, you must understand, there could also be no hooks, no zippers, no commercially made object of any kind used to close this handmade coat. The only way to fasten it against the weather were the tasseled black wool twists attached to each side of the coat so I could tie them together at intervals—ten in all from top to bottom. Sometimes I would start at the top with the wrong tie on one side and not discover my error till I got to the last tie at the bottom, and then have to start all over again. You didn’t put this coat on in an emergency.

As I fastened the ties one at a time I always thought of women in other centuries, about how many hours it would have taken them to dress and undress, about how many times a day they had to put clothes on and take them off, including their hats and gloves—about who was there to help them undo the tiny buttons at the back of their dresses at night. And I always thought about my Aunty Sibby, even after she was no longer around. I thought about her love and her creative gifts and how she would have been an artist in another life.

And now I was thinking about this extraordinary grey-haired woman standing on the street before me, asking me to loan her my coat. It turned out the woman was Doris Shadbolt, the director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. In a twist of fate no one could have foretold, she had looked out her window at the exact moment I happened to be walking by. She had recognized, from 400 yards away, a stunning work of art. More than thirty years after she created my coat of many colours, Aunty Sibby would have her work hanging on the wall of the most prestigious art gallery in town.