The Quilt My Granddaughter Went After

The Downsizing

I want to be fair to my family, and I intend to stay fair all the way through.

For three years after Gene passed I tried to keep that farm going. Then in February I slipped on the ice by the back step and lay there for twenty minutes before the mailman found me. Nothing was broken, thank the Lord. But my son Doug stood at the foot of my bed in the clinic in Willmar and said, quietly, “Mom, it’s time,” and I knew he was right.

So we sold the place, and I leased a two-bedroom apartment at the senior commons on Third Street in Brandvold, four blocks from my church and two from the high school. It is a good place, and I am grateful for it.

What I had not counted on was the stuff. Fifty-one years in one house will do that to a person. I had four sets of dishes. I had every Christmas card anyone ever sent us, rubber-banded by year, and a closet full of Gene’s flannel shirts that I had not been able to look at, let alone touch. Moving into eleven hundred square feet meant giving most of it away. And my daughter-in-law Heather, who works in billing for the hospital system in Willmar and can look at a mess and see the list inside it, volunteered to help.

She is not a villain, and I will not have her made into one. For three Saturdays in a row she and Doug drove out to the farm with coffee and cinnamon rolls. Heather brought labels and a marker and made three piles on the porch, the way the television people tell you to: keep, giveaway and trash. She sat with me over a drawer of Gene’s old pocket knives and let me cry.

But she cannot look at a pile of things without wanting to make it smaller. I learned later why. By the last Saturday she had a speed about her that I could not match, and when she said, “Mom, you don’t need this, do you?” I had gotten into the habit of answering, “No, I suppose not,” because it was easier than arguing with someone who was giving up her weekends for me.

There was only one thing in that house I had decided to keep and carry myself.

Mama’s Quilt

My mother’s name was Signe Halvorsen. She was born in 1923 on a farm eleven miles south of the one I would marry into, and she died in March of 2002 in the old Brandvold nursing home with her rosary in one hand and a half-finished crossword in the other. She was five feet tall, with wide square hands scarred from a lifetime of canning and milking, and she could do a thing with a needle that I have never seen anyone else do.

In the winter of 1999 and again in 2000, when her knuckles had started to swell, she sat at the kitchen table every night after supper and made a quilt anyway, by hand, with no machine at all. It is a pattern called Grandmother’s Flower Garden: hundreds of little six-sided pieces, each no bigger than a silver dollar, stitched edge to edge until they bloom into flowers. It took two winters, because she could only sew an hour at a time before her hands gave out.

She had no money for fabric, so she made it out of what she had. That is the part that matters. Every hexagon in that quilt is someone.

The center of the biggest flower is ivory satin from her own wedding dress. The blue ring around it is cut from my father’s chambray work shirt, the one she could never throw away. There is a pale green piece from the dress I wore to my confirmation at Our Savior’s Lutheran in 1966, with a tiny stain on it from the communion wine that I can still find with my thumb. There are feed-sack prints from the 1950s, little roosters and cornflowers, from the days when the flour came in cotton bags. And down in the lower left, in a flower all by itself, there is a square inch of yellow flannel with faded ducks on it, cut from the blanket I brought my firstborn home in, in the spring of 1977. That was Doug.