Quilting Passion

A Field of Poppies:

Four Friends, Fellowship and Fantastic Fun

My elder daughter Susan is responsible for my abiding passion for quilting. When she moved to Lancaster County almost 20 years ago, she quickly accepted a part-time job in a fabric shop. Pretty soon, her natural talent and training as an educator led her to conducting quilt classes. We used to say she was teaching the Amish how to quilt!

Gregarious and eager to share her skills, Susan offered to teach our female family members how to make a Quilt in a Day. So one day my mother, sister and three cousins gathered at my house to learn how to strip-piece a Log Cabin.

That day marks the inception of my quilting passion, which has grown to include the forming of Hearts and Hands, a charity quilt group in our community, during the Kosovo crisis, membership in a hand-quilting group with the unlikely name of "Uvulas" (don't ask) and teaching a bi-annual quilt day class at St. John's Episcopal Church where I now work as a part-time secretary.

Internet swaps widened my circle of quilting friends, including Judi Kirk from Canterbury (next to me in the group picture above). Judi has been my guest during the Lancaster Quilt Show and we've gone to Paducah together with two other friends, Connie and Diane , also pictured above.

On August 11, the day after the terror alert in London, Connie, Diane and I boarded a British Airlines flight, bearing Ziploc bags as our carry-on luggage. We quelled our anxiety by reminding one another it was likely the safest day in aeronautical history, and it turned out to be just that. We'd been looking forward to attending the Festival of Quilts, billed as the biggest show in Europe and, when one is possessed by quilt passion, a terror threat is no deterrent.

Before we went to Birmingham, however, we spent a day in the home studio of Maureen Thomas. I encourage all quilters to visit her website at www.aquiltartist.com to view her magnificent work and beautiful home on the south coast of England. The four of us played with hand-painted fabrics and specially-drawn patterns of poppies all day long, and the day was heaven on earth, topped off by a convivial meal together with Maureen and her husband at a local pub.

Isn't it amazing where a bit of fabric and a needle and thread can take you?

Lifetime Friends

I didn't intend for my second blog to be so closely connected to the first, but this one also has to do with letters.

The two smiling ladies in this photo began their friendship as Pen Pals some 61 years ago. That's me on the left, and Jenny on the right, next to her husband Mike. The Berrys live in Wiltshire, not far from Stonehenge, and we had a little reunion there just last week while I was on a holiday in the UK with three other dear friends. (More about that quilt adventure in a future blog.)

I was eight years old when I picked Jenny's name out of The Weekly Reader and composed my first "friendly letter." Ordinarily, this sort of childhood interest wanes quickly, but our correspondence did not. We wrote about our lives; we wrote about school; later we wrote about our boyfriends, our romances, our weddings, our children, and our longing to one day actually meet one another.

Countless letters crossed the Atlantic for 37 years until, one day in 1985, our mutual dream became a reality. I will never forget the exhilaration of embracing my sister-across-the-sea amid throngs of people in Heathrow Airport.

Times have changed, but our special affection for one another never will. Jenny and I are blessed with a relationship that warrants the appelation Lifetime Friends.

To this day, whenever a small envelope bearing the words Royal Mail arrives in the post, my eyes grow misty with wonder.

Letters

My sister (Nancy, Near Philadelphia) created my blogspot for me more than a week ago, and I immediately came down with a severe case of Bloggers' Block. "What shall I write?" I asked myself a thousand times or so. "Does anybody care what I think -- about anything?"

During this BB period, two different long-time friends came for lunch on two different afternoons and, oddly, the food for thought in both conversations settled into the subject of letters.

By letters, I mean those old-fashioned communiques written on pretty paper known as stationery, scribed in ink, folded in half and placed in a 4" x 5" envelope, sealed, hand-addressed, stamped and dropped into a big blue mailbox.

Jane, my friend who came to lunch on Wednesday, told me about some letters written by her mother more than 60 years ago that surfaced recently when the friend to whom they were sent found them as she was tidying up. She had saved the letters because they spoke of a sweet anticipation that she shared with Jane's mother -- both women were about to deliver their second child. Jane's mother died soon after that second child was born, and her sister Reenie has spent most of her life tortured by the belief that she was an unwanted, unloved child. It's impossible to imagine what these letters meant to her when they were kindly placed in her lap by her mother's dear friend.

Mimi, my friend who came to lunch on Friday, told me she recently had celebrated her "Jubilee," meaning that she has been a Sister of Notre Dame for 50 years. Her only sibling, a brother, was among the guests when her classmates and other members of the Order gathered to honor her. He read from a letter he had rescued from his parents' home in which Mimi's choice to become a nun was described with reverence and joy and -- at the same time -- not a little sadness because their roles and parents had come to an end.

Thinking of my own mother, I remembered the loving caretaker who was with her while she slipped away mentally from Alzheimer's Disease. Lystra was from Trinidad, and she had a special gift with people suffering from dementia. My sister and I grew to love her, admiring the creative ways she kept our mother safe and relatively free from anxiety. When Lystra decided to get her G.E.D., we and her children enjoyed helping her with her homework. I enjoyed helping her to write a "friendly letter" by sending one to her that exemplified the form and content of such a missive.

These days, it is rare for a letter to arrive in the post (though I always look for one amid the supermarket ads, catalogs, charity appeals and bills stuffed in my mailbox). I mourn the near-passing of this old-fashioned form of written conversation. Computers are a marvel; e-mail messages are fun to receive and once in awhile reflect a person's feelings. But they inevitably disappear down the dark hole of Delete, never to be remembered or recovered.

As I begin to count down the months until my 70th birthday, I have resolved to write some from-the-heart letters to those whom I love, in the hopes that they may find their way into a bureau drawer or desk, perhaps one day to resurface at the precise moment when the words need to be savored.

I wonder if you have some old letters tucked away, and what they mean to you today.