The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me
I stood in the doorway with my hand over my mouth.
Dana stood up from her machine and came over and took both my ruined hands in her young ones.
“Lois,” she said, “we have been talking. Every one of us in this room has a quilt you made. Our kids have quilts you made. We are not going to let two hundred and nine be the end of it.”
“But I cannot,” I started to say. “My hands.”
“You do not have to push a needle,” Dana said. “We will push the needles. There are nine of us and more coming. But not one of us knows how to do it right, Lois. Not the patterns, not the corners, not the flannel. You are the only one who knows.”
She walked me to the chair.
“So you are going to sit right here,” she said, “and you are going to teach us. And you are going to thread our needles, because Lord knows none of us can thread a needle to save our life, and you can do it with your eyes shut.”
I sat down in that chair.
I picked up my thimble off the top of the basket and I slid it onto the middle finger of my right hand, where it has lived for fifty-one years, and it was warm from sitting in the sun through the window, and I put my face in my hands and I wept, and nine women I had quilted for as newborns put their arms around me.
What I do now
That was six months ago, and I want to tell you exactly what my Saturdays look like now, because it is the happiest I have been since Harold was living.
I get there at nine. There is coffee, and somebody always brings a coffee cake, and I am not allowed to bring a thing or pay for a thing, which took some getting used to, because I am a woman who brings things.
I sit in Harold’s chair, which is what we all call it now, pulled up to Harold’s frame.
My job has three parts.
The first part is threading. I thread every needle in the room. My eyes are still good and my fingers, swollen as they are, still remember how to wet a thread and find the eye on the first try. I keep a pincushion on the arm of the chair stuck full of threaded needles, and as the girls use them up they bring me the empties and take a full one, like a pit crew.
The second part is teaching. I show them the nine-patch and the flower garden. I show them how to press a seam to one side so it lies flat. I show them why the flannel goes on the back and why you wash it once before you give it. I correct their corners. I am not always gentle about it. Dana says I am a tyrant about corners and she is right, and she keeps coming back anyway.