The Star She Gave Away Twice

They brought fabric in feed sacks and tote bags and one in a laundry basket. They set out their green cutting mats on the tables and their rotary cutters beside them, the way a carpenter lays out his tools.

Somebody had brought a pan of brownies. Somebody else had brought a cooler of sweet tea, which I suspect Mrs. Ferris pretended not to see.

The oldest woman in the room came in last, on her granddaughter’s arm. Her name was Opal Haney and she was eighty-eight years old.

She wore a pink flowered blouse buttoned up wrong and carried her fabric in a pillowcase. Her granddaughter, who was maybe forty, set her up at the front table closest to me.

“I don’t hear good,” Opal told me, “so I’m going to sit right here and watch your hands.”

“That’s the best way to learn it anyway,” I said.

She patted my arm. “I’ve been piecing since Truman. I still sew on my mother’s Singer. You won’t scare me.”

I went to the front of the room in my teal cardigan, my reading glasses pushed up into my short silver-blonde hair.

My hands were shaking a little, so I picked up the finished block and held it up high, red and navy, where everybody could see it.

“This is the Ozark Star,” I said. “I made it up twelve years ago, the winter after my mama died. I’ve taught it to a good many people since then. I’ve never charged anybody for it, and I’m not about to start today.”

Nobody in that room knew what that meant except me. A few women nodded politely. Opal leaned forward with both hands folded on her pillowcase.

“Everybody’s got a copy of the pattern in front of you,” I said.

“My name’s on the top of it. You can copy it, you can share it, you can teach it to your daughters and your neighbors. The only thing I ask is that you don’t ever let anybody sell it to you.”

Then I picked up my rotary cutter and showed them the first cut.

I have taught a lot of classes in my life. I teach a class of sorts every day, if you count teaching nine-year-olds to say please for their tater tots.

But I have never had a morning like that one. The room got quiet the way a church gets quiet.

You could hear the cutters rolling across the mats, that little zipping sound, thirty of them at once.

I walked the rows. I showed one young mother how to hold her ruler down with her fingertips spread out so it would not slip.

I helped one of the Pomona sisters, who had cut her squares a quarter inch too small, and told her the truth, which is that I did the very same thing my first three tries.

At ten o’clock we ironed. Hugh’s extension cords held up and nobody tripped.

At ten thirty I showed them the trick with the two squares, and I heard a woman at the back table say “Oh,” out loud, the way you do when a thing finally clicks, and two tables around her laughed.

By eleven, every table in the room had points. Some were crooked and some were perfect. Opal’s were perfect.

She had pieced four flying geese while I was still explaining how, and she held one up to me with her eyebrows raised like a schoolgirl.