The Quilts They Threw Away

The first thing I saw was a corner of blue calico poking out of a black contractor bag, and I knew whose hands had cut it.

It was a Thursday morning in late October, a quarter to eight, with a thin cold sun coming up over the hay field. I had stopped at Perl’s house to water her African violets. She had asked me to, back when she knew she was going. I came around the side of the garage with her spare key in one hand and a jar of rainwater in the other, and there in the driveway, where nothing had ever sat but her Buick, was a twenty-yard dumpster the color of old mustard.

It was nearly full.

I am sixty-three years old. I have lived in Cedar Point Draw, Wisconsin, all my life, which is a town of six hundred and twelve people, one feed store, one café, and one stoplight that blinks yellow because nobody can agree what it ought to do. I am not a woman who climbs into things. But I set the jar down on the gravel, and I walked up to that dumpster, and I took hold of the blue calico and pulled.

It came out of the bag in a long wet slide. It was a Lone Star, eight points of diamonds in blues and creams, with a border of tiny yellow ducks. The batting inside was heavy with last night’s rain. And pinned to one corner, in Perl’s tall slanting handwriting on a strip of masking tape, were four words.

Unit. Baby girl. Warm.

I stood in that driveway and held it against my coat, and I said a word in front of the Lord that I had not said since my husband dropped a transmission on his foot in 1998.

Then I looked down into the dumpster and saw bag after black bag, every one tied at the neck, every one the shape of a folded quilt.

The Woman Who Made Them

You have to know who Perl was, or none of this will make sense.

Perl was eighty-four when she died on the ninth of October. She was a retired school cook, a widow for nineteen years, and the oldest member of the Thursday Quilting Circle at Cedar Point Draw Lutheran Church. She stood five feet tall in her good shoes, wore reading glasses on a chain of seed beads, and could stop a grown man from cussing with nothing but a look over them.

She also made quilts for premature babies for thirty-one years.

It began in 1994, the year the new hospital opened at Pinewood Regional, forty minutes down the highway. They built a unit there for the smallest newborns, the ones who come too early and have to stay for weeks, sometimes months. The nurses call it the Little Ones Unit. Nobody had thought about what a mother carries out the door when she finally gets to take her baby home. Perl thought about it.

“She ought to have something to carry that’s not a plastic bag from the pharmacy,” she told the circle that fall.

So the circle made a handful. Then Perl made it her job, and nearly every baby who left that unit in winter went home wrapped in something with a muslin label sewn in one corner: Made with prayer for a little one. Cedar Point Draw.