Life and Death goes on…

September 8, 2005

Some things seem to hard to write about. This past week, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been like watching a train wreck on a global scale…Can’t look and can’t look away.

Meanwhile in my small part of the world, we’ve had another funeral and another wedding. My sister got married last weekend, and for the first time in my life, I was part of a wedding party. Talk about feeling like I was in a movie!

My other grandmother passed a few weeks ago. She didn’t leave many photos behind, but a long legacy of quilts from decades of sewing.

She taught me much about sewing, but not about quilting. I learned what I know about that when I was older and on my own. Some of what I learned from her was to be strong, determined, and persevere. She was one the most progressive and strongest women I have ever known. All her life she had a full-time career out of the house, raised a family, worked on her farm, canned food, painted and wall-papered, and made quilts.

One thing I know that I got from her was the story-telling. When I was young, she would tell me stories and jokes over coffee in the morning. When I was older, she told me jokes and stories over coffee in the afternoon. Stories about farm life, about her brother in WWII, about selling real estate, about current events around the world. Even as she slipped into a coma in the hospital, she was telling me stories in her sleep about people who made Mexican fighting knives and a baby in the family who died a long time ago because the grandmother wouldn’t put more wood on the fire.

Of course my favorites quilts are her patchwork ones. I was thinking the other morning about how quilts could be an allegory for our lives. We can take the little pieces of our lives, the happy and pretty ones, the sad and ugly ones, and of course the odd-ball ones, and put them together to make art.

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