Seasons of Change

 I pulled the quilt onto my lap, lined the small needle along a carefully penciled mark and, using a rocking motion with my fingers, loaded it up with the first five or six quilting stitches. I pulled the thread through the three layers of fibers and positioned the needle in place again. This was something I would do over and over again, for hours, before the quilt was finished.

But I had time.

I sat in my living room in an easy chair with my left leg propped up on a pillow while I quilted. I was sitting my way through my second knee replacement surgery of the year. The first was in January and the second was in June, which gave me different and greener views out my front window, although the neighborhood is quiet and offers few distractions during the day no matter what the season.

The quilt  is done in shades of yellow and blue, the colors of my high school alma mater, and a very traditional color combination for quilts. I made the top part of the quilt two years ago during a workshop I traditionally go to in Elk Rapids, Michigan  in the fall.  It is a quilt made to memorialize the year 2010.

That year was a touchstone for me; one that I’ll look back on the rest of my life and remember it as one of extreme highs and extreme lows.  My first grandchild was born in January, my mother died in May and my son was married in October.  Through it all I was trying to cope with these emotional extremes while suffering with the pain of bad knees that kept getting worse by the day. My sewing, which always meant so much to me and had a calming effect on my often hectic life, was put on the back burner while I “white-knuckled” my way through the days.

By the time autumn came along and I packed my car to head up North for a week of nothing but sewing, I was ready for a change.  As each mile rolled by the stress of duties and expectations fell away. When I got to the lodge where we meet for the workshop and set about the business of unpacking and getting ready to sew, I felt like I was connecting back with a good friend who had only been waiting in the shadows for me to call it forward again.

I lost myself in the sewing over the next several days and thought about my mother. Grief still had such a strong hold on me and never more so than when I sat at the little black Featherweight sewing machine that belonged to her. She was the one who taught me to sew so many years ago when she was a young mother of four boys and one daughter who wanted to be just like her. The Featherweight was a gift to her from my father back in the 1950’s and she gifted it to me when I went away to college 20 years later. Since that time she and I shared it, although we both owned multiple modern machines. It was simply the best machine to take to a quilting class.

The quilt I designed that week included a group of baskets alternating with a set of traditional blocks called “churn dash.”  On the top, as a header, I appliqued a basket full of fanciful flowers and weeds.  On the top left I loosely pieced five stars to represent the five original people in our little family, Tom, me, Caleb, Max and Sloan. Below my sons’ stars are stars for their wives, Candice and Sarah, and below Max and Sarah’s stars is a tiny one for the baby, Nolan.

Along the sides of the quilt I embroidered a few verses from an old folk song which is based on Bible verses:

To everything there is a season

And a time to every purpose under heaven

This song, with its gentle reminder of the ways of the world, brought me much comfort during these seasons of change.