A local church was celebrating its150th anniversary in the summer of 2010. I stopped on my way home to visit with friends, see the Pony Express re-enactor, and look at the quilts on display. As I rounded the corner to see the quilt display, I stopped in my tracks. There directly in my line of sight was a quilt block with my grandmother's name embroidered on it.
What was the cause of my amazement? Grandma died a year before I was born and yet here was something she had made decades ago. Her hands had not held me but they had held and worked this quilt square in front of me. I stood staring and contemplated how much more enriched my life might have been with her in it. I slowly reached out and gently touched that physical link to Grandma.
The feeling of wonderment continued as I left the church and stopped to talk with friends. I mentioned how gobsmacked I was to find my grandmother's signature on a quilt. "I remember her," one woman told me when I finished my story. "She gave me piano lessons."
My grandmother graduated from the Maryville Music Conservatory in 1916. When she came home, she taught local students. My grandfather once told me she would have had her granddaughters playing 'Yakka Hula Hickadoola' if she had lived. (This was evidently one of his favorite songs.)
"She gave lessons around 1944-45 at the high school; I think because her sister was teaching there. She charged $1 for an hour or maybe 30 minutes," she continued. "But I didn't like playing at recitals. So Mrs. Kyle would cut my recital piece until it was just the part that I knew." We laughed and I thought my grandmother must have been an understanding teacher to cut a little girl's recital piece to be just what she could play.
Driving home that afternoon I continued to marvel at how a scrap of fabric and a chance stop on a summer day made a grandmother I never knew come alive.
