Lori’s Label
Millie came over with the muslin and the pen
Lori’s Label
Millie came over with the muslin and the pen. She had been holding labels for an hour and a half by then, and nobody had asked her to come, but she knelt down in the grass by the lawn chair anyway and waited.
Grandma sat back down. Lori knelt beside Millie. They both held the label flat, one on each side.
Grandma wrote very slowly. Ida Miller. Winter, 1995. Kalona, Iowa.
Then, underneath, she wrote one more line, the way she had for Gabe.
For Lori, who I missed.
Lori read it, and folded the label in half, and held it against her chest, and did not say anything at all.
The Rest of the Quilts
When everyone had chosen, there were still four quilts on the lines. Grandma decided where they went. One to the nursing home in Kalona where her sister spent her last years. One to my cousin’s oldest girl, who is getting married in the spring. One for the bed in Grandma’s new house.
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The last one, the feed sack quilt from 2012, she gave to the tall teenage boy who had read the mill name. He had already picked a Log Cabin, and he tried to say so. Grandma would not hear it.
“You noticed it,” she told him. ”
He folded it like it was a flag.
The Next Saturday
We all came back the next Saturday. Every single one of us who could lift a box.
My uncles sorted Grandpa’s tools in the machine shed and argued over which ones were worth anything. My mother sat on the porch steps with her bad knee up on a bucket and wrapped dishes in newspaper. The cousins carried canning jars up from the basement by the case.
Lori was everywhere
Lori was everywhere. She had a clipboard and a pencil behind her ear, and she was directing all of us like a foreman, and she was smiling. I had not seen her smile in a month.
“I should have asked,” Lori said to me, standing in the bare basement doorway. “I kept waiting for somebody to offer. ”
“We should have offered,” I said.
She bumped my shoulder with hers. That was all. That was plenty.
The Binding
Lori started the binding lessons the week after the sale. On nice afternoons they sat out on the little front porch of Grandma’s new house in town, side by side on two kitchen chairs, with the new quilt across both their laps.
It took them two weeks. Lori is slow, and Grandma made her rip out the first two feet and start over.
“She’s still awful,” Grandma told me on the phone. ”
Last Sunday, Lori brought it out to my house.
The quilt was a Star of Bethlehem, all deep blues and golds, the thirty-second quilt Grandma ever made.
On the back, in the corner, there was a muslin label. The writing was shaky, but it was Grandma’s.
Ida Miller and Lori Schrock. 2026. Kalona, Iowa.
“She wants you to have it,” Lori said. ”
I tried to say no. Lori would not hear it.
The Last of It
Millie sleeps under the Sunshine and Shadow now. Gabe keeps the Bear’s Paw folded at the foot of his bed and will not let anyone else touch it. Every once in a while I catch him with his hand on that red plaid square.
I kept Grandma’s old coffee can of wooden clothespins. Some mornings, when I am hanging out sheets in the yard, I use them.
Every time, I think about those three lines of
And every time, I think about those three lines of quilts between the white barn and the cedars, lifting in the wind, and my aunt standing at the very end of the first line with her hand flat on a little yellow dress.
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