Reflections on the Tenth Week of Spring – Walks Through My Heart

A Mary Ann Oil Painting

    Mary Ann, as refreshing as her still life paintings, led a life that was anything but still.

    In the late 1990s, when Spence and I weekended at Wells Wood, she moved into the century and a half old farm house a third of a mile away and she walked along the township’s dirt roads. She walked and walked

• enjoying nature,
• finding neighbors for chats,
• exercising her dogs, and
• getting exercise looking for her dogs.

    The last is how we met.

    On a ninety degree day in August, a black dog stood in the middle of the garden when Spence and I arrived around noon. With head cocked, the dog looked us over.

    I jokingly called, “Hey, Ralph,” and the gigantic dog bounded toward me. Doubting the wisdom of calling the mutt with a head the size of a wolf’s, I gulped and Ralph placed his front paws on my feet. His entire hind end wagged while I took in his bulk―part husky, part German shepherd, and part mystery.

    He dashed back and forth between Spence and me to collect pats, shake paws, and sit on our feet. Then he rolled onto his back with four paws up begging for tummy rubs.

    While I grabbed his collar and squinted at the metal tag, Ralph nuzzled against my legs. No doubt he came from a loving home. Before I deciphered the tag’s faint print, Ralph dashed to Spence. After five minutes of Ralph’s shuttling, Spence and I stood side by side so I could concentrate on the tag while Spence rubbed Ralph’s ears.

    It reported that Dr. Hopkins, a Meadville vet, gave the dog a rabies shot. No name. No address.

    Again and again, Ralph trotted through the woods to Deer Creek. We’d convince ourselves he’d headed home, but he came back.

    Around four o’clock, Ralph sat by the porch door of the old red cabin Spence’s parents had built. Inside, on cots without black snakes underneath―I checked, Spence napped and I read Pride and Prejudice.

    From a slow moving car, a woman’s voice called “Arby.”

    We jumped off the cots and hustled to the road.

    Empty. And wagging Ralph sat at our feet.

    Half an hour later, Spence raked hay, and I waded in Deer Creek with Ralph.

    From neighbor Hutch’s woods, a woman and child called, “Arby! Arby!”

    Ralph’s ears shot up then he dashed toward the voices.

    “I see him!” the youngster squealed.

    Good. Ralph found his family.

    Sunshine glinted off burbling water.

    After splashing out of the creek, I moseyed up the path to the cabin where Spence stood with Ralph.

“I thought he found his family.” I rubbed Ralph’s ears.

    Spence shrugged his shoulders, picked up his rake, and headed back to the field.

    While he raked, I packed gear for the drive to Cleveland.

    The woman and child called again. “Arby! Arby!”

    Patting the big dog’s rump, I said, “Come on, big fellow,” and jogged up the driveway.

    Ralph followed.

    We met Spence at the top of the drive.

    From around the bend came wiry Mary Ann carrying her dimpled cheeked grandson Jacob piggyback. Silver hair fell in wisps around her worry etched face, and she slumped as if being flattened into road kill by Jacob’s swinging legs. Beside them strode Mary Ann’s lanky, autistic son Dan. All three cried “Arby!”

    Tail whacking his broad hips, Arby circled his family.

    “Gosh, Arby,” Mary Ann said as she rumpled the fur around his neck. “Where’ve you been?”

    “He’s been here most of the afternoon,” I said. “We’d hear you call. He’d disappear. We’d think he’d gone home, then he’d turn up again.”

    Mary Ann laughed. “He’s got an independent spirit. He’s been hunting for baby raccoons.”

Spence, Arby, and Mary Ann

    Countless times during the next year, Mary Ann and I coaxed Arby into the back seat of her car in the Wells Wood driveway or shoved him through her kitchen door so he wouldn’t follow me away from the old farm house. And we built a friendship that flourished through decades, the building of our log house, and three more dogs―Isabella, Muffy, and Jed.

Mary Ann and Jed

    The Friday after Mother’s Day 2014, Mary Ann and Jed walked over for a chat. I grabbed a pair of scissors and, while Jed circled the perimeter of the log house, ambled with Mary Ann to the towering lilac bush blanketed in flower clusters. I cut lilacs and handed them to Mary Ann. Though the fragrance permeated the air, she buried her nose in the flowers and inhaled deeply. “You’re as sweet as these flowers.”

    “Mother’s Day brings lilacs and trillium,” I said while she hugged me. “I hunt in the woods for trillium this time of year.”

    Three days later, Mary Ann walked to the log house.

    I let her in and gasped.

    She clutched a dozen trillium in her hands.

    Because I wanted trilliums to keep growing wild, I never picked them. But bunched together, the flowers looked awesome.

    She grinned. “I climbed down a bank halfway to pick these because I knew you liked them.”

    “Oh, Mary Ann!” I reached into the cupboard for a vase and filled it with water. “They’re lovely.”

    She stuck the flowers into the vase. “I almost fell, but I wanted you to know that I love you.”

    Hugging Mary Ann, I said, “You’re so kind. Thanks.”

    “I can’t stay,” she said reaching for the door knob. “I’m on my way to clear branches off Hutch’s yard.”

    This winter on the afternoon of February 7, Mary Ann’s eighty-fourth birthday, Dan opened Mary Ann’s door and shouted to his mom, “Janet Wells is here to see you.”

    I juggled a ripped paper grocery bag leaking a few of its three dozen potatoes. When Mary Ann got up to greet me, I sang, “Happy Birthday,”and handed her the lumpy mess. “I bet no one ever gave your potatoes for your birthday before.”

   She cradled the bag and chuckled. “No. No one ever gave me potatoes for my birthday.”

    We walked to the kitchen where she rested the green cast enclosing her forearm (broken when she ran across her icy yard to hop in a friend’s car for a grocery shopping trip) on the table while we talked for an hour and a half.

    Four days later, without a driver’s license and so blind she couldn’t recognize a person’s face from two feet away, Mary Ann lost her reasoning, drove her car into a ditch along Route 173, and landed in a Pittsburgh nursing home where she died May 8, 2018.

    In a dimly lit viewing room of Dickson Family Funeral Home, Spence and I murmured condolences to Dan and signed the guest book. Staying closed to Spence, I searched for Mary Ann’s coffin or urn. Not there.

    Instead, her oil paintings, posters of family photographs, and pots of flowers formed an arc at the end of the room.

    Son Jonathan rehashed Mary Ann’s gradual decompensation.

    Daughter Rebecca recalled dire phone calls telling her “Your mother stuck a knife in her cast trying to get it off.”

    And daughter Katrina talked about wheeling Mary Ann outside the nursing home for fresh air and having to restrain her from dashing to freedom.

    I soaked in Mary Ann’s still life paintings and mentally escaped to the time she and Muffy took a winter woods walk.

    Mary Ann trudged.

    Muffy bounded.

    Over the crest of a hill, they met a doe stuck in a foot of snow.

    Barking, Muffy charged the doe.

    “Stop, Muffy!” Mary Ann bent and brushed the snow away from the doe’s front legs. “Can’t you see she’s in trouble?”

    Muffy cocked her head then licked the doe’s nose.

    Mary Ann tamped a section of snow in front of the doe, reached into her pocket for cracked corn, and sprinkled it on the ground.

    Would anyone else carry corn in case she met a critter in trouble?

    Mary Ann, a friend as refreshing as her still life paintings, walks through my heart and mind―still.

Mary Ann's Trilliums

Reflections on the Ninth Week of Spring – Reinventing the Charm (Part 2)

Mansfield Park Quilt - Front

    The evening of April 4^th, I walked into the back room of Gail’s quilt shop where whoops and exclamations erupted.

    “Wow.”

    “Ta-da.”

    “We did it!”

    Bordered, quilted, and bound, our group falling leaf quilt hung on the display wall. And all seventeen members had taken part in the quilt’s construction.

    “Okay. Okay.” Pat, chair of the Country Charms quilt show, stood and passed out raffle tickets. “You’re each in charge of selling twenty tickets.” She stared at us over the top of her glasses. “Material, batting, and long arm quilting came to five hundred forty-six dollars and sixty-five cents.”

    We gulped in unison.

    Pat shook her finger. “We have to recoup our expenses.”

    Linda, president of the guild, said, “We should leave the quilt on the wall. People will see it and buy tickets from Gail.”

    “No.” Pat tapped her finger on the table. “I’ll show the quilt to people at my church and sell more tickets.”

    Not me. Walk up to friends and family with a corny grin and ask them to buy raffle tickets? I wrote my name on the back of eighteen and gave Pat thirty dollars.

Ticket by ticket.

Dollar by dollar.

    A week and a half later, on Friday the thirteenth, Spence and I drove home from an Allegheny College play in which a couple set fire to their neighbor’s house. Over the car radio, President Trump announced he’d bombed Syria. And, after checking that the fire they’d started to clear brush behind their barn had burned out, Gail and her husband Lee went to bed.

    While they slept, a spark flared. The barn ignited and set the back of the quilt shop ablaze.

    A passing motorist called the fire department but not before the fire consumed the barn, the back of the shop, the guild’s quilt racks, and our boxes of quilt show supplies. Smoke damaged material in the front of the shop.

Rack by rack.

Box by box.

    Gail went into shock, and Pat, as if fussy cut, went into a tizzy.

    “Gail is closed until further notice. That means we cannot collect or judge quilts at the shop,” Pat emailed. “My initial reaction was to cancel show but, rethinking what that would entail, I need your input. We can borrow racks from the IQ guild. Should we or shouldn't we continue with the show? In the meantime, keep Gail in your prayers.”

    I hit “reply all” first. “I suggest we continue with the show. But, there are so many loose ends, we should meet so you don’t have to deal with all this alone, Pat.”

    The only other response from the group? “We should cancel the show out of respect for Gail and Lee. We can still sell tickets for the quilt and make a little more on it.”

    Then silence.

    While I waited for Pat’s decision, one question surged through my mind.

    Were we having a quilt show or not?

    You’re wondering about the Mansfield Park quilt.

    Should I hustle to get it done?

    You need to finish someday.

    But if we don’t have the show―

    Stop dithering and quilt.

    I climbed to the loft, made quilt sandwiches then machine quilted cross in a cross and Irish chain patterns.

Cross by cross.

Chain by chain.

Mansfield Park Quilt - Cross in a Cross Block

    Finally, Marion, the quilter who co-chaired the 2016 quilt show with me, emailed. “Linda said she and Pat are meeting Tuesday morning at Our Lady of Lourdes to make plans. They would welcome your help.”

    So Tuesday morning, four of us―Pat, Linda, Peggie (my ride-sharing neighbor who’d stated she would quit the guild after the show), and me―sat at a table in the fellowship hall.

    Pat spread papers in front of her. “We’ve invested too much time and money to stop now. I’ll bring IQ’s racks Friday morning. Maybe the judge can come early to judge the quilts before we hang―”

    “I already called her.” Linda pushed her shoulders back. “The judge is coming at four Friday afternoon.”

    Pat frowned and checked an item on her paper. “Then she’ll have to judge the quilts after we hang them. Registration Thursday?”

    We settled that Pat and Peggie would register quilts at the church, Linda and I would register them at Fox’s quilt shop, and I’d change store fliers that advertised registering quilts at Gail’s.

    Linda pushed her chair back. “Will Gail still come as a vendor?”

   Pat shrugged. “I’ll ask her this afternoon. I know she hadn’t unpacked the truck with her supplies for vending at shows so if she’s feeling up to coming―”

    “I need to know as soon as possible,” Linda stood, “so I can call another vendor if she isn’t coming.”

    Pat spread her arms wide. “I’ll talk to Gail today and get back to you tonight.”

    “Do that.” Linda walked toward the kitchen.

    Pat shook her fists in the air. “Linda is driving me crazy. It’s like oil and water.”

    Peggie slid out of her chair and tiptoed away.

    Continuing to unravel, Pat said, “Why doesn’t Linda just let me run the show? We’re not co-chairs!”

    I put my hand on Pat’s arm. “You’re doing a great job. The show will be lovely.”

    “Well, it’s the last one we’ll ever have! Gail’s old. She’s not going to rebuild.” Pat hit her fist against the table. “That means the guild dissolves. We can’t continue the quilt guild without a quilt shop.” She stomped off.

    Dissolve the guild? My throat tied in French knots.

    Holding a cup of coffee, Linda stopped beside me. “See you Thursday at Fox’s.”

    “Pat said she’d dissolve the guild.” I glanced down at my empty hands and back up at Linda. “Pat can’t do that, can she?”

    With a smile appliquéd to her face, Linda shook her head. “We’ll hold a meeting after the quilt show and let all the members vote on what to do.”

Bicker by bicker.

Plan by plan.

    Back at home, I fastened support bands around both wrists, threaded a needle, and blind stitched the binding to the back of my quilt. Forty-one hours before quilt registration opened, I tied the last knot in the quilt. Done!

Thread by thread.

Knot by knot.

    Saturday May 5 dawned sunny and mild. Before the doors to the quilt show opened, guild members strolled down rows of quilts, each one a treasure.

• Double Wedding Ring, 
• Dresden Plate, 
• Wool Appliqué,
• Embroidered panel,
• Hexi Flower Garden,
• Nine Patch, 
• Trip Around the World,
• Minis, table runners, pillows, and more.

  

  Butterfly Quilt

    Fingers pointed, oohs escaped, and eyes checked for ribbons. We giggled, hugged each other, and stopped by Gail’s table to gaze at fabrics and patterns that survived the fire in her truck.

    “These are discounted.” She pointed to overlapping cuts of fabric on the left. “They were smoke damaged so my daughter washed and ironed them.”

    We drifted to our posts for the show. I sat behind the door prize table under the guild’s huge falling leaf quilt and with a view of my Mansfield Park quilt hanging at the end of the third row.

    One hundred twenty-eight visitors strolled past me and down the aisles. They pointed fingers, oohed, and gazed with delighted smiles.

    Mid afternoon two petite women, one clutching her handbag and the other walking with an arthritic limp, gawked at the falling leaf quilt. The first said, “Oh, my. “It’s so big. That took a lot of work.”

    Her friend tilted her head. “And the corners of the squares meet.”

    “All seventeen of us worked on the quilt,” I said.

    The women gaped. 

   “Imagine,” said the first.

    “Amazing so many women could cooperated on one quilt,” said the second.

    From the raffle ticket table, Linda waved her camera at me. “Help me gather the guild by the raffle quilt. I want a group picture.”

    I walked down the aisles, touched each member on the shoulder, and delivered the summons. “Linda wants us up front for a photo.”

    They groaned.

   “Do we have to?”

    “Her picture would be better without us.”

    “I’ll take the picture for her.”

    Members moseyed to the raffle quilt where we frowned, waited for others, and milled, as if sorting pieces on a display board. Everyone moved toward the back of the group. With time, we stitched ourselves into a crazy quilt arrangement.

    Linda focused the camera then handed it to a young visitor before joining the group.

    “Take at least four,” I called from the back row. “We need multiple chances to get a decent picture.

Visitor by visitor.

Smile by smile.

    And how did my Mansfield Park quilt fare?

    I lost to a corpse.

    Well, not literally.

    The quilter was alive when she appliquéd butterflies and hand quilted. She died earlier this year and left the quilt to her daughter-in-law Sandy, our neighbor and tax collector who lopes past our house daily. “Mom would point to a butterfly and say whose dress was made from that material,” Sandy told Spence and me one afternoon when she stopped on her walk. “The quilt’s so beautiful I wanted to enter it in Mom’s honor.”

    The butterfly quilt wasn’t in my pieced, machine-quilted category. But, after all the months of sewing, a little levity makes not winning a ribbon more tolerable.

    And from my vantage point at the door prize table, I watched two young women study my quilt as if preparing for a college art exam. With heads tilting towards each other, one woman traced an outside cross and an inside cross with her finger. Then she framed a Cross in a Cross block with her hands. Her friend framed a Four Square 2 block. They pointed to the gold squares running diagonally through each block and forming diamonds on the quilt. Stepping back, the women exchanged grins. Were they agreeing with the judge’s written comment at the bottom of a sheet of starred techniques?

    “Great construction work!”

Star by star.

Construction by construction.

    The following Wednesday, all but two of the now sixteen member guild gathered around a long table in the church’s fellowship hall.

    Linda started the discussion. “We got lots of compliments on the quilt show.”

    “And we did lots less work.” Pat nodded to Linda across the table. “No pie baking and the smaller racks were easy to assemble. We should use that size if we have another show.”

    Have another show? What about her threat to dissolve the guild?

    Pat pulled out her financial report and read a list of numbers including “. . . and we received five hundred ninety-six dollars from raffle ticket sales.”

    “Gee,” someone moaned. “We only made thirty dollars on the raffle quilt.”

    Actually, we’d made forty-nine dollars and thirty-five cents―the equivalent of each member donating two dollars and ninety cents. We could have saved a lot of time and work.

    Without bickering, we decided to sew pin cushions at the next meeting, celebrate all our birthdays by exchanging favorite notions in July, and have a quilt retreat in September or October.

    Gail leaned in. “I want to let you know work has started on the store. I’m going to participate in the Shop Hop in July. If the building’s not done, I’ll rent a tent.”

    Gail’s rebuilding, the successful show, and the cooperative sewing on the raffle quilt had reinvented the charm in our guild.

    Then Pat said, “We should combine the business meeting and fun night so we only come out once a month.”

    A member, who’d been suggesting that for years because she didn’t want to drive from Meadville twice a month after work, sat at attention. “I move we only meet once a month.

    Our newest member said, “I second it.”

    Linda looked down the table. “All in favor raise your hand.”

    “WAIT a minute,” I blurted out. Weren’t meetings to discuss proposals before making decisions? “I have a question.”

    Before I asked my question, someone said, “Wouldn’t that entail changing our constitution?”

    Despite the reinvented charm, our crazy quilted guild still deserves the reputation for bickering.

Quilt by quilt.

Show by show.

Guild Gathering and Waiting for Others by Raffle Quilt - photo by MM