The Church Babies Who Quilted For Me

The morning I stood up and said I was done

I want to tell you about the Sunday I quit, because you cannot understand the rest of it without that Sunday first.

It was the second week of April. The windbreak behind Bethel Community Church was just coming green, and the gravel lot still had a skin of mud on it from the thaw.

I am Lois. I am seventy-two years old, and I have been a member of that little church outside Red Cloud, Nebraska, since Harold and I were married in it in 1972.

We do a thing in our service called sharing time. The pastor steps back from the pulpit, and anyone who wants to can stand and say what is on their heart. A prayer need. A thank you. A new calf. A grandchild moving home.

That morning I stood up, and my knees did not want to hold me.

I had rehearsed it in the truck on the way in. I had said it out loud to the dashboard three times so I would not break down in front of everybody.

I still broke down.

“Most of you know I make the baby quilts,” I said. “I have made one for every baby born into this church for thirty-one years.”

Heads nodded. People were smiling, the way you smile at the start of a nice story.

“Two hundred and nine of them,” I said. “I counted them again last week.”

Then I had to stop and press my lips together and look at the ceiling fan until I could go on.

“My hands are done,” I said. “The arthritis has got them. I tried all winter to finish the quilt for Dana’s new granddaughter, and I could not do it. There is not going to be a two hundred and tenth. And I am so sorry.”

I sat down.

Pastor Greer let the quiet sit a second, then he said something kind that I do not remember, because my ears were roaring.

I folded my hands in my lap, those two swollen, knotted hands, and I felt eighty years old instead of seventy-two.

I thought I had said goodbye to something that morning. I thought I had set it down for good.

I was wrong about that, and I have never in my life been so glad to be wrong.