Quilts

Skipping My Way to the End

Elizabeth E.

I’m headed off to give my class their final exam. It’s the last day of class, and we’ll meet once more at their final exam time so the students can see their exams, check their grades. The trend has been to give the finals early–apparently it’s happening in all their classes. I don’t know why the math teachers do it, after all they have scantrons, but the Englishy types give the exams earlier because there’s just so much to correct and grade. Stacks and stacks. Reams and reams. Tons of stuff.

Last Sunday I pieced 4 blocks for my friend’s humanitarian quilt project. I cut out 3 1/2″ squares of green fabric, layered two together and stitched two diagonal lines, 1/2″ apart. I cut the square apart between the stitched lines making what’s known in the trade as “half-square triangles.” Here are the squares above.

But I was left with lots of 3 1/2″ squares and I was DONE making triangles. So I started sewing them together, putting a white square in the middle, in hopes of making a new twin-sized quilt for the guest bedroom (we already have one twin-sized quilt–just need another). See below for diagram. My inspiration was the bright pink and orange quilt that I made last summer.

After I grade my stacks and stacks and reams and reams, I’ll get back to this. A nice little respite from the labor-intensive Christmas Star quilt I’ve been working on.

Something to Think About

Flying Baby

Elizabeth E.

My friend Judy puts a poem up now and again on her blog. I read this on the Christian Science Monitor, and couldn’t resist following in her footsteps.

Flying Baby

A baby sits quietly
on his mother’s lap,
frightened and calm,
weary and curious,
beloved – and so – loving.
Old ladies struggling
with irregular carry-ons spot him
like a star on the horizon.
Passing by, each one
touches the baby’s head
with detached and utter
affection, sparks of God.
– C. Malcolm Ellsworth

Here’s our babies.

Journal Entry

Things Remain Undone

Elizabeth E.


On the way to meet my son Chad for lunch, I caught the last of an interview with Ian McEwan on the occasion of his new book, Solar, and heard Mr. McEwan read this snippet:

“He’d been deluded. He’d always assumed that a time would come in adulthood—a kind of plateau—when he would have learned all the tricks of managing, of simply being. All mails and emails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves. Clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes and all his stuff where he could find it. . . the private life settled and serene. In all these years, this settlement, the calm plateau had never appeared. And yet he had continued to assume, without reflecting on the matter, that it was just around the next turn, that he would exert himself and reach it. . . . [About the time his daughter was born] he thought he saw for the first time that on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered emails, and [at home] there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply. . . “

So Mr. McEwan finally captures the frantic race we all feel to Get Stuff Done, but we rarely achieve that “settlement, that calm plateau” he writes about. That would explain the mess in my study. That would explain why the cracked tiles in my bathroom have not been replaced in three years. That would explain the general overwhelmingness that visits me for for sometimes very lengthy intervals, riding around on my shoulder, a little chirpy voice whispering in my ear while the pen scratches out on paper a list of things that need to be done, no, must be done.

I’ve always had this belief that I can get caught up, and in some places there is a division of labor in my life: the grading will finish, the students will no longer show up in class, the fences will be built, the house will get painted. And then I start believing that this finality will gradually appear in other areas of my life: the quilts all sewn, the closets cleaned out, the floor mopped, the laundry completed.

Obviously, it’s not a belief. It’s a fantasy.

100 Quilts · Journal Entry · Quilt Finish

Visitors. . . and a Story

Elizabeth E.

We had some visitors from out of town last week. It was my daughter Barbara and her three kids: Cute, Cute and Cute. And Cute. Did I mention that they were cute? All my grandchildren are cute. I’m so very lucky.

And now, a story.
Some time ago, I’d made a quilt with pinks and blues and cherries and flowers and was so frugal with my fabric I had enough for another quilt leftover. I starting piecing the pinwheels and put them up on the pin wall, and then was stuck. I tried this combo and that combo and nothing would come together.

Then one horrid horrid day, our friend Heather wrote to say that she had Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, and it had spread to her liver, and maybe her brain but they were doing CT scans checking, checking. We waited. Good news! No brain mets, as she said.

I began to work again on the stuck quilt. Only I knew now it was for Heather so it flew together in a glorious explosion of work and love and tears and care for our friend. I thought long and hard about what to name it.

I arranged a visit to see her shortly before she would begin her first of six rounds of chemotherapy, a grueling process. I wanted her to have the quilt. I had in my mind what I wanted to call it, carrying along my pen to sign and write the name on the back, just in case I was right.

We had one of those happy-sad-teary-laughing conversations about what lay before her. I knew then what I planned to call it was correct, Earth’s Crammed with Heaven, from E. B. Browning’s verse:

 

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

And only he who sees takes off his shoes;

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

 

I told her that it meant to me that because of her suffering she would see and understand so much more about heaven and earth than she ever would before. She would see that indeed, earth is crammed with heaven.

I tracked her chemo treatments on my calendar, trying to visit when possible, emailing whenever as I waited for her to come up out of the vortex of chemo and bendy bones and pain.

Last week she had another CT scan, and because of her treatments, and her faith, and the doctors and good karma and prayers and heaven and hugs and everything-we-could-throw-at-it on earth, her tumors have been eradicated. As she put it: “lots of high fives and tears in the doctor’s office.”

Oh, yeah. You go, Heather! Happy Valentine’s Day. Happy Chinese New Year.

Happy Life.