Depression-Era Quilt

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When my first child, Sean, was nine months-old, I regarded myself as a failure at motherhood. My husband, Frank, would come in from work each day to find me at the kitchen table, sobbing. I would explain it all again: I am miserable. I am no good at this. I do not know how to be a mother.

I needed to know I could do something right. A quilt seemed like a worthy project. Systematic. Sequential. One square after another.

In the trunk of leftover fabric scraps and old clothing kept for sentimental reasons, I discovered the plaid shirt Frank wore on our first date; I had teased that it made him look like a farmer. There, too, was my grandmother’s fancy Italian tablecloth, each pink rose the right size to fill just one square, and the striped cotton I had used to make crib bumpers. Deep down in the pile was the sarong that covered a bikini I fit into for exactly one month the summer Frank proposed.

One day Frank arrived home to find me at the sewing machine, with Sean rifling through fabric scraps.

“What are my two favorite people up to?” he asked.

“I don’t know, nothing,” I mumbled. “Looks like something to me,” he said. I did not know how quilters cut perfect squares, so I improvised a plastic template and cut six thicknesses at a time, not always neatly. I set out to gather more fabric and wound up with an eclectic and comforting assortment, fragments of old and odd things—clothing, curtains, one bathing suit and two horse blankets. My mother-in-law’s old gardening apron. Aunt Mary’s bureau scarves. A cloth napkin snitched from a room-service tray. Outgrown baby clothes. The pillow from the old, orange-flowered couch, now in a neglected corner of the basement, but once the centerpiece of a long-ago apartment where Frank and I first made love.

Somewhere along the way I learned that what I was doing (though crudely) was making a memory quilt. Mine is a 380-square hodgepodge of competing patterns and clashing colors—a mish-mash, with identical squares sometimes touching, and assembled without regard for matching or repeats. It would give a serious quilter a major migraine.

At my basement sewing table, nearly 14 years ago, I allowed Sean to pick which square to sew next. Months passed, a year, two. We practiced our colors, pointing to flowered or striped squares. We practiced our numbers, counting the squares. Sean pushed his little foot on the pedal to make the machine whirr.