FEBRUARY 2016 - A cold front is blowing through our little corner of Georgia, and there are snow flurries flying and a few icicles hanging.
You don’t have to live in the South long a’tall, as my mama would have said, to know that a single snowflake is cause for grocery store runs on milk and bread and fill-ups at the gas station. But that’s not how it is at our house. Here, we settle in. Here, we turn on the gas logs that pretend to be real wood in the fireplace, find a good tv marathon and pull out the quilts.
Right now my bride is in the arm chair beside me. She is snuggled beneath a Dresden Plate quilt. It was pieced by my mama and quilted by my mother-in-law. Tonight, when we turn in, we’ll be snuggled beneath squares of Colonial Ladies, also pieced by mama and quilted by my wife’s mom. We also have House Block quilt, a Dutch Girl, a red-backed quilt of embroidered cats posed on white squares that my mother-in-law made and another of her creations, a simple butterfly applique quilt primarily in purple.
There’s something wonderful about these quilts. They are pieced in vintage cloth that, 70 years ago, were school dresses, aprons and blouses. Fashion designers and mass manufacturers attempt to replicate the colors today, but I haven’t seen them succeed. There’s something, I don’t know, ethereal, about them. The blues are cool with a hint of green. The reds are deep and saturated. On these quilts, especially the ones with numerous diamonds, squares and triangles, you see all kinds of patterns and color combinations, some subtle, some kinda wild—all of them special. I look at those Dresden Plates and wonder where the cloth came from. My grandparents were poor, so I’d be surprised if any of the cloth was store bought. If I was a bettin’ man, I’d wager that you’d find one of granddaddy’s old shirts in the mix alongside blouses and skirts my mama and her sisters wore and trousers or shirts that my Uncle Erskine sported.
These quilts are heirlooms, pieces of our mamas that we get to share with our kids, and hopefully their kids and their kids’ kids. My mom died 11 years ago; my mother-in-law passed a couple of years before that. To have this cloth that they cut with their own hands and thread that they placed with careful intention is a special gift.
I grew up with these quilts, or at least the squares. Mama kept them in a cedar chest that stayed at the foot of either their bed or another in the house. They were precious to her. I know, because only the most precious treasures resided in the chest. The squares were finished, but had never been sewn together or quilted. My wife’s mama, Maw Maw, took my mama’s beautiful squares and turned them into full-fledged, hand-crafted quilts after my mom lost her ability to sew well. I loved both of those women, and when Maw Maw used her time and talents to finish what my mom started…I don’t have words. Real quilts, not the solid lengths of cloth stitched together that retailers call quilts, I mean real, pieced quilts, are dying. Oh, there are some new age quilters out there who are playing with color and shape and texture to create fantastical cloth paintings, but nobody ever puts those on the bed or over the edge of a chair arm where they can be called into action. That would be like covering up with a canvas. That’s not a quilt you can sleep under or picnic on.
The quilts at our house are bed covers, or more appropriately, people covers. Some are so worn through that the stuffing inside is visible, but that’s OK. The threadbare places in the design are signs of life and love. I wonder how many kerosene lanterns lit my mama’s hands while she pieced those squares? I wonder about the stories told around the circle where these patterns were being cut or what straight edge Maw Maw used to cut the perfectly aligned strips of cloth that hold these squares together. I wonder about the women and their laughter.
These are not sad wonderings, just the opposite. I may be in my 50s, and these mamas long gone, but when I pull a quilted square under my chin and close my eyes, it’s like I’ve been tucked by the hands of two strong women who loved my family as much as I do, and I smile.
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