Quilts

I haven't written on here in so long I forgot how to get to the blog.  My mother insisted I needed to write again.  She might be right.  Sometimes she is.  She was right about this: 


Almost a week to the day after David died she stood with me in our bedroom, insisting that I choose my favorites of his shirts and put them in a black plastic trash bag to take with me to the first memorial service in Hanover.  I didn't want to.  I wasn't ready to have them gone.  She insisted, standing there with that bag open.  I did it.  One of David's nieces had told me that when I was ready she would take the shirts and turn them into a quilt. 


She has been teasing me a bit during the year, sending an email telling me where she was in the process but never letting me know anything about it.  Then on Friday, March 7th; she wrote that it was finished.  A full year to the day later the quilt was ready.  It came in the mail on Monday and was so perfect, so full of his presence that I simply sat with it in my lap and cried.  Good crying.  It was like I got him back.  I remember every shirt, the old plaid flannel one that he wore every morning as he drank his coffee, before it was quite warm enough for just a Tshirt.  The old gray one with holes in the elbows and a frayed collar that I wouldn't let him get rid of because I loved it so much.  The blue one that matched his eyes.  The one he wore when he had to dress up. The two that his ex-wife made him, that I should've hated, but I loved the linen fabrics that changed color depending on the way the light hit them.  The list goes on.  So many memories held in those fabrics.


It is the perfect size to wrap up in on these crazy spring nights and it looks like it was made to be in this house.  Which I guess it was. 


This was a gift in another way as well.  In the back of my mind when I think of all the gifts I received during this time, I am sure that I will never have a gift to give when it is my turn.  I don't cook well, I can't play music, I'm not a super good organizer, but I do quilt.  I could do this for someone.  That realization moved me forward just a bit more. 


I've been writing again, on paper, maybe I'll start up here again.  A bit over a year into this I still have days where I simply manage to get through what is required of me.  But sometimes, sometimes, I have glimpses of something that makes me think I might find joy again.  Love wins, right?