- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sunday, June 13, 1999

School's out. I'm working full time at Mr. Peiffer's for the summer, which means forty hours a week of cutting yardage and telling women from Long Island that no, that's not silk, and here's how you can tell (burn a thread; silk smells like hair and goes to ash, polyester melts into a little bead). Mr. Peiffer lets me do the window now. This month it's all white: piqué, eyelet, linen, organdy, white on white on white, with one red spool of thread on the floor of the window like somebody dropped it. People stop.

Grandma is home from rehab, living with my parents for now. Mom moved her bed into the dining room. Tonight she called me herself. Mom dialed, but Grandma held the phone.

Her voice is slower than it was, and some words take her a while to find. But tonight she found all of them. She asked about the window. I described it. She was quiet, and then she said, "One red spool. That's good. That's the part they'll remember." It was the most Grandma thing she's said since February. I sat on the kitchen floor in Astoria with the phone cord stretched and cried, the good kind.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Wednesday, April 28, 1999

Thesis proposal is due Friday. Senior thesis is next year: you design and make a collection, six looks, start to finish, and a jury sees it in the spring. Our proposals are due now so we can start research over the summer.

I know what mine is. I've known since I sat on the floor of Grandma's bedroom in February with the cedar chest open.

Grandma's quilts. Six looks, one for each of six quilts. The Log Cabin, which is strips of fabric built out around a center square, light on one side and dark on the other, so the whole quilt is light and shadow. (The center square is red. Grandma says that's the fire in the hearth.) The Double Wedding Ring, all interlocking curved arcs, which she made for her own wedding in 1940. The Grandmother's Flower Garden, hundreds of little hexagons, which her mother made. The feed sack Nine Patch. A Drunkard's Path, which is quarter circles that make a curving road. And the crib quilt she and I made together the summer before sophomore year.

Not quilted clothes. Not patchwork vests. I don't want anything that looks like a craft fair. I want the structure: the way a Log Cabin is built from the center out is how I want to build a jacket. The curves of the Wedding Ring as seams. The hexagon as a pleat. And the quarter-inch seam allowance inside everything, the quilter's seam, not the dressmaker's, because it has to last.

Mom mailed me snapshots of each quilt spread out on the lawn. They're pinned over my desk. Diana says it looks like a shrine. It is a little.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sunday, March 7, 1999

Back in New York a week. Behind on everything. My professors gave me extensions without my even asking, which made me cry in the stairwell, the old stairwell, for a whole new reason.

Pete has been bringing food to the apartment every night after his shift, wrapped in foil, the staff meal leftovers or something he made just for me. Last night, braised short ribs at one in the morning. I hadn't eaten since lunch. I didn't know I'd forgotten. He sat on the floor with me while I finished a pattern and didn't talk, he just handed me pins when I held out my hand, like a nurse in a movie.

Grandma's in a rehab center now, working on walking and on her right hand. Mom says she's furious at the hand. That's good. Furious is good.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Saturday, February 20, 1999

I've been home in Michigan for nine days. I'm at my parents' house, on Mom's computer, with snow up to the windowsills.

Grandma is going to be all right, the doctors think. The stroke was on the left side of her brain, which means the right side of her body, her sewing side, and also the part of the brain that keeps your words. Her right hand doesn't work well and her right leg drags and her words come slow. But she knows everybody. She knew me the second I walked into the hospital room, and she said, "You came all the way from New York," and I said "Of course I did," and she said, "What about school," and I laughed for the first time in two days.

Thursday she asked me to bring her mending basket from her house. I did. She tried to thread a needle with her left hand, holding the needle against the blanket because her right hand wouldn't hold it, and she couldn't, and she tried for five minutes, and I sat on my hands and let her try, because I knew she'd want that. Then she held it out to me without saying anything. I threaded it. She sewed a button back on Dad's shirt cuff, left-handed, crooked, very slowly, while I held the shirt. Four stitches. She tied the knot with her teeth.

Yesterday I went to her house to get her robe and I opened the cedar chest. All her quilts are in there, and her mother's. I took them out one at a time and spread them over the bed and the chairs and the floor, all of them, until the whole room was quilts, and I sat in the middle of them. I'm going back to New York next Saturday. I don't know how.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Thursday, February 11, 1999

Writing this at the school lab at 6 a.m. because I can't sleep and I need to do something with my hands that isn't sewing.

Grandma had a stroke last night. Mom called at eleven. Grandma was at her kitchen table doing the crossword and couldn't hold the pencil, and she was talking but the words were wrong, and she had the sense to pick up the phone with her other hand and call my mom. She's in the hospital. She's alive. They don't know much more.

I have a flight to Detroit at noon. Dad will drive down and get me. Pete is coming at nine to take me to LaGuardia on the bus. He worked till midnight and then he came straight to Astoria and sat up with me till four, and when I said go home and sleep, he said "No."

Professor Ingham. Mr. Peiffer. I left messages for both. If you're one of the people who write to me, please think of my grandmother today. Edith Ball, 79, a quilter, a seamstress, the most stubborn woman in Michigan.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Tuesday, January 12, 1999

Back in the city after two weeks in Michigan for Christmas. The radiator in our apartment is either off or set to Hawaii, nothing in between. I've been sewing in a tank top in January.

Grandma seemed slower this Christmas. She sat more. She had me pin the hem on a skirt she's making for my cousin instead of kneeling down to do it herself, which she's never done before. When I asked her about it she said her knees were seventy-nine years old and I should try it sometime. She still won at gin rummy every single night. She still caught the one place where my topstitching wobbled on the jacket I wore home.

Pete came out for two days after Christmas. On the Greyhound, sixteen hours, because he wanted to meet Grandma. She looked at his hands and asked him what the burns were from, and he told her, and she showed him her needle-prick fingertips, and they compared like two old soldiers. After he left she said, "He's a worker." From Grandma that's like a medal.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

next: now  |  spring 1999  |  before: 1998  |  1996-97