A quilt made of memories
Every seaside cottage and summer cabin should have indestructible leather couches and a quilt. Only the former will do for wet bathing suits, sandy bottoms and little feet with pine needles stuck to them. Only the latter will do for the goose-bumped and almost blue little bodies that duck into the house for a breather late in the day, shivering and shaking because the sun has dipped behind a cloud, but not quite ready to give up the idea of one last round of cannonballs off the pier.
For years, the hunched little forms of my children would line up on the old leather couch at our summer home on those late afternoons, wrapped in damp beach towels, catching a quick cartoon while they took a warmup break from the endless outdoor activities that all seemed to center around cold water. In the evenings, the same band of four would drag blankets from nearby beds and share a huddle on the couch as the North Woods night chill crept through the wooden cabin. When it was time for lights-out, beds and blankets always ended up in tumbles as damp as the children's suits.
Then I made the quilt.
A quilt made of memories
I must have been in my Suzy Homemaker stage of motherhood, before career responsibilities later fast-tracked our lives. That one lazy summer — the same summer when we made dandelion wine and learned to waterski on canoe paddles — I took the pile of old jeans, too beat up to be handed down one more time, and a scrap of crimson calico and made a patchwork quilt for the couch.
These were special jeans I just hadn't been able to let go of. Jeans with memories. Some were stained with droplets of khaki-grey paint from the year we had tried to match the cabin color to the surrounding pine-tree trunks — and the munchkins had all insisted on helping us paint. Some jeans had silly patches on them that had once seemed funny but were now embarrassing: "Don't swim in lumpy water." Some had been accidentally tie-dyed with too much bleach and were now beyond fashionably funky even for kindergarteners. But I still loved them all.
With the old Singer that had come with the cabin and the old pinking shears, over many quiet nights after the children were in bed, I cut and pieced together those squares that had meaning for me. Randi's back pocket; Mike's torn knee piece from the time he fell off his bike on the gravel; Kelly's embroidered old favorites that had backed into a wet paintbrush; Eric's favorite hippie jeans, ruined for school forever by the oil stain near the crotch.
The quilt, when it finally came together, was perfect. The patches were worn and soft, like old jeans always are. But impervious. The sand flicked off in the mornings with a quick flap against the porch rail, and any dampness the quilt might have acquired was burned off by the sun before it was needed again late in the day. For almost twenty years the quilt hung waiting each summer afternoon for cold, wet kids to come cuddling.
