The Building That Held Her Workshop for 31 Years Has Been Sold. The Dressed Porch Geese She Finished This Spring Are The Last Lorraine Stauffer Will Ever Make.
Ephrata, Pennsylvania. The shop is narrow. Fourteen feet across, maybe forty deep. One wall is pegboard, floor to ceiling, holding spools of thread that run from cream to black in about ninety steps. There are two machines. One of them is older than the shop. The cutting table came from an auction in Lititz and cost eleven dollars, and in thirty-one years Lorraine has never once thought about replacing it.
And in the front window, facing Main Street, there is a goose.
Twenty-three inches tall. Her name is Gertie. Right now she is wearing cream cotton printed with pumpkins and maple leaves, a plaid bib panel, lace at the collar, and a bow the size of her head, because it is that time of year.
Gertie has stood in that window since March of 1995. In thirty-one years she has not once stood out there bare.
„People set their calendar by her,“ Lorraine says. „I'd change her over in the morning and by noon somebody would come in and say — well, I guess it's fall then.“
Nobody looks up anymore
Drive through most neighborhoods in October and you'll see the same thing on every third lawn. A nylon turkey, plugged into an extension cord. Upright at night. Face-down in the wet grass by morning. Come December it goes in a bag in the garage, and the year after that it has a split seam, and then it goes in the trash.
Lorraine doesn't have much to say about those.
„It isn't that they're ugly,“ she says, and she means it — she's not a woman who enjoys running things down. „It's that nobody is going to remember them. Nobody's grandchild is ever going to say, that's the house with the blow-up turkey.“
She's got a point, and it's older than she is. Around here, and across Ohio and Indiana and half of Appalachia, people used to keep a goose on the porch and dress her for the season. It started in the eighties. Women traded patterns at church. They sewed outfits for each other's geese. The geese had names, and the neighbors knew the names.
Then, somewhere in the nineties, it mostly stopped. The porches emptied out. The garage door went in front of the front door. And a street that used to have thirty small reasons to slow down and look now has none.
- 23 inches tall (58 cm) — the standard porch-goose size, the one the old dress patterns were cut for
- Soft fabric body on a weighted base — stands on her own, for a covered porch, an entryway or a window
- Dress included — sewn from Lorraine's own pattern, not sold separately
- Two designs: the Harvest Leaves dress and the Thanksgiving dress
- Elastic neckline and double-turned hems — so it goes on easily, sits straight and doesn't fray at the edges
- Final series — the shop on Main Street closes October 31st
None of which explains why the woman three doors down from Lorraine has had one on her porch since 2003.
It started with her mother's goose
Lorraine taught home economics at the middle school for eighteen years. Hems, darts, buttonholes, four hundred twelve-year-olds who did not want to be there. She was good at it and she liked it and she does not describe it as a stepping stone to anything.
Her mother, meanwhile, kept a goose on the porch in Denver, Pennsylvania. Cream-colored. Nameless, actually — her mother just called her the goose. She had maybe six outfits, all of them store-bought, all of them faded.
When her mother died in 1994, Lorraine took the goose home and put her on the porch and then stood there for a while looking at her, because it was February and the goose was wearing nothing.
„I couldn't leave her out there like that,“ Lorraine says. „I don't know how else to explain it.“
The first dress she made was cut from one of her mother's own dresses. Navy, with small white flowers. She still has it, folded, in a drawer at the shop, and she is not going to sell you that one.
The shop opened thirteen months later.
What thirty-one years of mistakes teaches you
Here is the part Lorraine will actually talk at length about.
She washes every bolt of fabric twice before she cuts it. Skip that and the first time somebody cleans the dress the colours bleed, the seams draw up, and the whole thing rides around the goose's neck looking, in her words, like something the dog got at.
Every hem is double-turned — folded twice, then stitched — so there is no raw edge anywhere to fray. It takes longer. It is the difference between a dress that survives one season and a dress that survives nine Decembers in a box in the attic and comes back out looking like itself.
There is elastic at the neckline. That one she learned the hard way in 1998, when she hung a dress over the porch rail to air out, a gust came across the front of the house, and four hours of work went over the Hoyles' fence and was never seen again.
And the wing openings sit slightly forward of where you'd think to put them. Cut them where they look right on the table and the dress hangs crooked on the bird. It took her two seasons to figure that out.
One thing she is careful to say, and says twice: she does not make the geese. The birds come in on a pallet, the same as everybody else's, and they always have. What is hers is the pattern, the fabric, the cutting and the sewing.
„I dress geese,“ she says. „I've never pretended to be a sculptor.“
She will also tell you where to stand her, and she is not gentle about it. Under the roof. A covered porch, an entryway, a landing, a wide windowsill — anywhere she stays dry.
„She's cloth,“ Lorraine says. „She is not a lawn ornament and she was never meant to be one. Put her out in the open weather and you'll ruin her in a season. Keep her under the roof and she'll still be standing there when your granddaughter is grown.“
The last two designs
There are two in this final run. She cut both of them in June, back when she still thought there would be a next year.
The Thanksgiving one is the one that gets her. She'll be out of the shop a full three weeks before the holiday arrives.
„I won't be here for it,“ she says. „I made them anyway. Somebody's going to be here for it.“
Why this is the last one
The building sold in March. New owner, new terms — a number she asked him to repeat, twice, because she was certain she had misheard it. Her lease runs out on October 31st.
But ask her whether the sale is the reason she's stopping, and she waves it off like a fly.
„That just made me decide something I'd been putting off for two years,“ she says. „In a good week I'd cut and sew sixty dresses. Sixty. I'm seventy-one. My shoulder tells me about it every night. And every single year I'd say — next season. Next season.“
She is not putting the machine away. Neighbors will still bring her hems and she will still do them, at the kitchen table now, and she will still refuse to charge Margaret Hoyle for anything, ever, on the grounds that Margaret drove her to physical therapy for six weeks in 2011 and won't take money either.
„I'm not done sewing. I'm done sewing sixty of anything.“
Lorraine Stauffer, Stauffer's Sewing & AlterationsShe did try to hand it on. She spent most of last winter teaching the whole thing — the pattern, the fabric washing, the forward-set wing openings — to a younger woman from her sewing circle. That woman works full time and has three children under eleven, and both of them understood how it was going to go without anybody having to say it out loud.
So: one-off dresses for people she knows, yes. Another series, cut and sewn and boxed by the dozen? No. Not again.
Which leaves the practical problem. She cut for a full season before she knew it was the last one. There is more sitting on those shelves than one small shop on one Main Street is going to move in the weeks she has left — which is why it's going out online, and why it's going out for less than she'd have asked for it in June.
The shoebox
Under the counter at Stauffer's there is a shoebox. It is full of photographs — Polaroids at the bottom, phone printouts on top — of other people's geese, on other people's porches, in towns Lorraine has mostly never been to. Women send them. They have been sending them for years.
There are more than forty dressed geese on her own street alone.
„My mother had one when I was a girl and I never thought about it again until I saw this. Mine's been by the front door since Labor Day. Two different neighbors have knocked on my door about her. I've lived here nine years and nobody had knocked on my door.“
„Ordered the leaf dress. The stitching is better than I expected for the price — the hem is turned twice, you can feel it with your thumb. She's beside our front door under the porch roof and she reads as something somebody made, not something out of a bin.“
„My granddaughter is four. She calls it Grandma's goose house. That's what she calls my whole house now.“
What happens to Gertie
This was the last thing I asked her, standing by the window, and it turned out to be the only question all afternoon that she had a ready answer for.
„October thirty-first I hand over the keys,“ she said. „And I'll put Gertie under my arm and take her home and stand her on my own porch. Dressed. She has never once stood out there bare and she is not going to start now.“
Then she said the thing that has stayed with me since.
„One window on one street is not much. But there's a few hundred of them in the back room, and every one of those is going to end up on somebody's porch, in some town, where somebody's going to slow down and look at it. That's a better trade than I had going.“