Word: quilting
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...well-cropped grass and several cars in the driveway, but I knew that my grandmother saw something quite different. She leaned over my shoulder to rethread the bobbin I habitually tangled as she taught me to make a patchwork quilt. She was transported. She looked out the same window, but instead saw the hills of central Kentucky of 70 years...
...loved spending time with my maternal grandmother, who lived with us when I was young. I loved sewing but hated it at the same time. Why I was pricking myself with needles, tacking together scraps of fabric to make a quilt, when bed comforters were for sale at Lazarus...
...Naturally, the quilt was to be a patchwork, a blend of bits on hand. Because my grandmother had always made shirts, pants and dresses for her four daughters when they were children, her walk-in closet was a patchwork paradise. I sewed the fabric squares; Granny insisted that the right angles met in 90-degree perfection. (No wonder my mother became an architect.) The flashing needle tacked together vestiges of white dresses, red-checkered shorts, turquoise blue blouses and a dusty-rose colored skirt. Nothing matched, but that was the point...
...grandmother taught me the ways of this land, a land of winding dirt roads and hills peppered with rolls of hay perched on hillsides like giant spools of thread. In my Currier dorm room, I have a patchwork quilt on my bed and pencil holders made of reused tea canisters on my desk. It is a direct result of the strength and permanence of Appalachian values and Granny’s—my family’s—diligence in their preservation...
...secessionist movements alive today in Vermont, Hawaii and California are not really battles between left and right: they include libertarian Marxists and tribal-rights activists and anarchists and greens and every other ideology, all stirred up by their opposition to big national government. America is now a multicultural quilt of 300 million people spread across cities and suburbs and forests and prairies; when it is compared with the colonial world of our forebears, it is harder to judge whether what unites us is greater than what divides us - or agree on just how much power we want to cede...