The Quilt That Covered Me For Years

Last weekend we bought a new quilt for our bed.

Normally that wouldn't be something I'd find a need to post about on my blog -- or even turn into a status update on Facebook! It's actually not the new quilt (a practical machine washable one, lightweight with lovely colors, on major sale) that I feel a need to post about. It's the quilt we're retiring.

That quilt (the one pictured above) was handmade by my grandmother. My beloved Mamaw passed away almost seven years ago, the day that the sweet girl turned one month old.

Mamaw was an amazing woman. Tiny and tenacious, she gardened and quilted and canned for years in her small mountain home in western North Carolina. She often made what I thought of as "milestone" quilts to celebrate marriages and births.

By the time Dana and I got married, in 1992, she was in her early 80s and her quilting activities had slowed down, mostly because of her failing eyesight. I didn't really expect she'd be able to make us one and so was extra-delighted when she presented us with a quilt (the last one she ever made) in 1994. It was not her best quilt, she apologized. Some of the stitches came out crooked (I loved those). But she wanted us to have it. She stitched our names in tiny little red stitches on the inside corner. "Both your names," she emphasized, "so you'll always have to stay together." Her way of telling us that marriage is meant to last!



Although part of me considered the possibility of giving the quilt a longer life by only using it for decorative purposes or only using it once in a while, I found I just couldn't. My grandmother was such a busy, grounded, active person, always doing things for others, that it just didn't make sense not to use her gift to us as it was intended to be used. It was lightweight and stayed on our bed year-round. It's been there for fifteen years.

In the past couple of years, it's begun to get ragged. I started to cringe whenever I had to wash it as some of the tears got larger and some of the batting came loose. Unlike my Mamaw, I have no sewing gifts, and there wasn't much I could do to repair it. The edges and corners also began to look perpetually grubby and dingy. I used it longer than I should have probably, but it had become such a comfort and such a icon of love. Yes, it was a quilt that graced a marriage bed, so it represented that, but it seemed to bundle many other kinds of love in its warm folds. I cuddled with it on the couch on sick days, wrapped it round me in times of grief, and wrapped up in it to read countless times. I snuggled my nursing baby in the warm embrace of this quilt.

It was past due for retirement. It was time to take it off the bed and replace it with a serviceable quilt for "everyday use." As I folded it up and smoothed its soft surface, I found myself remembering a poem I wrote years ago when it was brand new, a tribute poem to my grandmother. It's one of those poems that makes me realize there really are moments when poetry can be a touch prophetic. I thought I would share it here.

You Gave Me Strawberry Squares

You gave me strawberry squares
stitched together with gnarled love
and trembling tenacity.
Patches of red cut a zig-zag path
against a field of soft white cotton.
"If I have one more quilt in me, it's yours."

You pulled it, piece by piece,
from your inner spaces
like sticky strands of intricate web.
Your weaver-hands are old.
You say you lost the needle
whenever your eyes got tired.
I see you searchng, on hands and knees,
looking for the eye, the center of things.

I patch your story with every question
about every photograph in the album.
We lose the thread of conversation
in the jumbling of years,
but always find the center again.
Your life has ripened on the vine,
bright like cloth strawberries.
Your creation holds the colors
of Christmas, the fruit of summer,
full circle in the midst of squares.

This quilt will cover me for years --
the fruitful squares of story
keep me going when I can't find the eye.
What did you think while you sewed
the pattern, bent over the frame
like living prayer?
(Was the pattern there all those years?)

Did you think about
the boxer dog who stole brown workpants
and green shirt right off the line,
how Papaw gave away the best beans
in the row because giving the best
is what you do,

the depressed corn field
where hungry neighbors stole healthy ears
and you pretended not to see,
the grave your men dug in the same field
for a friend,

the way you could turn your
Baptist-preacher-father-in-law
on the sheets with one hand
he took to dying so lightly...

You remember it all, the places,
the names, the color of the corn
and beans, the feel of the sheets
and the smell of the field,
and it's all there, stitched into
strawberry squares you gave me,
past pieced lovingly to future.

This quilt will cover me for years.

(EMP)