Summary:
A granddaughter´s reflection on her grandmother´s most prized possession - a story of faith, hope, and friendship that spans generations.

Details or Sample:
My Grandparents live deep in the Ozarks of Arkansas, on an unassuming bend of Spring River. Hummingbird vines cling to latticework, pink flowers and wispy greenery reaching up to my Grandmother´s screened-in porch. You can swing in the whitewashed porch-swing for hours on a summer afternoon. Sip iced tea with a sprig of mint from her kitchen garden. Watch the river flow lazily by, and listen to stories about the good old days. About the farm and the ranch where my Grandparents fell in love, lost their first home in a raging fire, and rebuilt their lives with the help of their friends.

My Grandmother is a slight woman, who has her snow-white hair set every Tuesday at the beauty shop. No one at Grand-mamma Vivian´s house ever goes hungry. No one ever leaves without a pretty, as she calls it. A special prize she´s picked up at a yard sale. If you’re lucky, she’ll find you something from her bedroom closet.

You could get lost among the rows of dolls, clothes and purses and shoes. It´s full of things that she´s saved, bought, found, or cunningly made herself. There, high on the shelves, carefully folded and well worn with age, is a stack of hand-stitched quilts.

A handmade Ozark quilt is a treasure beyond pearls. Worn from washing, stained by time, they are pieced from bits of fabric saved, cut, matched or mismatched, patterned and stitched by hand and batted by women who believed in recycling before it was a glimmer of an idea to most people. They meet in coffee circles and church meetings. Grand-mamma has more quilts in her collection than we could count not for sale but for giving, when someone really needs it. Some quilts were made with her quilting circle, and others she´s gathered from years of hunting through her infamous yard sale purchases. Then, there are those that were given to her, near and dear to her heart.

Her quilts have fascinated me since childhood. Every time we pulled down the soft, time worn blankets my sister and I would run our little hands over their many different surfaces, tracing pinwheel, patchwork and wedding ring patters with careful fingers. There was one that was special unlike any other. It was the one we wanted to see every summer. The one that we would pour over each panel and wonder at the names of the women who constructed it for my Grandmother, before my mother was even born. The Friendship Quilt, she´s always called it. Yellow-edged, carefully folded, lovingly pieced together by women from days gone by. Days that you can almost imagine as you inspect the hand stitching and thread tied knots. When Grand-mamma Vivian was a young bride, newly pregnant with my mother, their only child, and living on the ranch in Doniphan, Missouri where my Grandfather was a cowboy.

They had a little house on the ranch where they both worked. She would wait for the cowboys to come home, sitting on the porch in her rocking chair and plucking her guitar and singing with a high, lilting voice. If you close your eyes, you can see her, rocking and singing with a twang in her soft voice and a sparkle in her eye; a young girl of 19, wise in the ways of the world in 1940. Hard times led her to grow up fast, but she was at last happily married to the handsomest cowboy for miles around. They had eloped upon her return from St. Louis, when she had informed him she would either marry him, or move on. Life without her was unthinkable. They had little but each other when they married. On a cold winter’s night, their tiny house on the ranch burned down. Suddenly they had nothing at all save for each other, their love, and a baby on the way.

The ladies of the ranch started the patchwork quilt for her immediately. A Friendship Quilt, it was called. Each of them added their own square until it was whole. The hands that stitched batted and tied were all hands of women who rose to the occasion in time of need. Gathering to lend a helping hand. To drink coffee, gossip about the latest scandal each knowing that the tragedy that brought them together could have happened to any one of them. This was way back in the times before E-mail, before you could call a friend long distance on a whim-before families hopped a plane to see each other, if only for the weekend. It was another millennium. For better or worse, they only had each other.

And, to this day you can read their names nestled in the quilt, and catch a glimpse of their personality. Every block has an embroidered signature telling a story.

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Written by: ashleyludwig
Available File Types:Text
Words: 1069