Meet our writers

Win $1,000







Reflections August 2012

Health, Wellness & the Good Life

Quilt Squares: Stitching Through Sorrow

By Lynn Pribus

She used perfect tiny stitches and I picture her concentrating on the needle and thread and fabric scraps instead of her grief and her overwhelming responsibility for the children.

Grand-mere, my French-Canadian grandmother, was still a young woman when her husband died, leaving her with four children -- the youngest only seven. Even 70 years later, my mother recalled Grand-mere sitting in her rocking chair, unable to sleep night after night.

As she rocked, she stitched quilt squares, each with a flower-like circle of 16 narrow calico wedges with a butter-yellow center the size of a silver dollar. She used perfect tiny stitches and I picture her concentrating on the needle and thread and fabric scraps instead of her grief and her overwhelming responsibility for the children.

Later, Grand-mere moved to a tiny apartment, and my mother, married and living in another state, became the keeper of the quilt squares which she stored, carefully wrapped in white tissue, in the linen closet for many years. Then, as Grand-mere was nearing 90, my mother learned of a group of women in Niagara Falls, New York, who assembled quilts to raise funds for their church.

She mailed them the squares along with the modest fee they requested, then waited. And waited. Finally, more than a year later, she wrote to ask when the quilt might be ready because Grand-mere was growing frail and the coming summer's visit would probably be her last.

One of the churchwomen wrote back to apologize for the delay, explaining that their youngest quilter was 81. However, they added, they would move the quilt to the front of the line. When it finally arrived, only two weeks before what was indeed Grand-mere's last visit, it was beautiful.

When my parents downsized from their home to a retirement apartment, I became the keeper of the quilt. A quilting neighbor admired the beautiful scalloped binding and the nearly perfect stitchery and identified the pattern as "Dresden Plate." Here and there was a tiny brown spot where an elderly churchwoman had pricked her finger. My husband and I carefully draped the quilt over a handsome wooden dowel on the bedroom wall.

I see the treasured quilt each morning as I awaken and feel a wonderful sense of continuity and joy. I picture Grand-mere, stitching through her sorrow 70 years ago, finding a small measure of consolation in her meticulous work. And I think of that circle of quilters I never met -- all of them must be gone now, too -- who took the squares, born of Grand-mere's grief and turned them into a beautiful legacy for me and my sons and my granddaughters.

 

Lynn Pribus lives near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Meet Lynn