quilts
once upon a time, a quilt was homemade. a bunch of women got together on a designated night and they hand-sewed pieces of rags, scraps, and remnants of cloth into the top and the back of what would become a quilt, more or less a rectangle, more or less the size to cover a double bed, fall past its sides on three sides, and maybe even tuck in at the bottom. a substance called batting, reminiscent of cotton balls, would be attached to what would become the inside of the quilt, and the whole thing would be put together with thousands of stitches. I heard about these nights as a child from an aunt who had gotten to participate when she was an older teenager, so her stitching had gotten good enough that she held her own with the grownup women. apparently the women did all this immersed in hours of conversation that ranged over many, many subjects, and the women talking did so without missing a stitch. (I say women talking because, in my experience, when a group of women talk, more than one is talking at the same time. it's just part of being a woman, being able to talk and listen at the same time, and at the same time you're stitching a quilt and shaping a late teenager and making coffee or tea. as well as I can tell, any woman can do two, three, four things at the same time, while a normal man can do up to one thing at a time.) in any case, back in the late forties and maybe into the early fifties, quilts were homemade, each by a group of women. some quilts were signed (in stitches) by each of the women who worked on it. so those were the quilts I knew back in northeastern Brasil. now you may wonder what on earth we needed quilts for in a place where a cold night might get down to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and I would answer what on earth kept new American missionary men wearing dark blue and black wool suits in the tropics or semi-tropics of northeastern Brasil? they did. if you want my guess at a "because", then because they knew what was right: a man of god wore a dark blue or black wool suit. when god could finally get their attention, he might point out that a linen suit of off-white made a lot more sense, but sometimes it took a while for god to get the attention of these men of god. similarly, my mother knew that in winter, kids slept under a quilt, so we did. it wasn't her fault that the snow never fell that close to the equator. she did her part. and the odd thing to me now is that it worked. I didn't care that I didn't need it. a quilt is warm and heavy. (the physicist in me just screamed. a quilt is not warm, but it insulates well, it holds in your body heat. if you're not losing body heat, you say that you are warm.) later on in Texas, where a cold night can get down below zero, no matter how much the politicians talk, my aunt covered me with thicker quilts, and when I'd get up to go to the bathroom, I'd learn how much good those quilts did! even now in Los Angeles when our winter gets down to cool, I enjoy a quilt or an afghan - insulation and weight, comforts. (I guess those associations go back to furs, - insulation and weight means comfort.) and even commercially made quilts continue the tradition of a pattern on top. someday an old man with a really good memory will try to explain the pattern on the top of quilts to the whipper-snapper running the company, and patterned tops will vanish. there no doubt will be an explanation that shows how removing the pattern enhances the quality of our lives and the safety of our children, but maybe I won't be appreciating quilts by then.
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