Grandmother's Flower Garden

I wrote this story a few years ago. It has appeared in four quilting magazines and will be published in the Piedmont Writers Group 2011 collection of stories and poems due out later this year.

Grandmother's Flower Garden

A few years ago, my mother gave me a quilt for Christmas. It is very special to me because it was pieced by my grandmother and quilted by my mother. It hangs on my bedroom wall because, to me, it is a work of art.

The pattern is called "Grandmother's Flower Garden" and contains hundreds of hexagon shapes. The fabric is from the 1930's and each small scrap bursts with bright pastel color and tiny floral prints. My grandmother loved fabric with miniature roses and violets and searched through piles of cotton material to find each perfect little gem for her collection.

Grandmother was a great seamstress, making clothes for herself as well as her two young daughters. The scraps were saved, cut, carefully stacked in a box and stored on a shelf in the closet. When she finally had enough shapes to form the pattern, she pieced the design, alternating floral and solid hexagons. The quilt top remained in a cedar chest, never finished, until my mother found it, quilted it and added a border. She gave the finished quilt to me as a surprise Christmas gift.

The old fashioned fabric takes me to a time before I was born, when my mother was a child and her mother was a young woman. The thread that weaves through families is both delicate and strong. It holds us together gently but firmly through time. This is the thread that sews the fabric of our lives as we intertwine with the past. One generation comes after another, held together by the past but looking forward to the future. I think of the two women who created my quilt and whisper a promise to keep it safe until I pass it on the the next caretaker.