Grandma’s Quilts on the Clotheslines

The Move to Town

In August, Grandma fell on the front steps. She did not break anything, thank the Lord, but she lay there for almost an hour before the mail carrier saw her and stopped.

That was the end of the farm. Grandma’s four children talked it over on the phone, and by Labor Day she had a little two-bedroom house in Kalona, three blocks from the library, with one step at the front door and none at the back.

The farm itself was already rented out to a neighbor. What was left was the house, the barn and sixty years of everything two people collect when they never once move. All of it was going on a farm sale, the second Saturday of October.

Somebody had to run that sale. My mother, Doreen, is Grandma’s oldest, and she had a knee replacement in August. She could not drive for six weeks, let alone carry boxes up from a basement.

That left Lori. She lives about twelve miles away, near Riverside, and her husband, Stu, works second shift at the appliance plant over in Amana. Lori said she would handle it, and everyone was relieved, and that was the last most of us thought about it.

I thought about it a little. I want to be honest. I thought about it, and then school started, and I had a room full of second graders and two kids of my own, and I let it slide right off my plate onto hers.

Back in the Farmyard

So there I was, standing by the barn with eleven feed sacks full of my grandmother’s life’s work.

“Has Grandma said it’s all right?” I asked.

Lori stood up. Her knees cracked. “Mom said to do whatever I think is best. She doesn’t want to deal with any of it. She cries every time I ask her about a single dish.”

“Did you ask her about the quilts?”

“I asked her about everything, Bethany. For four weekends. By myself.” She looked at me then, and her face was hard. “I am not going to stand here and argue over blankets.”

I walked over to the nearest sack and worked the twine loose. Lori watched me do it and did not stop me. I think she was too tired to.

The first quilt I pulled out was the Bear’s Paw. I knew it before it was all the way out of the sack. Grandma pieced it the winter after Grandpa died, in 2009, out of his old work shirts.

The blues were faded, the way chambray goes after years of sun and wash water. There was one square of red plaid from the flannel shirt he wore to feed cattle every morning of my childhood.

I held it in my arms in the middle of that farmyard, and I could smell the cedar chest on it, and something in me just would not let it go back in the sack.