The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

I knew them all by their blankets

Here is the part that I think people do not expect.

I knew every one of those children by their quilt.

Not just the babies. The grown ones.

I could be standing in the Jack and Jill grocery in town behind a young man buying motor oil and a case of pop, and I would look at him and think, nine-patch, red and yellow, 1998, Tyler, and I would be right.

The quilts were how I kept them all. I never had children of my own to count the years by, so I counted them by other people’s children, and the quilts were the mile markers.

I could tell you about the blizzard baby, little Grace Hoffman, born in the ground blizzard of 2010 when the ambulance could not get through and the volunteer fire chief delivered her on the kitchen floor of a farmhouse on Road 4. I made her a flower garden quilt and I put a single white hexagon in the middle of all the colored ones, for the snow.

I could tell you about the preacher’s twins, before Pastor Greer’s time, two boys, and how I about went blind making two nine-patches at once that August.

I could tell you about the little boy who came nine weeks early and fit in a shoebox, they said, and spent two months in the hospital in Omaha, and his mother told me later she kept his quilt folded on top of the incubator the whole time because it was the only thing in that room that came from home. He drives a gravel truck for the county now. Big as a door. His name is Cody and his quilt was green and red and he still has it.

Do you see what I am telling you? The quilts were not really quilts. They were how I loved a church full of children that were not mine, and how those children stayed mine, in a way, their whole lives.

And the first of all of them, number one in the green ledger, red and butter yellow, March of 1995, was a baby girl named Dana.

Remember Dana.