Scissors and a Ruler

My mother’s hands, with just a pair of scissors and wooden ruler, cut squares of pink, blue, yellow, green, some from the scraps of my childhood—from the sundresses and jumpers she’d made me. Three-inch squares of florals and solids, stripes and ginghams in hundreds of colors. She never told me. She just cut and sewed half square triangles for years, a bit at a time.

Momma was a nomad. She moved to different cities, different states, different countries whenever things got too hard in a place. I don’t know how many places her squares travelled as the pile grew, or how she organized that one thing when so much else in her life was a jumble.

Her love for me was never a jumble, though I didn’t understand all she did, all her choices and actions. She was a survivor. Her decisions tended toward the thing which would keep her sheltered and eating the longest. She had many jobs over the years, but ended up as a nurse who loved her patients more than policies—a job helping others survive, too.

And somewhere along the way, she started making the squares.

She had planned them for a blanket for my firstborn. She wanted to wait until he was older. After another divorce, she moved once more—but the bin stayed in the basement as she went away to survive again, to breathe again. By then it was so full the lid bulged. Thousands of pieces—thousands of three-inch squares—stacked, piled, jumbled together. It lived there for years.

Then her body put up a wall she couldn’t climb over.

A stroke, a bleed in the motor cortex, trapped her hands. That’s when I learned of the squares—when she knew she would never make that quilt.

So the squares moved to my basement, and there they lived for several years. I’d move the bin around when I organized. I’d look inside and feel overwhelmed at the thought of stitching them all together. I had sewn some things, but I had always thought quilting was bizarre. Cutting fabric into pieces and sewing it back together. After years of shifting that bin—full of my mother’s labor and love—I knew I had to let it go. I hefted it one last time and took it to my sweet neighbor. I knew she would use the squares, and I thought she may even make us a small blanket from them.

Weeks later, her house burned down.

I watched as the windows vomited black smoke. I held my neighbor when she couldn’t stand because of the shock. She had finished a masterpiece quilt for her mother yesterday—today it was transformed to ashes. After a week, I went with a friend into the black shell that was left and dug through the char looking for jewelry or anything valuable we could return to our neighbor. We found very little. There were a couple of rooms the fire had partially spared, but the heart of the house was gone. Its organs and entrails were black charcoal.

It took two years to rebuild.

At some point during those two years, I made the decision to start quilting.

Growing up, I needed more than one mom, and was blessed to receive what I needed. My choice to begin quilting was because my second mom had started, and I wanted to spend more time with her. Momma had used only scissors and a measuring stick, but Mom Dodge had all the gizmos—rotary cutters, grid mats, acrylic rulers . . . even her scissors were fabulous. Quilting had become a new game since Momma had started her squares decades before. I made my first quilt, and Mom Dodge gushed at my accomplishment.

I wanted to do it again.

For my next quilt, I wanted more color. A hundred different fabrics. I didn’t have any real quilt fabric yet—so I begged. I asked for donations from my neighbors who were cleaning out their stashes. I was not disappointed. Sackfuls appeared on my porch.

After weeks of planning and measuring and cutting and sewing, I was so proud of the result I took it over to my neighbor’s newly rebuilt house to show her. She had donated some of the fabric and I wanted her to see what I’d made from it.

While I was there, she asked me if I wanted my mother’s squares back.

She’d had them stored in her bedroom—one room the fire hadn’t completely gutted. She had saved them in storage for two years after the fire. She had laundered them four times to wash out the smoke, but said she could still smell it.

And now she was giving them back to me.

Momma’s thousands of squares had come back home to me.

I knew now that I could do them justice. I ironed each square and stacked them according to color. Counted and numbered each one. I drew a diagram of where each square would go. Each of the first thousand. I laid out diamonds and sewed a quilt for my firstborn son, now twenty years old . . . like every square in his quilt. There were another thousand squares—enough for a quilt for my second son, too—a diagonal rainbow of stripes.

So these particular quilts were a gift from four women: My mentor, my second mom, quilted each of them for me. Each square was made by my mother, with scissors and a wooden ruler. Each square was salvaged from a fire by my sweet neighbor. And each square was placed and stitched by me.

Those quilts are never going to win awards. The muted colors are not my favorite. The squares don’t all have perfect points. And I swore off half square triangles for a long time afterward. But when I see those quilts, I see four women’s hands blessing my children. I see decades of hope turned to warmth for generations to come.