Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [60]
She perused her note cards. “We’ve gone through the history of the adobe and of the Sinclair family. I was just going to start the tour of the storytelling quilts. I read all the histories last night.”
“Mind if I follow along?”
“Not at all. You can tell me if I get anything wrong.”
The first quilt was made by a woman in Morro Bay who had been married for fifty-three years to a captain of a commercial fishing boat. Waiting for Henry was its name. Incorporating the traditional quilt pattern Ocean Waves and using a mixture of hand-dyed multicolored fabric with touches of nautical fun prints, she created a Grandma Moses-style scene of a man out on a wildly tossing ocean hauling in nets, while on a high bluff in a blue-and-white saltbox house his wife stands leaning against a silver widow’s walk looking out to sea. Around her shoulders was a bright patchwork quilt embroidered with tiny little fish.
The typed card next to the quilt read, “I spent many hours ‘waiting for Henry’ and worrying every day about whether the sea would give him back to me. Quilting was a real blessing and comfort to me during those stormy days and nights. And fish, which have supported Henry and me all our married life and sent our two kids through college, always seem to sneak their way into my quilts, whether I intend them to be there or not. The fisherman’s nets are actually strings from the nets my husband used before retiring—thank the Lord—three years ago.”
I followed Mildred through the tour of thirty quilts in the display and was still delighted by each quilt even though I’d studied them closely myself before interviewing the quilter and recording her story. Most of the quilts followed a common style in story quilts—capturing a moment in the artist’s life and freezing it much like a photograph. There were quilts that told of summer days at the beach or mountains, a favorite pair of shiny black tap shoes, a great-grandfather’s smelly pipe, a devastating flood that killed a family’s three hundred chickens. Tiny moments of people’s lives recreated, using myriad pieces of fabric, leather, buttons, and beads.
One especially delightful entry was by a black woman about her grandmother, a native of Tennessee. The title of the quilt was My Grandmama’s Flags. Bordered by a Peace and Plenty pattern, the center was an array of colorful flags from all the states where her grandmother had family. In the center was a tiny woman with skin the color of milk chocolate sitting in a porch swing underneath a flagpole displaying the American flag. Behind her head, like a huge halo, was an array of smiling faces ranging in color from creamy coffee to rich mahogany.
“My grandmama collects flags from wherever she has family. We were taught from the time we were young children that the first thing we had to do if we moved out of Tennessee was to send her a flag of the state or country we lived in. She has a flagpole in front of her small cabin in Tennessee and whenever one of her children or grandchildren came to visit her or on their birthdays, they can always know that their flag will be waving over her log cabin. She taught all of her kids and grandkids how to quilt. Out of fifty-seven of us, thirty-five are still quilters, including my father. This quilt is my salute to a very special lady, who at eighty-eight still cooks all day every Saturday to make meals to take to the ‘old people’ at the retirement home.”
When we reached Evangeline’s quilt, though, even after seeing so many intricate and touching quilts, it elicited an amazed murmuring from the docents-in-training. Evangline’s details of Cajun life and the intricate needlework in each of the twelve squares gave her quilt a quality not unlike a painting by one of the masters. It could be rediscovered again and again, as each time you viewed it, another detail revealed itself.
After the group moved on to a bold surrealistic quilt incorporating and celebrating the stylistic features and Native American themes of the Canadian artist M. Emily Carr, I lingered in front of Evangeline’s