The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

The third part is the stories, and this is the part I did not expect to be the important one.

As we work, I tell them about the babies.

I tell them about the blizzard and Grace delivered on the kitchen floor, and Grace sits right there and hears her own story, and her eyes go wide every time even though she has heard it a dozen times now.

I tell them about Cody and the shoebox and the quilt on the incubator.

I tell them about the preacher’s twins and about Peggy Vostry handing me her son in the back pew on the worst week of my life and starting this whole thing without either of us knowing it.

They have started writing the stories down. Grace brings a laptop. She says when we are done there is going to be a book, a book of all two hundred and nine, every baby and every quilt, so the children who come after will know.

We have finished six quilts since June.

The first one we finished, the very first, was Dana’s granddaughter’s. Red and butter yellow. A nine-patch. The same as Dana’s own from 1995.

I did not push a single stitch of it. The girls did all of it. But I threaded every needle that touched it, and I taught every hand that worked it, and I cross-stitched the name in the corner myself, slow, over the course of a whole morning, because that one thing I was not going to give up.

When Dana laid her own 1995 quilt and her granddaughter’s new one side by side on the fellowship hall table, and they were the same, she did not say anything.

She just looked at them a long time, and then she looked at me, and we did not need to say anything.

That is the two hundred and tenth quilt. It got made after all.