Pop 89: Quilt Reading
By Madonna Hamel
These nights my sister and I fall asleep listening to the same sublime cd of 17th century lute music played by Jose Miguel Moreno.
There is a moment in the music where I cannot help but break into tears and lift my hands the air, as if in some strange posture of surrender and supplication. The first time this happened I found myself saying: "Glorious, Glorious, Glorious." To feel that kind of happiness amidst this whole brain tumour expedition is a gift indeed.
I've reached the end of another week of radiation treatments, chemo pills, blood tests and oncologist reviews and am drifting off to sleep on my friend Judith's couch. I'm fortunate that the exhaustion that comes from the treatments translates into naps; a good nap is a precious gift - it's like being handed a designer chocolate!
In the yard the birds are singing, the scent of lilacs fill the room and the temperature has cooled enough to snuggle under a blanket. And it's not just any blanket; it's a quilt made by Victoria's Quilts Canada, a non profit charity organization of over 15,000 volunteers who stitch quilts for people like me who are diagnosed with cancer. Since 1999 they have blanketed over 100,000 Canadians in their embrace.
What makes this particular quilt even more precious is the fact that it was stitched by the Climax group, the only VQC chapter in Saskatchewan.
The group is very dear to me, as I performed an excerpt from my monologue "Mother's Apron" for their fundraiser just over a year ago. Little did I know then I would be one of the recipients of their kindness and craftsmanship.
Most of us know the story of the Underground Railway - the route escaped slaves took to make their way to safe houses and eventually across the border to Canada.
While details differ, the story goes that women along the escape route would leave quilts hanging on lines or draped on fenceposts to serve as maps.
The quilts were embedded with a kind of code, so that by reading the shapes and motifs sewn into the design, an enslaved person on the run could know where to turn, and what to avoid.
Nowadays it is possible to buy ready-to-assemble quilts. There's no need to lug detritus around, to save bits and bobs, to fiddle with fabrics to see how they might reveal entirely new stories by laying that old bit of jeans against that scorched bit of tea towel next to that last scrap of lace from an old wedding dress.
But surely the point of a quilt is to use the material of our lives - the borrowed and blue, the old and new bits infused with our sweat and stains, our mistakes and victories, our histories embedded in every saved scrap and patch. Every patch is a paragraph belonging to a page in our story, a story within a story, earning its place in the bigger book of humankind's big family. But ready-cut patches are not borne from our lives, but from a factory. What we save in assemblage time we lose in all those years spent lingering over the memories each patch renders us as we snip at their rough edges and sort them into piles of recollections.
The point of a quilt is comfort, yes, but it is also about using what we have, what we gathered and earned and loved and lost and found once more. It is, like any work of art, about the process, not just the product.
Meanwhile, the temperature outside is dropping. I'm looking around for another blanket when my eyes land on a small lap quilt wrapped over Judith's rocking chair. It occurs to me that my eye lands here every afternoon - that without fail I am drawn to a particular patch bearing a pair of oxen grazing in a red-flowered field.
And every afternoon the oxen bring me back to a poem I studied in 10th grade, written by Thomas Gray, entitled: "Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard."
I recall only a few verses, but I am relieved I can recall some of the lines that still hold meaning for me, that remind me of my own mortality.
Here's a shortened version, stitched together, if you will, into smaller patches:
"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere.
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear.
He gained from Heaven
('twas all he wished) a friend."
Elegies are made for good byes. Quilts are made for good nights. Both, eventually, leave the world to darkness and our weary selves.
I gaze back down at the quilt delivered by my heavenly Climax women friends and realize that, scattered among the blue flowers and the orange stars are verses - bits of scripture beseeching me not to be troubled nor afraid, reminders to give thanks in all circumstances, to grant peace to each and every one of us.
I lift the quilt, letting it fall over my legs, and a bold gold word leaps before my eyes: It is: "Glorious!"
For more info on Victoria Quilts, including how to volunteer contact: https://victoriasquiltscanada.com