The Quilt in the Bank Window

The hours

My mother is Margarethe Kiel. She is 80 years old. Everyone in Fergus Falls who is old enough calls her Gretchen, and everyone younger calls her Mrs. Kiel, and I call her Mom.

She started quilting at twenty, the summer she married my father. Her own mother handed her a bag of feed sack scraps and a needle and said, a married woman ought to know how to keep her family warm.

She keeps a list in a green spiral notebook in her sewing drawer. Every quilt she ever finished is in it. The pattern, the year, who it went to, and how long it took. Number one is a Nine Patch from 1966.

For the last one, the Double Wedding Ring, she did something she had never done before. She marked her hours on the kitchen calendar, the free one the co-op gives out every December, a little number written in pencil in each square.

“I want to know,” she told me, “what the last one cost me.” She said it with a laugh, but she meant it. By then her hands had already started to turn.

Arthritis came for her slowly and then all at once. First her thumbs, then the knuckles of her first two fingers on both hands. By the time she started the Double Wedding Ring, she had to soak her hands in warm water before she could hold a needle.

A Double Wedding Ring is not a pattern for a woman with bad hands. Every ring is made of curved arcs, and every arc is pieced from small wedges, and every curve has to be eased and pinned and stitched so it lies flat.

I held the lamp for her on winter evenings when I came by after the library closed. I would read to her while she worked. She liked mysteries, and she liked the Psalms, and some nights she liked both in the same sitting.

It took her a little over three years. She quilted it by hand on the old wooden frame in the spare bedroom, eleven stitches to the inch, just like that volunteer said. When she tied the last knot, she sat back in her chair and cried a little.

Then she added up the calendar squares with a pencil and wrote the total in her green notebook. 1,400 hours. Quilt number 61. Double Wedding Ring. For the cedar chest, she wrote, and then later she crossed that out.

The ring in the very center was different from the others. If you didn’t know, you’d never see it. But I knew.

She pieced it from my father’s old work shirts. The blue chambray he wore to the elevator, the brown plaid he wore to fix fence, and a white one with a thin gray stripe he wore to church on Sunday with his good tie.

Dad died nine years ago in the spring, right before planting. The year Mom finished that quilt would have been their 60th anniversary. She put him right in the middle of it, where the rings cross.

That was the quilt hanging in the fair building with a stranger’s name on it. Except Shawna was not a stranger. That was the worst of it.