My Mother’s Quilt

It’s old and tattered, but aren’t we all — as my friend Gordon used to say. My Mother’s Quilt. It has worn thin with age (which isn’t quite as good a description of the rest of us) and is losing some of its parts. It is just the right weight and right size for Nyel’s hospital bed and covers him softly each night.

The quilt is part of my earliest memories. It has always ‘lived’ in this house and was the covering for the little iron cot in my first bedroom here – the smallest upstairs room that overlooks the church across the street. I don’t know the name of the pattern –probably something like “The Flower Basket.” It is hand-pieced and hand-quilted and I always feel my mother’s love when I handle it.

Dale Espy Little, September 22, 1934

She made it in 1933 while she was waiting here in Oysterville for my father to send for her. He was in Boston working for Roger Babson for $15 a week. Or was it a month? In any case, it was not a large enough amount to support two people, but it was the midst of the Great Depression and he felt himself lucky to have a job. He lived with his parents, saved his money and, when the year was up, he went to Mr. Babson and asked for a raise.

Dad had been on the debate team at the University of Redlands. He was logical and clear and knew how to advocate for his position. He clearly told Mr. Babson the reasons he felt he needed a salary increase (he wanted to marry his sweetheart and bring her to Boston from the wilds of Washington), but he also demonstrated with facts and figures how much two people on a bare bones budget would require.

Meanwhile, my mother lived here and spent her days helping her ailing parents and sewing her wedding trousseau. Each item she made represented a labor of love. She was not a seamstress nor was she a ‘crafty’ person – but she did what she had to do and she did it well. By the time my father sent for her, she had a trunk full of linens – pillow cases with crocheted borders, embroidered tea towels, finely hemmed linen napkins, several quilts and whatever else she and her mother deemed necessary to set up her first household.

I still use some of those items, though they are a bit frayed around the edges. I sometimes think about the demise of the trousseau tradition. By the time I became a bride, 22 years later, our world had changed enough that we could afford to buy the things we needed to begin married life.

But, in a way, we cut ourselves out of something important – like the memories that surround my mother’s dear old quilt.