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The Quilt

©Denise May 1999

I don't know the pattern. It's rather like a dog bone with pointy ends or a diagonal crazy-patch bow tie set together with circles. This motley, ragged quilt is the last one that my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother worked on together. It captures their essence.

This is no art quilt. Pieced together with scraps from their dresses, nightgowns, and my great grandmother's sunbonnets, its unmatched binding surrounds pieces of their lives, scraps held together with a strong running thread. Where one thread leaves off, another begins.

Dimples and creases line its face and the weaker fabrics have disintegrated leaving the cotton batting exposed between the quilting threads. Stains dot some patches like the despised sunspots on my great grandmother's hands. When I look at it I see quilt frames set up on sawhorses with skirted legs underneath, feet softly patting time with the song being hummed. Hands--delicate and transparent, young and strong, or gnarled and arthritic--working in time too.

'Do you want to put a pattern in the circles?'

'No, just straight lines going catty-corner.'

'It might look good with a spider web.'

'Naw, this ain't no good quilt.'

When it was finished, it graced my grandparents' bed, then my parents' bed in our little two-room house, my brother's and my sister's and my twin-size beds when we moved to a larger house. Later, after suffering with sick children and being washed countless times, it sprawled on the grass in the sunshine while we listened to our transistor radios.

Finally it was retired to the linen closet as being too ratty to use, but too good to throw away. A few years ago my mother ran across it and asked if I wanted it. She thought that maybe I could salvage a few pieces for cushions.

I did make one cushion, then I couldn't cut it anymore. Maybe I will one day. It has a few places that might be usable. Mostly I like owning it. I can see my life in it and the lives of my matriarchs.

One day I will probably take it out and offer it to my daughter, saying, "Maybe you can do something with this. See this, it's from Mama's dress and here's Ollie's house dress. Look, right here is Grandma Shelton's bonnet. She never had ties on her bonnets because they choked her, and all her bonnets buttoned to the brim so they could be starched and ironed. And look--here's where I cut out the cushion that we used on the bench."

I can't help but think that Granny was wrong. It is a good quilt.

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Ollie
Charleston SC