The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

The winter I started

To tell you why the quilts mattered to me, I have to tell you the sad part, and then I promise I will not linger there.

Harold and I married young. We wanted a houseful. We farmed eighty acres of his father’s ground and rented another two hundred, corn and beans and a few head of cattle, and we built a nursery before we had any business building one.

The babies did not come.

We saw a doctor in Hastings in the fall of 1974. He was not unkind, but he was plain. He told us there would be no children for Harold and me. He said it the way you would tell a man his well had gone dry.

I did not cry in the office. I cried the whole way home, forty miles of gravel and two-lane, and Harold held my hand across the bench seat of the truck and did not say a word, because there were no words.

That was a Friday.

That Sunday I made myself go to church, because staying home felt worse.

We sat in the back pew, where I could cry without the whole congregation watching, and a young woman named Peggy Vostry came in late with her brand-new son.

She was frazzled and alone. Her husband was gone with the harvest crew. The baby was fussing and she needed both hands to get her coat off.

“Lois,” she said, “would you hold him a minute?”

And she set that warm, heavy, red-faced little boy in my arms.

I want to be honest with you. It should have broken me. The one thing I could not have, handed to me in the back pew on the worst week of my life.

It did not break me. Something else happened.

I looked down at that baby, and he had worked one fist loose from his blanket, and the blanket was a thin hospital receiving blanket, white with that faded blue and pink stripe, worn soft from the laundry.

And I thought, this child should go home in something somebody made for him.

I cannot explain it any better than that. It was not a decision I argued myself into. It landed on me whole, like weather.

I went home and I pulled out my mother’s old treadle machine, and I started cutting.

Harold and the frame

I was not a quilter yet, not really. My mother had been. I had watched her my whole girlhood but never had the patience for it myself.

Grief gives you patience. It turns out that is one of the few things it is good for.

That first quilt took me five weeks and it was crooked as a dog’s hind leg. The nine-patch blocks did not line up. The binding puckered.

Peggy cried when I gave it to her anyway, and she used it until it fell apart, and she told me about it at her own mother’s funeral twenty years later, so I guess crooked did not matter.

Harold built me the frame that December.

He was a quiet man and he showed love by making things with his hands. He took good straight pine and he made me a quilt frame that filled half the front room, with wooden ratchets at the corners so I could roll the quilt tight as I worked across it.

He sanded every edge so I would not catch a splinter. He rubbed it with linseed oil until it was the color of honey.