Aunt Eula's Quilt

         As the sun sinks behind the oak tree outside my window, I slip my thimble from my finger and drop it into my sewing basket.  I am finished quilting for the day.  My eyes aren't very good, and without natural light from the sun, I can't see to make the tiny twelve-to-fourteen stitches to the inch that identifies a veteran quilter. I pause to inspect the latest damage to my fingertips.  I never could get used to wearing a thimble on my left hand. I have always been envious of those who could.  I need to feel the needle coming through the underside of the quilt.  As a result of all those needle pricks, the fingers of my left hand stay sore and calloused most of the time.  However, everytime I see them, I am reminded of another pair of hands that cared for me as a child--a pair of hands whose left-hand fingers looked a lot my own. 

Every summer for as far back as I can remember, my mother sent my sister and me to spend the summer with her favorite Aunt.  Eula Brannon was a no-nonsense woman who stood close to six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds.  She had eyes in the back of her head beneath her frizzy, iron-gray hair.  She wore it cropped off at her shoulders.  This made her look a lot like George Washington to me.  She was about as stubborn as he was, too.  She had a flourishing peach tree in her yard that grew as many switches for my correction as it grew peaches for Aunt Eula's preserves.

I never actually saw Aunt Eula quilting, simply because she didn't quilt in the summertime.  Her monstrous, homemade frame was hauled up near the ceiling of the bedroom my sister and I shared by a contrivance of ropes and pulleys long before our arrival each spring.

It was evident that she did quilt, however.  Every night my sister and I were sandwiched tightly between an old-fashioned feather mattress and one of those weighty creations.  Surprisingly, though, we were rarely too hot.  Many nights though, I remember falling asleep--swaddled to the teeth and staring rebelliously up at the underside of an unfinished quilt--while I listened drowsily to the "music" coming from the front porch.

Uncle Bill sat out there on the porch almost every evening with his long, bluejeans-clad legs propped up against the porch rail while he plunked his banjo or tuned his fiddle.  If there was a breeze at all, along with his music, there came the scent of Aunt Eula's cabbage roses into the room, to lull me to sleep. The roses mingled pleasantly with the smell of homemade soap that was boiled into everything Aunt Eula owned, as well as a faint hint of cedar from the chest in which Aunt Eula stored her quilts.

Not long ago, my mother found something in her attic and invited me over to see what it was.  I stared in awe as she gently unfolded an unfinished quilt top.  My experienced eye quickly began calculating the possible antique value of it.

"Where did it come from?" I almost whispered.

"It was the last quilt top Aunt Eula started before she died in 1957," she answered, well pleased with the look on my face.  "I never got around to finishing it.  I thought you might like to give it a try."

It didn't take me long to finish that quilt.  It was a "Star of Bethlehem" and was one of Aunt Eula's favorite patterns.  It isn't old enough to be an antique yet, but no amount of money could buy it from me.  It lies neatly folded on the end of my bed.  Not even the cat would dare touch it.  To me, it is a time machine.  I only have to wrap myself in its folds to hear the echo of "Ol Dan Tucker", or "Turkey in the Straw", and smell again the scent of cabbage roses on a summer's breeze.  But best of all, everytime I swaddle myself in its warmth, I can feel again the strength of my Aunt Eula's love. 

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