Getting Ready
Every night that week after supper
Getting Ready
Every night that week after supper, I drove out to the farm and took a few more quilts out of the sacks. I shook each one out on the lawn, checked it for mouse holes, and laid it flat on a clean sheet.
I made a list. I wrote down every quilt, the pattern and the colors, and then I sat with Grandma on the porch steps two different evenings while she told me the year and the scraps for each one.
She remembered everything. That was the part that got me. She is eighty-four and cannot always remember whether she took her blood pressure pill, but she knew which blue came from which dress in which year, and who had worn it, and where.
Never miss the next oneGet a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
Your welcome email is on its way (check your Promotions tab), and tomorrow’s story will be waiting.
I called every family. My cousins, their kids, my mother’s brothers in Kansas and Minnesota, who said they would drive down. I asked everyone to come the last Saturday in September at ten in the morning.
I called Lori, too. It went to voicemail. I left a message telling her when and where, and that we would want her there. She did not call back.
Stringing the Lines
On Saturday morning the sky was as clear as I have ever seen it, the kind of late September day eastern Iowa gives you a few times a year to make up for everything else.
The beans across the road had gone from gold to brown
The beans across the road had gone from gold to brown, and there was a good steady wind out of the southwest.
Nick was there by seven with a roll of vinyl-coated clothesline wire, a box of lag eye bolts and his battery drill. He drove three eye bolts along the end wall of the barn at shoulder height, spaced about four feet apart.
We ran the wire from the barn across the yard to the cedar windbreak, about ninety feet. He wrapped each line around a good thick cedar trunk and cinched it with a turnbuckle so we could tighten it later.
Ninety feet of wire with ten quilts on it is going to sag, so he dug Grandma’s old clothesline props out of the machine shed. They were the long wooden kind with a notch at the top, gray with age.
Then Stu, Lori’s husband, pulled in. He is a big, quiet man who has worked at the plant in Amana for twenty-six years.
He climbed out of his pickup, nodded at Nick, nodded at me, and went straight to the turnbuckles without a word.
” I asked him.
“She knows,” he said. He gave the turnbuckle a few turns, and the line came up tight and singing. “She’ll be along. ”
By nine-thirty the three lines were up and tight. Nick had to leave for the field, and he kissed me on the cheek and told me to save him a piece of whatever pie showed up. Stu stayed.
I braided my hair back out of the wind, buttoned the cuffs of my denim shirt, got Grandma’s coffee can of wooden clothespins off the back porch, and started pinning.
See more on the next page
