The Bow Tie Quilt

It was about 1989 when the community center connected to my church and church school in southern California hosted a service project to make quilts for AIDS babies. The ladies came around to all our classrooms showing us what the quilts might look like and suggesting that both children and parents could work on the project. They would have a Sunday afternoon session, they said, to teach people who had never quilted before how to make a quilt easily.

I was in my late 20's, teaching a multigrade class, and the project caught my eye. So I bought the amount of material they had listed on the handout and went to the sewing room of the community center to take the little 4-hour quilting class. Out of that class came a bow tie quilt of dark turquoise green and white. I was pretty proud of my production. And so I made another one. And another. And when it was time to gather together all the quilts for the ladies to deliver to the distribution center, I think I sent two.

I sent two, because I kept looking at my green-and-white bow tie quilt and thinking, "This is my very first quilt. I might get married and have children, and if I do, I'd like my first child to have my first quilt." So I tucked it away in a drawer, and it went through the next four or five moves with me.

As fate would have it, by the time I got married I was in a different place in life and didn't plan to have children. So one time when Stepdaughter #1 was visiting, I gave her the quilt. It was my effort at passing on the lineage. Even if our DNA is unrelated, I consider Husband's kids to be my descendants, in some way. "It was supposed to be for my first child," I said. "But maybe it can be for your first child now."

Bless her heart, Stepdaughter #1 tucked the quilt away and it went through several moves with her. And this week she pulled it out so that her firstborn could model my very first bow tie quilt.

There come along quiet pleasures in life that are gentle ones, but oh so precious.