The Wednesday's Quilters
By Gary Wittmann
April 10. 2006 ©
All rights reserved.
Every Wednesday at lunchtime,
they come into our school lunchroom
using their canes or walkers to move across the wooden floor.
They ate the same meals at the same wooden tables with our names scratch on them.
I even found my Dad’s name on one table.
Afterward, they gathered in the music room
and begin to pull the closet long frames and saw horses..
They begin clamping bolts, moving chairs,
getting thread and needles in the wrinkles hands.
The women would sit three to a side unless more had show up that day
and work on quilts for threes hours.
There would be three women sitting on each telling stories. .
Memories of sometime in their life
and told probably again and again over many weeks,
but yet they laugh with each other.
They were on a mission to make quilts
for the Christmas Fair for the church.
At three oĂ‚’clock school was done
and I would run down the hallway to the music room.
The old ladies looking up and smiling
I walked over to Grandma giving her a hug
and asking are you ready to walk home
from the Lutheran church school.
We took the two and halves blocks of walking home.
A hug for walking home with her,
knowing I could have been home in half of the time.
But then again I would have missed our chats.
In the evening from my bedroom window, I check on my grandparents.
Grandpa was watching television.
Grandma sitting next to the new quilt she was sewing
with the patches of our old worn out clothes.
Sometimes I would come over and sewed with her
as she told stories to me but the true stories are in the quilts.
She would point to this fabric and say this was a piece of your grandpa’s pant,
this from one of my old shirts, this piece from my old wedding dress.
Near the end of her life the light were fading from her eyes
but she determine to get three quilts done
for the grandchildren‚—Cindy, Christoper and me.
I still have that quilt.
I still feel like I can smell the freshen when she first gave it to me.
You can see dark lines on it
because her blindness was coming quicker than she realize.
She used a black marker to see where she sew.
I have memories of her quilt
and the memories of the ladies
on the Wednesday afternoon
who then sold quilts to the Christmas Fair every December.
Snow floating down the street, but the quilts hung in the gym during the fair.
Summer sun the quilts hung on the clothesline moving from the breeze.
The wind help to bring the memories back
as I took off the quilt from the line
and smelled the freshen one more time
as my mind drifts back to over forty-five years.
Patterns of our life sewn into the quilts.
