The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

“Now you got no excuse,” he said.

That frame has been up in my front room for fifty-one years. We ate our suppers around it. We watched the moon landing reruns and the Carson show over the top of it. When Harold got sick the last time, his hospital bed went in the front room too, right alongside it, and he liked to watch me work while he dozed.

He gave me one other thing that first year. A thimble.

Not a cheap drugstore one. He drove all the way to Lincoln and bought me a real sterling silver thimble from a jeweler, and he had the man scratch three letters inside the rim where only I would ever see them. L.F.M. Lois Fay Mercer.

“So you remember whose hands these are,” he said, and he was blushing, because that was about as romantic as Harold ever got out loud.

I have worn that thimble on the middle finger of my right hand for fifty-one years. The silver has worn thin and gone soft gold where my skin touches it. I could not quilt without it. It is the one tool that does not hurt my hands, because it is shaped to me now, the way a saddle shapes to a horse.

How you make two hundred and nine of anything

People hear the number and they think I must have done nothing else for thirty-one years.

That is not how it works. You do it one at a time, and you do it while you do everything else.

A baby would be born, and the news would come down the phone line the way news does in a small church. Somebody would call me before the mother was even home from the hospital in Hastings.

“Lois, the Ackermans had their girl. Seven pounds two. Emma Rose.”

And I would start.

I had a system. Boys got a nine-patch, usually in barn red and butter yellow and a deep field green, because those were the colors of the country these children were born into and I wanted them to carry a little of it.

Girls got a flower garden pattern, hexagons stitched up into blossoms, in whatever soft colors the bolt ends gave me that year.

The back was always flannel. Always. Flannel on the back so it would survive a hundred trips through a farmhouse washing machine and come out softer every time.

I pieced the top on the treadle machine in the evenings. I quilted it by hand on Harold’s frame, which is the slow part, the part that takes the real hours. A baby quilt is small, so I could finish the hand quilting in a week of evenings if I pushed.

Then I washed it once myself, so it would come to the family already soft, already a little puckered and loved-looking, not stiff and new.

And on the Sunday the family first brought the baby to church, I would be waiting in the back with the quilt folded over my arm.

I never made a big show of it. I would just find the mother and press it into her hands and say, “This one is his. I put his name on the corner so you will always know which is his.”

Because I did do that. Down in one corner, in small cross-stitch, I put the baby’s first name and the year.

Two hundred and nine corners. Two hundred and nine names.

I kept a ledger, a green record book from the farm supply, and I wrote each one down. Number, name, date, boy or girl, pattern, which colors. I am a farm wife. We write things down.

That ledger is how I know it was two hundred and nine and not two hundred and eight or two hundred and ten.