it's made with rags and tied together with thread and pieces of red yarn.
It's worn and beautiful.
It was hand-stitched—every piece put together by my great-grandmother.
My grandmother promised it to me.
And I want it—because it's my heritage.
Only there's something missing—I don't know the story behind it.
I know parts of my grandmother's view of the quilt and of others that my grandmother knew of—but there's a large chunk missing.
But it is serving a purpose that I think my Great-grandma Blackburn didn't anticipate when she created this piece of art.
I have one memory of my great-grandmother:
I was probably about three or four. My family went to visit her and there was a bowl of popcorn on her dining room table. And, like a lot of three-year olds, I wanted some food. For some reason, my parents wouldn't let me.
I have a fuzzy picture in my head about what the dining room table looked like. It was close to a window with white curtains and to the left was a doorway that went into the kitchen, only I don't remember what the kitchen looked like.
The only thing I remember about my great-grandmother was that she was sitting on the couch. I don't remember how she treated me, I don't remember how she smelled, I don't even remember what her silhouette looked like in the shadows created by the sun.
But she lives-on in me through what hangs on the bed-frame in the guest room of my grandmother's house and when it covers me at night when I spend time with my grandparents.
In my grandmother's house there's an old framed picture.
There are three children in white clothes with white porcelain faces with pink cheeks and Mona Lisa smiles.
My grandma says it's her mother, her aunt, and her uncle. The three of them were able to say together for a short period of time. When they were young, their parents died and all of their brothers and sisters dispersed among various family members. The three in the picture were able to stay together or they lived fairly close to each other geographically. The youngest was my great-grandmother. So I know what she looks like in a picture when she was young, but the other pictures I've seen of the same time period don't look anything like the people I know and love.
I wonder what it was like for her to live so far apart from her siblings. I'm very close with my brother and sister and even my cousins—I can't imagine being separated from them for any long period of time. I wonder what it was like for her to be left to relatives she hardly knew. I wonder if she graduated from high school or if she wanted to go to college. I wonder if she wanted to travel and if she had much opportunity to visit her siblings. I wonder if it made her hard and if that's the reason she treated my grandmother so badly.
My grandmother told me that growing up she had an intense desire to go to church. Her father didn't want to go and the answer my great-grandmother gave her was that since she cried in church when she was a baby, she so embarrassed her father that he decided never to go again. My grandmother talks a lot about her life from the time she and my grandfather were engaged until the present day--but she doesn't talk much about her parents or her childhood except to mention good times she had with her sister or to talk about her introduction to different types of food. I get the impression that my grandmother had an unhappy childhood and I don't want to push it. She's been happy for the past fifty-three years with my grandfather and she wants to focus on the good memories. And I can understand that, but I'd love to spend a day with my great-grandmother and ask her about her childhood, her marriage, her goals, and if she accomplished them. If not, why not, what she wanted for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
But, that will never happen. The closest that I'll come to this is the memory book I gave my grandparents a couple of years ago. Only, my grandmother thinks she's too busy to fill it out. I hope she fills it out so I can tell my grandchildren about her as much as possible. She's an amazing woman-—I hope she lives long enough to meet my children and they can benefit from her eccentricity, her laugh, her wisdom.
I hope she fills it out if only to pass on her recipes. My grandmother loves to eat and cook. Dinner in her house is a ritual. It's prepared with the upmost care and usually takes hours. But, as strange as it seems to prepare a simple dinner of chicken and rice in three hours, it's done in an interesting way. My grandmother has a system of doing things and she explains them as she goes along. I spend time with her in the kitchen as she prepares the food and she explains the preparation process to me, even though I know it, so that she can make sure it's ingrained in my head. Her recipes and her cooking are her way of living forever. In a world of low-fat and no-fat foods, she still cooks with Crisco (and her food is good) even though she knows that she should watch her cholesterol and her fat intake. But she realizes that some things just have to be prepared as the recipe says in order for the family traditions to continue throughout the generations of this family.
But, if she never gets to that memory book, she will live-on in me, in what I've learned and in the memories I have of her. She and my great-grandmother will live-on when I get married--she's promised me the wedding rings that my great-grandparents wore and I will make sure I give my grandchildren something of hers so they will have a memory of her, even if it is through the mementos I give them. My grandmother is an amazing person and I will make sure that others know about her strength, her faith, and her life.
