What happens in the video
In a bright kitchen, a woman in a white blouse holds a light-coloured envelope or card tied with a blue ribbon. A younger woman in denim speaks with her and reaches towards it. They look down at the table, then towards an older woman approaching from the doorway. In the final moments, the woman in white looks at a sheet of paper.
Continuation:
“Before you open it,” Liv said, “remember that you told me to sort the kitchen drawer.”
Her mother regarded the blue ribbon. “Sorting generally involves throwing out dead batteries. This looks more serious.”
For years the drawer had stuck halfway. Inside were bent birthday candles, a key that fitted nothing in the house and a little envelope wedged behind the cutlery tray. Liv had nearly put it into the recycling until she saw her mother’s maiden name.
She’d wrapped it in the only ribbon she could find. Now she wished she’d just handed it over quietly. Her mother, Caroline, was staring at the address as if somebody had called her by a name she hadn’t heard since school.
Gran appeared in the doorway. “Well, there’s my good ribbon.”
Caroline drew out the paper. At seventeen she had written to a woman who designed costumes for a little theatre. She had enclosed a pencil sketch of a coat with enormous sleeves and asked how a person got a job making such things. She remembered posting the letter. She remembered, even more clearly, waiting for a reply.
Here it was.
The designer had liked the sleeves. She had suggested a different fastening, drawn a tiny diagram and invited Caroline to bring her sketchbook on a Saturday morning. The invitation was thirty years old.
“Did you see this at the time?” Caroline asked her mother.
Gran read the first few lines. “I don’t remember it. We moved that winter. Look, it’s still got the forwarding sticker.”
There was no satisfying person to blame. That almost made it harder. Caroline sat down and ran a finger over the designer’s pencilled alteration. Somebody had spent time on her coat. All those years she had thought the drawing too silly even to answer.
Liv left the decision about what came next to her mother. On Sunday she came into the kitchen to find the table covered in newspaper. Caroline was cutting a paper pattern while Gran held a saucer over one corner to keep it flat.
“Apparently the sleeves were the best bit,” Caroline said. “You want to try one?”
The coat took six Sundays. One pocket sat higher than the other, and the first time Liv put it on she discovered both women had left a pair of scissors in it.
She wore it to the little theatre, which still opened its doors on Saturday mornings. This time Caroline went in too. A wardrobe volunteer admired the unusual fastening and asked where she’d got the idea.
Caroline unfolded the old letter. “Somebody showed me,” she said, and stayed for the whole morning.
