Today would be my grandmother’s 100th birthday, but our family celebrated her life together a little earlier than planned at her funeral in October of this year.
I began this essay in August of 2012 and have shaped and reshaped it over the years, never quite finishing it. It seemed about time to find it a home here on the internet.
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In July of 1997, my father dropped my younger brother and I off at our grandparents’ house in Kansas for two weeks during summer vacation. It was an eight hour drive away from our home in Illinois, and likely our first big adventure away from him since our mother had passed away the July before. Being let loose for two weeks on the farm with the older boy cousins settled just fine with my seven year old brother, but I was turning ten that month and was a little more reserved, a bit less of a daredevil. So, that summer, I learned to sew.
My lessons came in the form of a simple nine block quilt, just big enough to be a baby or lap blanket. I got to pick out the colors from Grandma’s enormous stash of material, settling on a blue with tiny pink flowers for the border and some of the blocks, and then a pale reddish vine pattern for the contrast. We stamped pictures of little kittens in the middle of white squares to go in the center of each block, leaving one block blank for my name and another for the date.
Over the next two weeks, my grandmother patiently taught my impatient little hands how to measure and cut, how to pin and to press. She had plenty of practice with this method: she’d raised three daughters to make their own clothes, and her three sons are no stranger to a needle and thread, either. In fact, as children, if our clothes ripped, my siblings and I took the damaged goods to my dad and he would mend them. It wasn’t always pretty, but he got the job done.
Our operation was housed in her little sewing room that doubled as a walk-in pantry and laundry, and our primary tool was a beautiful old Singer sewing machine, black with gilded scrolling patterns on it. I learned to thread the machine, replace the bobbin, and change the needles, very excited to get to do such grown up tasks, and even more so to be partnering with Grandma in the endeavor.
We worked on it a few hours each day. I learned to create strips of blocks to sew to contrasting strips, and then attached those strips to others. My foot pushed the pedal slowly at first, then, gaining confidence without having mastered the technique, I would press harder and the fabric would whoosh! through my fingers and I would have to back up and start over. Luckily, my material always pulled to the left, so that I would sew right off the edge of the material and not down the middle where the stitches would need ripped. Then, I would retreat back to timidity, slowly tapping the pedal in intermediate bursts of slow, slightly less slow, and then slow again. I wanted my quilt to be perfect.
After it was all stitched together, blocks within blocks and those blocks within borders, Grandma measured the batting, taught me how to sew up strips of fabric for the binding, and then she sat down and put it all together. She sewed one tiny stitch after another, all nearly invisible to the eye as she bound the layers under her lamp at her place on the couch while Grandpa nearby in his recliner reading the latest agriculture magazine or listening to the ball game on his radio.
And finally, it was done. All the rush and activity culminated in a beautiful, nine block quilt with those two empty spaces. I took great care to print my name – Abbigail Elizabeth Morgan – in the block on the left of the quilt. And then Grandma glanced at the calendar, ready to help me print the date on other block. It was July 27th.
“That won’t do,” grandma said, “we’ll have to write in the 26th.”
Curious, I waited for her to explain why the date had to be different on the quilt than it was on the calendar.
She paused, a contemplative look on her face, and said “I guess it won’t matter. I don’t think anyone will do the math and figure out that we finished it on a Sunday.”
Still, we wrote in the 26th–just in case.
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In memory of my grandmother, Bertha Alice Morgan, 1919-2019.
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