When I was a little kid, my mom hung a quilt in the corner of my room. I didn't have a headboard and it served as one, in a way, as my bed was pushed up against the wall. The quilt reached the ceiling and I loved it.
A neighbor gave my mom the quilt after our house burned. The neighbor's mother pieced the quilt together during her last years of life while she was struggling with dementia. This reflected in the quilt. At the top, the pieces were perfect, a complex strategy of solid colors and patterns placement. In the lower blocks, this began to fall apart. Sometimes colors or patterns would meet in places they shouldn't. Sometimes the same colors would be next to each other.
As a little kid, I loved this quilt. I would study it. I would pick various pattern blocks as my favorite, only to change my mind the next day. I would study the placement, the repeating patterns, and wonder why some of them didn't quite work. It wasn't until I was older that I was told about the condition of the original artist while she was working on the quilt. This made me love the quilt more. I felt a connection to the humanity of it, to the woman who was still trying to create, no matter how difficult that became.
I don't know what happened to the quilt though I suspect it was destroyed when that house burned.
The quilt imprinted on me. Whenever I make my household an afghan or a knitted blanket that has a lot of colors involved, I always have places where I put the same color too close together or purposefully mess up a design here or there. It's my way of paying tribute to this quilt I loved as a child, and to the woman I never met who brought comfort to my life.
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