THE JOURNALS

He handed it off at the end of my lunch hour.

"You're the only one that cares anything about this stuff – here," shoving the old folded quilt toward me.

I really did care about the old family heirlooms, if you could even say we had any. A fork here, a busted-up primitive banjo there, and now, a quilt joined the misfits from eras gone by, sepia memories locked in a vault of dementia.

He was a quiet man, my daddy's daddy, and I was a young adult before I found the courage to engage him in conversations, dodging his dry humor and jabs fast as a heavyweight champion.  But my youth and his advancing age didn't catch up to one another in time to learn his stories and explain the few photographs and keepsakes scattered like bread crumbs on a trail to nowhere.

I'd had the quilt for years before my own interest in quilting was ignited by the antique sewing machine purchased on a whim.  Martha, a Singer featherweight, with her quiet, beautiful stitches, sparked my desire to learn to quilt, believing time spent bent over puzzle-piece cottons would tell me old stories.   

And it was Martha that caused me to look with new eyes at the old quilt of triangles in a large sky of squares unraveling in the pine hutch. I blinked, and the little feed sack triangles stepped back and the large solid ones turned on point came forward, standing boldly and proudly, likely pieced as the train whistle and the cold blew through the cracks of the old house at Coldwell.  Unlike my pieces, these were stitched by hand, beautiful stitches, but at times inconsistent in length, as if many hands, not a single one, had moved needle and thread through layers meant for warming on frigid nights or to spread for dinners on the ground at Sunday fellowship gatherings.  

Library books, internet searches, and quilter quizzing spun me around with the many descriptions of the block known as hovering hawks, most often stories of one that preyed on the vulnerable and less fortunate.  I’d stand back and stare into the triangles, seeing with new eyes the soaring wings of the raptor, floating and, yes, hovering, over fields with a gaze fixed on what and who it might devour.

I never touched the quilt without thinking of my grandfather.  It always pulled me into the stories he tried to tell, and I tried hard to hear.  Funny, he was nearly deaf but spoke in muttered tones, maybe because he didn’t trust his own volume. But it made the ciphering all the more difficult because I didn’t want to embarrass him by asking him to repeat himself. As the dementia hawk hovered, I tried desperately to pull our family treasures closer, clinging for dear life to all that was left of the tapestry of his life.

“Tell me your story!” I screamed through my tears.  “Tell me your story!”  Help me hear you; Like my Papa Zeke, your words are muttered but you are striving to get them to me for safekeeping. You know your stories, like the old photographs and silver fork, are fading and dulling, but they’re begging to remain. Don’t let them die with you. Tell me! Tell me a story. Tell me your story.  

“I am your story.”  

Not muttered but clear; not loud, but strong.

“I am your story.”

Snubbing, I inhaled deep, releasing the struggle of straining, toiling and spinning, relinquishing the longing for voices, pictures, and coherent words to materialize and tell me about him; to tell me all the things the hawk devoured.

But what it took is not the story; it’s what it couldn’t steal.

I see him in my mirror.  His eyes, his jowls, but, thank God, not his bald head.  He is in my love of books and words.  After his death, Daddy discovered a poem written by my grandfather as far as we can tell--Tales of the Night Roamer--one of the roads where our stories intersect.   

Our stories are stuffed deep, internal scars from battles fought in solitude, knowing those closest to us sense we are broken but depend on our strength to support their weaker moments and struggles.  He knew war.  He knew loss.  He knew grief.  But he rarely spoke of them. The quiet resolve to soldier through life compels us.

We are makers. He created with iron and steel, bending and shaping arches and railings, cemetery entrances, gates and grandstands. I’m a quilter, though novice; a paper crafter; a word wrangler, bending and shaping thoughts and ponderings; piecing together with fabric and thread heart work.   

The quilt, like his life, covers, warms and inspires me.  It gently reminds me that our stories become the tapestries of the lives of our children and their children. It spurs me to write, to quilt, to craft. And it testifies to the importance of sharing our stories. In doing so, we take back what the hawks steal and add it to all they could not.