Familiarity Breeds Content

In one corner of our dining room sits a big, wooden trunk.  The arched top and sides are glass, allowing you to peer down into the trunk where my Grandmother’s colorful quilts hang.

 When I was a little girl there was hardly a time that my Grandmother didn’t have a quilt started.   She was either cutting up pieces, sewing them together, or sitting at the quilting frame making tiny stiches to tack the back and front together with the cotton batting sandwiched between the layers.

 

Every quilt she made was completely different.  Some started with new material, a yard of this, a piece of that.  Some were elaborate and very specific in design, but my favorites are the ones that she created from a hodgepodge of old clothes.  Those quilts are almost like thumbing through an old photo album.  Here is a piece of a favorite dress with a pattern of violets, a blouse I remember with poufy sleeves and pretty buttons, a skirt that was ruined with a spill but has now been repurposed.   All these things were fodder for a quilt top, and all of them brought back memories even then as you snuggled beneath them or made the bed the next morning.

My most cherished quilts are the ones she made before I was born.   Mom brought me home from the hospital in one of Grandma’s handmade quilts.   Because I was born in the days when you guessed the sex of your baby on how “high” you carried or how much heart burn you suffered, my grandmother made two quilts.   One is a riot of predominantly blue pieces, the fabric as varied as the old clothes from which they came.

The second, a pink and white quilt, matches in texture so I believe she must have purchased the fabrics especially for the quilt.  How I wish I had been wise enough to ask her questions about these two quilts.   I was the first grandchild, and I know how I felt when I was waiting for the birth of my first.  I should have compared those two experiences with her when I had the chance; I didn’t.

As I grew these two quilts cradled my baby dolls, covered my teddy bears, and survived into my adulthood.  The blue quilt was in a box in storage when a mouse decided it was great nesting material and helped himself.  When I discovered the damage I had so carelessly allowed I didn’t have the heart to throw the quilt away.   I was fortunate enough to find a lady who turned the usable pieces into a teddy bear, and I still have it.  The pink and white baby quilt hangs in the trunk with a couple of other large quilts Grandma made.

My wedding gift from my Grandparents was a pink and white checkerboard quilt with all the states and flowers hand embroidered on the white squares.  All these years later I still have it, but the fact that it was well used is apparent.   Someday I want to make the much needed repairs, combine my work with hers,  and pass it on to one of my children.

As she grew older my Grandmother made small “doll quilts” and gave them away as gifts.  They were made on her sewing machine, they were simpler and made from fabric scraps she bought or was given.  Every small child she came to know got one.   A colorful stack of them perched on top of a cabinet in the back bedroom.  It always gave her such pleasure to slip out of the room to bring one of the colorful doll quilts back to a tiny pair of hands clutching a baby doll.   

I’ve been so lucky all my life to have been given things that still decorate my life.   Quilts, my great grandmother’s kitchen cabinet, a pitcher that sat on my great grandfather’s table every morning, a glass butter churn given to me by my mother in law.  All of these are  things whose value is only apparent to me.   It’s now my job to tell the stories about where they came from and pass on their worth to my children as the years go by.  

                               The only real value in any possession is the memory it inspires.

                                                                             Life is Good