The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

The winter my hands quit

The arthritis came on slow and then all at once, the way those things do.

For a few years it was just the mornings. My hands would be stiff and sore until I got them working. Warm water in the sink, a little flexing, and I would be fine by nine o’clock.

Then it got into the first knuckles so that they swelled and went sideways, and the needle started to feel like pushing through a board instead of through cloth.

I did not say anything. I slowed down, is all. A quilt that used to take a week of evenings started taking three.

This past winter it got the best of me.

Dana called in January. Her daughter had had a baby, which made Dana a grandmother, and the baby was Dana’s granddaughter, which meant this was the grandchild of my very first baby.

Do you understand what that meant to me? My first baby’s baby’s baby. A third generation. I had never made a quilt for a third generation before, because I had only been doing it thirty-one years and these things take a little while to come around.

I wanted that quilt to be the best thing I had ever made.

I decided it would be red and butter yellow, a nine-patch, the exact same as Dana’s own, back in 1995. I wanted that little girl to grow up and lay her quilt next to her grandmother’s and see they were the same.

I started the first week of February.

I could not do it.

My hands would not hold the needle more than ten minutes before they cramped so hard I had to stop and sit with them in my lap and breathe. I would get two inches of quilting done and have to quit for the day.

I worked on that quilt for three weeks and I finished exactly one corner.

One corner, with a little girl’s name cross-stitched in it, and I could not even make the stitches even anymore. The name looked like a child had done it.

I sat at Harold’s frame one gray afternoon in March, and I put my face down on that one finished corner, and I cried the way I had not cried since the day Harold passed.

Because it was the same feeling. It was the feeling of a thing being over.

Harold had been gone four years by then. The front room was quiet. And I thought, this is the last thing that was still mine, and now it is over too.

That is why I stood up that Sunday in April. I had already buried it in my own heart. I thought the hard part was behind me. I just had to say it out loud.