The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

The leak that was not a leak

Now I can tell you the good part, and I have been waiting the whole time to tell you.

The Saturday after I made my little speech, Pastor Greer called me at the house.

Pastor Greer is a young man, not yet forty, with three kids and a tired wife and a way of looking straight at you when you talk that makes you trust him. He came to us from a church down in Kansas six years ago and he has been good for us.

“Lois,” he said, “I hate to bother you on a Saturday, but we have got a leak coming through the ceiling over the kitchen in the fellowship hall, and nobody knows that building like you do. Would you run down and tell me if it is the roof or a pipe before I call somebody and spend money we do not have?”

Of course I said yes. I have cleaned that kitchen and run that coffee pot for forty years. I know where the water lines run.

I drove down. The lot had cars in it, more than a Saturday should have, and I thought there must be a meeting I had forgotten.

I came in the side door by the kitchen, looking up at the ceiling for a water stain, and I stopped dead.

There was no leak.

There were nine sewing machines running on the long folding potluck tables, the ones we set up for funerals and fall suppers.

Nine machines, humming all together, and women bent over every one of them.

And I knew every single face.

Dana was at the first machine. Beside her was the Hoffman girl, Grace, the blizzard baby, nineteen now and home from college. Across from her was Cody’s wife and Cody’s sister. There was Emma Rose Ackerman, grown and married. There were women whose quilts were in my green ledger, women I had wrapped in flannel before they could hold up their own heads, every one of them.

In the middle of them all they had set up Harold’s quilt frame.

They had gone to my house, with my spare key that Dana’s mother has kept for emergencies for twenty years, and they had carried that fifty-one-year-old frame down to the church and set it up in the middle of the fellowship hall.

There was an empty chair pulled up to it. The good chair, with the arms, from the pastor’s study.

And on the seat of the empty chair was a basket. A basket of thread, every color, and a packet of needles, and right on top, where I would see it first, my silver thimble that I had left sitting on the windowsill at home.