Is there some magical thread that weaves together the lives of those who live open to life’s journey? Do background, country and cultures fade when you meet a fellow traveler?
Yeunny Mears thinks so.
She was born 61 years ago, the oldest child of the provincial governor of Kangwon Province, Korea. In complete defiance of Korean custom, Yeunny was determined to never marry. But then, one day, a young man—an American—rode his bike into town.
“I looked at him with his bike, his backpack and his sleeping bag and I saw a free spirit. I thought, ‘Here is the man for me’.”
He agreed he’d found his soul mate. And so they married and spent the next three years traveling the world, eventually settling outside Sebastopol in Northern California. Yeunny was an artist; her husband, a town planner.
Things may have stayed that way, but when a close friend of Yeunny’s lost her son, Yeunny was determined to reach out to her. So she asked if they could meet once a week and just talk. The friend was open and appreciative. Her only caveat … it had to be in her hometown of Bodega.
Bodega is not a well-known part of Northern California. If tourists do wander into town, they usually stop only long enough to take pictures of the church and the school made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
But Yeunny liked it there. And she particularly liked a tiny shop on the main street. When it became available, she decided to rent it. But what to do with the space? At first Yeunny thought she’d use it as her studio. But that didn’t feel right.
Then she had an idea. She could help support women artists around the world by buying their handmade fabrics and working them into clothing designs. And so she began to import hand-painted silks from China and woven fabrics from Tibet. Then she let them “speak to her,” telling her what they should be: a scarf, a dress, a jacket.
Two weeks ago, Nancy Casolaro and Suzanne Neil stumbled onto Yeunny’s shop, The Dressmaker, during a weeklong trip to the Russian River region of California. Friends since the age of 9, they take time off every year to travel together, sans children and mates. Suzanne (or Sam as Nancy calls her) fell in love with one of Yeunny’s hand-painted scarves, but decided it was out of her price range.
So the two left but after much reflection, circled back to buy the scarf. While there, Yeunny mentioned she was Korean. Sam bowed and spoke in Yeunny’s native tongue.
“How do you know Korean?” asked Yeunny.
“We both have two children adopted from there,” she replied.
Yeunny was not the least bit surprised. “I feel that the people who walk into my shop are there for a reason,” she says. “It isn’t just happenstance. There is something we are meant to learn from one another.”
To Sam and Nancy she said, “I’ve made a connection. When that happens, there is something I have to do. It’s not just that I want to, I have to.” And with that, she had each woman pick out a favorite scarf and keep it as a gift.
What Yeunny didn’t know, what she couldn’t know, was that 20 minutes after leaving the shop, Sam received unsettling news about one of her children.
She was troubled and upset, but she took the kindness shown to her by a stranger as a sign, that eventually, all would be right. The scarf became a talisman of hope.
Yeunny says only this: “When you weave, if you miss even one thread, there will be a hole. So I try to find every thread, every person with whom I can make a meaningful connection, and weave them into the tapestry of my life.”
By Jamie Simons for PeterGreenberg.com.
Read more entries from the Grateful Traveler series:
Or read the post that started it all: An “Eskimo” Showed Me the Way.
