The Heirloom

Grandma keeps the quilt in the cedar chest at the foot of her bed, along with her passports, birth certificates, and old pictures, as if moths could get in and steal her identity. I roll my eyes at the thought, grinning a bit.

“Careful with the hinge,” she says, even though I've opened this chest a hundred times and I know about its creaky hinges. The lid gives a soft sigh; cedar, old, familiar scents drift up. Vintage clothing I know of is buried at the bottom: some of her wedding dress, tiny baby clothes, picture albums with their smell of old glue and paper, and lavender sprigs that she threw in liberally, knotted up in an old pantyhose toe.

Inside, the quilt sleeps folded, silent and waiting, all those squares of dresses, curtains, shirts, and pants worn thin, reborn into this magnificent heirloom. I slide my hands beneath it. It's heavier than it looks.

“I swear it gains a pound every year,” I say.

“That's the stories,” Grandma says. She says that every time I've said the same thing. We have been doing this ritual for a few years now. She sits in her rocker beside the window where the best light is, her thread and needle winking from a tomato pincushion on the sill.

“The stories soaked right in,” she adds, peering up at me over her half-lens glasses.

I carried the quilt to the couch and unfolded it carefully in the light. The early morning sun pours through the lace curtains, catching on the stitches, turning them into rivers of color. I know the squares by heart, the cornflower blue that used to be Mom's Easter dress years ago, the gingham from Uncle Ernie’s work shirt (and I wonder how she ever got it clean). There were burnt orange and brown patches, as well as mustard yellow; they matched the tree leaves out back this time of fall.

We do this every year, as she’ll need the quilt on her bed from here on out. Somehow, as carefully as she is, and using it only through the winter and spring, parts of it seemed to fall apart. It doesn’t help that she has a cat that isn’t as careful with its claws as we’d both like.

“This is it,” I say, “The heirloom, I hope to take care of someday.”

Grandma hums, a sound that hovers somewhere between yes and we'll see.

“Fetch me the little scissors,” she says instead. “The ones with the little bird beak.”

I bring them, and the thimble she likes, the one with the dent where her finger presses. She sets the thimble in place and lifts the corner of the quilt she can reach from her chair.

“There,” she says more to herself than to me. “This seam’s wandered.” They always do.

“The seams wander because we do,” she stated. “We live our lives hard sometimes, rubbing everything down to its threads.”

I think of the times in my life that I had wandered, letting my own ‘threads go’, and as always, when I sat in Grandma's living room, she would help me put them back together again.

“Hand me that spool.” She's already squinting, the needle flashing. Her hands were so gnarled and old, spidery veins dancing in them, but they moved with purpose, in a familiar way that makes me smile. In another life, I could have imagined her a dancer, her movements fluid, purposeful, and strong. Not now. Every year when I come, I can see the changes age has wrought on her, and my heart breaks a little more knowing life is a full circle and I won’t always have her near.

“Tell me about your neighbor with the loud truck, you mentioned in your letters,” she says in the silence of my thoughts. Yes, I still write her letters, as I have done all my life. There is no way Grandma is going to use a cell phone, no matter how much I have tried to show her how easy it is, and there is no way she is going to wear one of those “dang-fang dangled chain things” around her neck that would tell someone else she had fallen. “It was none of their business!” she had growled, with added choice words, whenever I mentioned it.

“Ivan?” I settle onto the rug so I can watch her. “Yeah, he put a cherry bomb muffler on, says it's legal, but it definitely hasn't made the neighbors like him any better.”

“Legal is not the same as decent,” she admonishes, biting and smoothing the thread before she squints at the needle’s eye. This is where she'll need me, and I wait.

“Your grandpa used to drive a truck that said RIDGE FEED on the side, loud as the sunshine in July. He always parked it at the end of the driveway for advertising. He was so proud of that truck that he had worked and paid for with his own hard-earned money,” she adds. I know this familiar story and settled in for the telling. A smile twitched at the corner of her mouth, and she handed me the needle to thread.

“He let me paint over the letters when your mother was born. We wrote Baby Sleeping on the side of it, and nobody honked or drove with a lot of noise for a long while; they were respectful back then.” I handed her back the threaded needle, and she continued sewing.

I had seen the photographs of my grandma standing up on the truck fender, drawing letters with a piece of chalk on the side. It was still hard for me to believe words could hush a whole street for a little while; I can’t even imagine it today.

I run my fingers along a line of blanket stitching as she finishes her story. “When you give this to me someday, do you think I should keep it in the chest or hang it? There's a wall in the hall that would fit it perfectly.” I pushed, presumptuously. I just had to know. For some reason, this quilt has begun to mean everything to me. I think about it during the day, and sometimes I even dream about it. It’s a connection to my entire family and past, and I know, as precious as it is to Grandma, it has become precious to me as well. When she doesn’t answer, I push down a smidgen of worry. There isn’t really anyone else interested in this quilt besides me. Grandma has a lot of other fine things that the family is already beginning to bicker over.

“Do you remember,” I murmured, “Which square is the one from your wedding dress?” I ask more to fill the awkward silence; I already know which square it is.

“Keep it where you can see it,” Grandma says, pursing her thin lips, “but not where the sun can shine on it, that'll wear the fabric out faster than ever.”

Inside, I felt a sigh of relief.

“I want to get it framed!” I say, and she snorts.

“That quilt needs more to do than sit behind glass and stare out at you.” She glares at me over the top of her glasses. “I expect more from you,” she adds.

“But it's the family heirloom,” I laughed nervously, “I need to keep it safe!”

“And I'm an old lady, but that doesn't mean I belong in a museum. I can still dance.” She looked at me squarely. “I have used this nearly every day for fifty years, longer than you have been alive, and it's still here because I do this. We do this,” she amends after a beat.

Grandma's eyes go to the far corner, and she points, “That one's the wedding dress square.” It was her way of making up for being so forthright. “That dress was more lace than sense,” she smiled wryly. “I wore it one day and it cost far too much, even though I sewed most of it myself.”

She taps a square that resembles the color of clean, frothy dishwater, a meek blue-gray. “That came from your mother's apron the year that the pipes burst. She made soup for the whole street. That was a terrible freeze, broke a lot of pipes for nearly the entire town.” Grandma bites the end of the string off, snips it closer with scissors, and hands me the needle to re-thread.

“There were a lot of people who couldn't cook in such conditions; they just didn't have the know-how.” She glanced at me, “But your Mama had the know-how; she could cook soup over a campfire.” And so, another story I already know by heart starts. I listen and watch the needle flick in and out as she patches a piece of wayward fabric.

My heart swelled with the comfort of knowing the quilt was going to be mine someday, and I let out a breath I didn't even realize I was holding.

I listened with half my mind while, outside, a jaybird scolds in the side yard, and not far away, a clock’s second hand ticked the time of our morning along. I see the pale crescent scar on Grandma's hand from time to time as she weaves it in and out while sewing. She had cut the rope on a hay bale too close to her hand in her farm days. She is already on to another well-known story when I put my finger on the burnt-orange square of material and stopped her,

“What's the story about this one?”

She squinted at me with one eye, not liking to be interrupted. “That one is the curtain from the back door in the old house that wouldn't quit slapping around. Your grandpa swore he'd fixed the latch every Saturday, but every Saturday, he found something else to fix. Her voice warmed. “You would have liked him, though. He was the sort to whistle in a storm. A good man.” She stills, but her chin trembles a bit.

“I whistle in the grocery store, and people stare,” I confess, trying to smooth the moment.

“They stared because they forgot how to,” she says, lifting the thread end to her mouth, wetting it, then rolling it between her index finger and thumb into a knot. Then she continues to sew. “Hand me the other spool,” she asks easily, “The cream, no, the real cream,” she admonishes, my hand on a spool. “Not that sickly beige.”

I hand her the real cream, and she continues to sew, a gentle quiet for the moment between us. Outside, somebody starts a mower and we both hear it die off.

“I was thinking,” I say, which is a lie; what I've been doing is planning—"that after... well after... I could bring the quilt to my place and keep it safe.” We both understand 'After.'

“’ Safe,’” she says, almost like a hiss. She gives me that perfected look, the one that grandmas give when they're grievously upset.

“In the chest, I mean,” I try on the words. “It's an heirloom, right? After all, I should keep it safe.”

Grandma glances at me, then at the quilt, and then back at me. Her eyes are light gray, the color of morning roads. “If you want to keep the chest, keep the chest,” she says. “This quilt goes where the need is, where the work is.”

The work? I know my eyebrows have risen, and my voice cracks a bit.

“I don't want anything to happen to it,” I say in a rush, and I hear how childish I sound.

“Things are supposed to happen to it,” Grandma says gently. “That's how it knows it's loved.”

I lie back on the rug so I can look up at the quilt spread over the couch. From below, the squares are a sky of small histories. You could navigate by them if you knew their names: the Apron Year, the Orange Curtain, the Day of Rabbits, the Soap Ribbon. I imagine a child who isn't here yet, dragging the quilt along the floor, making a comet tail of lint in the air. I imagine teaching that child how to thread a needle, how to bite the end of the thread so it will behave, how to hold a story steady long enough for it to catch. To make amends, I sit up and ask, “Can you show me how to make the ladder stitch again?”

“You know how.” She peers at me suspiciously.

“I like the way you teach it,” I tell her.

Grandma huffs a little laugh, small and satisfied, and leans forward so the light makes a pale crown of yellow sunlight in her gray hair, bending closer so I could see her stitching.

“A ladder stitch,” she says, “Is for closing something without letting the world see the work. You take a tiny bit on one side, then a tiny bit on the other, and when you pull,”—She pulls; the seam hushed itself closed, almost like magic.

I smile, truly delighted.

“I want to be that good at it someday.”

“You will be,” she says, with a soft smile.

“I want the quilt to last forever, as long as it can. That's what I mean when I say safe,” I murmured almost under my breath, faltering in my words.

She lays down her hands and looks at me. “There is no forever in anything,” she tells me. “As much as you want, everything is going to go away someday, including me.” Before I can say anything, she points to another square and starts the story of my mother's Easter dress.

Several stories later, I leave with my head swimming. I know most of the stories by heart, but she occasionally throws in a new tidbit. I think I learned more about our family than anybody in our history, and not all of it was good. Grandma winks at me during a few of those stories and puts her finger to her lips. She whispers dramatically, “Most people think these are just filler squares,” and adds a secret smile. “But now you know the truth of it.”

Some of the stories seemed so fantastical, I wonder if she was really being truthful, or maybe it is her age; either way, I commit to remembering them.

She has also gifted me several squares of some of the materials from the cedar chest, instructing me to practice the stitches she had taught me. I had a little bit of everything, even a tiny piece of her old wedding dress.

The following year, in late spring, when I come back to visit, I find a note. Grandma is gone to a doctor's appointment, so I stay and tidy up the house. The quilt was already folded across the couch, waiting to go back on her bed or for repairs.

I thought I'd surprise her. After all, what better way to keep it safe than to send it through a good wash before we use it again? Who knows when it was last washed? I fill the machine, choose a gentle cycle with warm water. I even added the lavender soap, the kind she always uses. But when the spin cycle ends and I lift the quilt out, my stomach drops. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. What had happened? What had I done!

The seams had come loose in far too many places; whole squares were slumped away from each other, split wide open. The batting bunched up like blobs of hard clay under the surface, oozing out of the squares. The quilt sagged in my arms, not a blanket anymore but like something that had died. I cry out, my sobs echoing in the empty house.

By the time Grandma returns with her helper, I have spread the pieces across the kitchen table, frantically trying to fit them back together with pins. My hands are shaking. I turned and looked at her, stricken, seeing her eyes fall onto the quilt.

“I wanted it to be clean for you,” I say, choking on the words. “I-I didn't know this would happen!” Tears spill faster. “It's totally ruined. We have no more family heirloom, all because of me!” By this time, my voice was so full of tears and heartbreak that it was barely audible. “I didn't know, I just didn't know!” I continue to lament, wiping my tears with trembling fingers. “I am trying to fix it”. My sniffles were loud in the silence.

Grandma's helper shook her head. “Lordy,” she whispered, “That's a sorry-looking mess.”

Grandma does not scold; she touches a loose square of her wedding dress, and then she bursts out laughing, bent over, laughing even harder. I stare at her, confused.

“Oh, child,” she manages, wipes her eyes, and stands up, trying not to laugh more. “You only hurried up what time was already doing.”

More tears burned my swollen eyes, “But it's ruined, just ruined,” I flailed my hands like lost birds around my head.

She captures one hand and lays it on her chest, placing her other hand gently over it. “Yes, it's finished,” she says gravely, “It’s done. It held a record of all our stories for a long time.” She pauses a beat, “And you,” she taps my chest, “You’ve already got them all stitched up inside you, and that is our true family heirloom.”

The ruined quilt lies silent between us, but in that moment, I swear I heard it speak, a hundred scraps clamoring with a hundred stories, still holding together where no seam could ever fray.

The quilt was gone, but even a boy like me could carry the true heirloom, every story stitched safe inside my heart.