Sally bent low over the quilt in front of her, inspecting the stitches. "Fiddle!" she thought to herself, "They are as uneven as the day is long." She began to rip out the row of tiny stitches. She adjusted the half-moon shaped glasses perched on her long, thin nose and leaned closer to the fabric. She wanted to get the stitches perfectly even. No mistakes were allowed on this quilt except for the traditional backwards block.
Sally had always thought that idea was an odd one. The whole tradition of the backwards block surrounded the idea that making something absolutely perfect was to invite the devil. In order to escape the fiery demon’s attention, it was most important to stitch one block of the quilt backwards. She couldn’t recall how many backwards blocks on how many quilts she had made over her 93 year lifetime. This was one more to add to the list. This one was the most important.
It was hypnotic, the stitching. Selecting and cutting the fabric was the most enjoyable part of the process for Sally. She didn’t mind piecing the blocks or laying out the finished top in order to sew it to the backing. The actual quilting of the piece drove her to distraction. When her cousins were alive, she could always count on them to help her. Having Willie and Emma around made the quilting part go so fast. When they were young married women with young children, they would sit over the quilting frame and gossip in the heat of the Texas afternoon. Back in the days before air conditioning, the quilt frame would be set up on the porch to catch the breezes that sometimes came through the valley. Once the chill of conditioned air came to their back roads area, the quilt frame was set up in the parlor. It was never used anyway. Very few people came to visit in that remote area of the Texas hill country and Willie and Emma were long gone.
Pausing from her stitching, Sally raised her head to listen to the twilight sounds stirring outside. It was early summer and she had decided to quilt on the porch for old times’ sake. Through the screened windows and doors of the porch, she heard a symphony of cicadas and crickets. She could smell the cedar and live oak on the breeze. She turned her head and caught the twinkling of fireflies beginning to rise from the blackberry bushes that lined the fence. Tiny winking lights her grandchildren tried to capture in jars. It had been years since her grandchildren had been that young and capricious. She recalled her granddaughter’s skinned knees, gap-toothed grin and disheveled hair. She could never stay clean, that one. Always rolling in the grass or climbing trees to collect the cicada shells stuck to the bark after they got their wings and abandoned their old bodies. The shells clung to the tree and glowed amber in the setting sun.
Sally turned her attention back to her task. She only had a few more stitches to complete the pattern. She watched the needle, propelled and guided by her gnarled fingers as it popped up through the fabric and down into it again, the thread following with a pop then a hiss. Up and down. Up and down. The thimble on her middle finger caught the setting sun and flashed. It was the thimble her mother had given her when she started teaching her to quilt as a girl of eight. Eighty-six years of quilts. Eighty-six years of life and death, love and pain, work and family, loss and friends and all of it pieced in quilts.
With a final tug on her thread, Sally tied the knot to her last line of stitching. She took her half-moon glasses from the end of her nose and rubbed her eyes. Her fingers, twisted with arthritis and years of scrubbing the family wash against a washboard, ached and trembled. She was finished. She gazed over the pattern stretched taught in the quilt frame. How beautiful it was. So many colors and textures and patterns. A piece of her favorite feed sack dress from her childhood here, a flash of her daughter’s wedding dress satin there. They were all there. Her mother, father, cousins, aunts, uncles, husband, children, grandchildren and friends. Pieces of everyone sewn with pieces of her. Her life and heart in the pieces of this most important quilt.
With a sigh, Sally got up and began to dismantle the quilt frame. Gently, reverently, she folded the quilt over her arm. It was such a comforting weight against the thin, fragile paper of her skin. The cotton was soft and worn, much like Sally. She shuffled to her room, the dying summer sun lighting her way with golden arcs of light on the hallway walls. She reached her bed and sat heavily on the side, the ancient mattress barely sagging under her transparent body. She swung her legs up, onto the bed and lay back against the flat, feather pillow. Sally pulled the newly finished quilt over her tired body. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and took her last breath under the comfort and safety of her final patchwork quilt.
copyright 2004, zelda pinwheel
(a letter to my granny written by my puppet abbiegail. i made the stationary on which it was written. i think i was 10 years old.)
