Reflections on the Third Week of Spring

      On our way to the YMCA Thursday, my friend Cindy said, “I told Marion she was lucky you didn't hit her over the head with that big box.”

      Was Cindy serious? Tired from hours of fretting over details for the impending Country Charms 16^th Quilt Show, I stopped at the corner of Randolf and Liberty to glance at my passenger. She was serious.

      The night before I had lugged show supplies in a ten-ream-paper box to the guild meeting. Referring to four spread sheets, I stood and reviewed supplies and volunteers for each step in the quilt show event–quilt registration, judging, set up, show jobs, and tear down. Who could bring a cash box? Which women were willing to climb twenty-foot ladders to hang quilts?

      When I asked Marion, my co-chair, if she'd brought the raffle quilt sign and the quilt registration sheets, she said, “I forgot.” I scribbled notes to remind her later and continued discussing the long lists. Picking up the heavy box to hit anyone over the head never crossed my mind. What did flash across the old gray cells was whether I annoyed Marion and the other quilters with too many details.

      Their lips formed straight lines, and their eyes focused on fingernails. A new quilter said, “It will just happen. Everyone will pitch in, and it will all get done.”

Were they regretting I was a co-chair for their show? Did they just want me to shut up and the meeting to end?

      Shifting into first and letting off the break, I asked Cindy, “Don't you think I annoyed everyone with so many details?”

      “No. You were organized.”

      Back home, I sewed my project for the quilt show guild challenge–a set of eight log cabin place mats with yellow centers to symbolize a light in the window for a welcome home. I had sewn a chain of first and second logs (attach the first two pieces of fabric, sew three or four stitches without material, sew the next pair). Log by log I chained the place mats bigger and bulkier till all twenty-one logs were attached. With stitch in the ditch (quilting on seam lines), I created the log cabin pattern on the backing material. This week I attached binding to the fronts by machine and the backs by hand. I took a break from hand stitching the second place mat Saturday and lit lights to welcome Spence home from his Central Ohio tenant meetings.