The feed sacks were lined up along the white barn when I pulled into Grandma’s yard that Sunday afternoon, and I counted them before I even shut off the engine.
There were eleven of them, the woven kind from the co-op, each one stuffed fat and tied at the neck with baler twine. My Aunt Lori was kneeling in the gravel, tying off the last one.
“Bethany,” she said, without looking up. “If you came to help, the canning jars in the basement still need sorting. Nobody has touched them.”
I said I would get to the jars
I said I would get to the jars. Then I asked her what was in the sacks, because I already had a bad feeling, and I wanted to hear her say it.
“Mom’s quilts,” she said. She pulled the twine tight with her teeth. “All thirty-one. They go on the hayrack with the box lots. I told the auctioneer to start them at twenty dollars apiece and not wait around on bids.”
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I stood there with my car keys still in my hand. The wind came across the bean field and rattled the cedar windbreak behind the barn, and for a second I could not think of a single thing to say.
“Twenty dollars,” I said finally.
“Nobody sleeps under handmade anymore, Beth.” Lori sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with her wrist. “They’re faded. Half of them have been washed a hundred times. People want something they can throw in the dryer.”
I want to be fair to my aunt, because this story is not really about her being cruel. It is about all of us, and I was part of it. But in that moment, standing in the gravel, I was not thinking about fair.
I was thinking about the front room of the farmhouse in January, and the quilting frame that took up half of it, and Grandma bent over it under the lamp every winter of my whole life.
One Quilt Every Winter
One Quilt Every Winter
My grandma is Ida Miller. She is eighty-four years old, and for thirty-one winters in a row she pieced and hand-quilted one full quilt on that frame in her front room.
She started the winter of 1995, when she was fifty-three. Grandpa Harvey was still farming then, and the winters were long and quiet out on that gravel road southwest of Kalona. She said she needed something to keep her hands busy until the ground thawed.
One quilt a winter. No more, no less. She would start the piecing right after Thanksgiving and put in the last stitch sometime in March, usually right about the time Grandpa started talking about getting into the field.
We are Washington County people, and around Kalona a good hand-quilted quilt is no small thing. The quilt sale every spring draws buyers from three states. Grandma never sold a single one of hers.
She just folded them up and stacked them. Some went on the beds. Some went in the cedar chest. A few went on the guest bed upstairs, piled six deep, so that sleeping up there as a kid felt like being buried in a warm bakery.
I am thirty-six now. I work as a para at the elementary school in Kalona, mostly with second graders who need a little extra help with reading. I have a husband named Nick who farms with his dad, and two kids, Gabe and Millie.
All my life, those quilts were just there
All my life, those quilts were just there. That was the problem. They were so much a part of Grandma’s house that none of us ever thought about what would happen to them.
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