The women who taught us to sew.

There is a photograph in our atelier of three women standing outside a small building in Kasoa. It is 1978. They are our grandmother, our great-aunt, and a woman whose name we no longer know. Between them, they had been sewing for a combined ninety-one years. The building behind them was their workshop. It is where our house began, though none of us knew it at the time.

We drove down to the Central Region last month to visit the two of them who are still with us. Auntie Comfort is eighty-three now. She still keeps a Singer machine in the corner of her sitting room, oiled and covered with a cotton cloth. When we asked her to show us how she sets a sleeve — really sets a sleeve, the way her mother taught her — she waved us away and told us to sit down first and drink some water.

This is the kind of sentence you hear all afternoon in her house. She has forgotten more about garment construction than most of us will ever learn. What she has not forgotten is why the work matters — that a piece of clothing, made properly, is a small act of care for whoever wears it. That care lasts longer than the season, longer than the trend, sometimes longer than the wearer.

We came back to Accra with three notebooks of her observations and a length of cloth she pressed into our hands as we left. "Make something honest with it," she said. We are still deciding what that will be.