Stitched Together

Going to Grandma Doty's house always meant I would get to do a project of some kind. She taught me to paint fabric, cross stitch, and quilt. As a tiny child I remember crawling under the quilting frame that seemed eternally to be set up in her living room and listening to the chatter of Grandma and her friends, watching the quilting needles duck in and out of the tight fabric making neat, tiny stitches.

When I was a teenager I asked Grandma to help me make a quilt of my own. From one of her overflowing back closets, Grandma pulled already pieced blocks of outrageously bright fabric scraps that became the basis of my first "crazy quilt." She taught me to place them in a pattern, sew the rows together, and then the quilting began. I have sweet memories of sitting at that quilt, my Grandmother and I. This time I was part of the chatter, and I steered the conversation to Grandma's past watching the pattern of her life story emerge.

She told me of her childhood: Her family's early settling of the Big Horn Basin, complete with flies, dirt, cabins, and lean-tos; cutting the ice from the river to cross to and from school; how Great-Grandpa hauled good from Montana to Wyoming by frieght team and about his amazing ability with horses. She recounted a long childhood trip in a Model-T to California so that she could be cured by a doctor of her severe stuttering, which she was. I learned the details of how Great Grandpa traded a team and plow for her piano on which she learned to play, and how that piano-building man from Chicago gave up his newly built homestead when his wife refused to join him in Wyoming.

She recounted her year at the state university, where she met Grandpa, the details of their early romance, and how he got on the train to see her off only to stay on through a number of stops before disembarking and buying another ticket home; how her father refused to let her return to Laramie for fear that it would look like she was "chasing" grandpa, insisting instead that the next year she attend BYU. She recalled the long exchange of letters before the eventual proposal. I discovered her passion for teaching and the details of her few years as a young elementary teacher. I heard of her worries and hardships as a mother: How her oldest child suffered from diabetes and the strict diet she monitored; how she would cut cardboard soles to put inside the children's shoes to make them wear the rest of the year; the simple Christmas gifts she would create for them.

The completed quilt would not win any awards. Many of my stitches were clumsy and its brash color scheme does not make for a showpiece, but I treasure it nonetheless. To me it is a symbol of the sweetest time she and I spent together, the time when I came to really know my grandmother. And that experience is quilted on my heart.