The Quilt I Pieced a Second Time

I could sit at my own table with my own thread and make a second quilt. I could carry it to Pearl Hoffmeyer myself.

There was not one thing Rhonda or anybody else could do about it. It was the only clean move in the whole mess.

Quiet. Nobody’s name on it but mine and Pearl’s.

I want to be honest that there was some sour in it at first. Part of me liked the idea that Rhonda would hear about it, and squirm, and know why I had done it.

I sat with that part a few days and did not like the taste. A gift you give to shame somebody is not a gift, it is a slap wearing a bow.

So I made myself a deal at the kitchen table. I would make the quilt for Pearl and for no other reason. If Rhonda never heard a word of it, that had to be all right with me, or I should not make it at all.

It took me most of a week to mean it. When I finally did, the anger went out of my shoulders and the work got easy.

I went to the fabric drawer that night and started pulling the colors. Not the wedding ring. That one was gone, and I would not copy it.

A Grandmother’s Flower Garden. It is all little hexagons sewn around a center, the pattern the old women called a garden because you build it one flower at a time.

I would build Pearl a garden. It would take me all winter again. Good. I had a winter.

The Second Winter

It is a strange thing to make a gift in secret for half a year.

I did not tell the quilting circle. The circle is where Rhonda sits every second Tuesday.

I did not trust myself to be in a room with her, and a project she did not know about, and keep my face still. I quilted Pearl’s garden at home, after Dale went up to bed.

A flower garden is slower than a wedding ring, if you can believe it. Every hexagon is sewn by hand to the six around it, and you baste each one over a paper first, the English way my grandmother taught.

I cut hexagons the size of a silver dollar out of every soft print I owned.

The ones that came out best were from an old housedress of my mother’s, a blue with tiny flowers. I put those at the center of each garden, so that a little of my mother went into it too.

Dale caught on by Christmas. He came down one night for his pills and found me basting.