Dommy's quilt

Photo: quilt made for me when I was born by my great grandmother, Laura Mary Amanda (Frederick) Ford.

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On Christmas Day in 1993 I took my two daughters to meet my great grandmother. She was blind and confined to bed by severe arthritis. Her legs were twisted around each other, but Dommy had large, strong hands. Marian (2) was afraid to approach the old woman with the groaning voice and quivering fingers. But Brenna was only five weeks old. Her great great grandmother had turned 100 on March 1 of that year. With those great strong hands, Dommy picked up Brenna, held the baby's forehead to her lips, kissed her and said, "Bless you."

That was the last time I saw Dommy alive, although she lived another two years in the nursing home until a few days short of her 103rd birthday. Her heart and other vital organs were strong as could be. She always had a voracious appetite, and her metabolism kept burning and burning in the withered flesh amongst her fragile bones. She had been confined to bed that way for 15 years. In the end, we believe she starved herself, refused to feed the flames any longer.

Those big woman hands on the shrunken body were the last remnants of a strong, gentle woman. She would walk two blocks to comb my mother's hair every day for school, along with her four sisters. I went to the same place as my mother and grandmother until grade 2: Victoria Road Public School. Dommy and Poppy still lived right across the road in the house he had built during the first decade of the last century.

With those strong hands Dommy made cookies which she would serve with ice cold milk once a week when I met Mom at their house after school.

And she had made this blue and white quilt. It consists of 3" by 6" inch rectangles, pieced together, white and blue in a herringbone pattern, like layers of life, generations angled one on top of the other. The blue squares come from six or seven different fabrics, the kind of navy blue she must have worn or made into curtains in the 1940s. Most of them have small white polka dots or tiny floral clusters, but one is covered with a fanciful leaf pattern that reminds me of kelp. The quilt is too small for a single bed. Perhaps it was meant for my crib. Now it has a tear. The cloth is old and soft, wearing through in many places. It has been used, slept in, cried in, cuddled with.

On a winter night, nothing feels so comfortable as the way cold sheets slide over bare feet, calves, thighs and buttocks, ready to embrace, promising imminent warmth to ward off the long Canadian dark.

In the old days women couldn't afford to throw away anything. When clothing wore out, they would cut it into squares and patch together quilts. It was their only way of enforcing some beauty, square by square, against the white blast, which must have seemed so ferocious after European girlhoods. A quilt tells the stories of lives, if you take time to read it. This blue and white quilt is simple, no nonsense, the colours of a woman born to German immigrants in 1893.