The Pieces We Keep

My patchwork quilt has been with me as long as I can remember. It was made by a woman we called "Aunt Dot." I don't think she was my aunt, but my parents had me call a lot of people "aunt" and "uncle" when I was growing up.

I call it my "traveling quilt" now, but it was with me at Goshen before I ever knew I could wander. I played on it with my dolls. I used the squares to divide up the space into a "house." Each set of squares was a room. The quilt went with me to the fields too. I spread the quilt out on the clover when I brought my father lunch. We would lie back on that scratchy quilt and make up stories for the clouds that played across the sky. Other times I pulled that same quilt over my head when I was afraid. The woolen squares were heavy, and they made me feel safe--invisible when I needed to hide.

Later when I was a teenager, the quilt went on sleepovers. It partied with me at the gravel pit beneath the light of the Michigan moon. It absorbed the smells of cheap booze, lousy cigarettes and the energy of youth. It rested next to an icy spring in the mountains while Ronda and I stretched out on in the sun drinking beer and reading The Screwtape Letters. At home it sometimes lay folded at the foot of my bed.

My quilt did grow up when I did though. Later it was the table for many a picnic with my children. A tent when it rained. Once Jayna and I slept outside in November. I read to her under that quilt with a flashlight until we fell asleep. When I woke up an hour or two later, it had snowed. The quilt was dusted with big white flakes, but we were warm.

The quilt went to Salisbury with me and the kids late one July for a camping trip. We piled into a pup tent under the quilt and called my mother on my cell phone marveling at the technology that would allow us to talk to her in Michigan while we were camping on the edge of a marsh in Massachusetts.

In recent years the quilt has traveled with me in case I ever want to stop somewhere. It has rested in fields of flowers. On rocks by the sea. Deep in the forest. On sandy beaches. It has served as a coat. Doubled as a towel. And it has more than once caught my tears.

Right now it is in my closet downstairs. I need to get it restored and/or washed because it is starting to fall apart. I can't stand that it is falling apart. I am weird about my things. I never let anything important go even if I stop taking care of it as I should.