The Wisdom of a Washed Quilt

Gentle cycle lessons in durability + "Foraging for Metaphor" workshop on 4/26

There are a handful of places where frantic pacing is appropriate. In hospital waiting rooms, for example, when the engine of time stalls out. Or, speaking of stalls, outside of an occupied gas station bathroom on a long road trip. But I never expected to find myself treading the same three feet of hardwood next to my washing machine, listening to the swoosh-flop of the gentle cycle with the same keen attention one would devote to a newborn’s breathing.

Let’s back up.

It’s a rare privilege to celebrate someone turning 100. Rarer, even, when they mark that milestone vital, vibrant, and fully compos mentis. Even thinking of that kind of birthday turns us all into time travelers, trying to envision the completely different world into which our friend was born and how unrecognizable our own worlds would look if we made it to a century.

Alice was born before Mickey Mouse and the Empire State Building. The Great Depression and Dust Bowl hit the country before her tenth birthday. By the time I met her, she had already reinvented herself several times over. After retiring from education administration, she jumped both feet into a pastime she had only dabbled in, becoming a full-time puppeteer. She also met the love of her life, Matt, at 76 and married him at 78. He learned puppetry, too, so that they could perform together, which they did until he passed away six years later.

My first interaction with Alice was over email in the fall of 2013. She had seen an article about the launch of the urban folk school I ran, The Homestead Atlanta, in a local paper and wondered if I’d be interested in her teaching a class on wool rug braiding. She repurposed wool coats, slacks, field hockey skirts from thrift stores into the nostalgic rugs found in many New England cabins. I replied that I most certainly would but was still figuring out the logistics of scheduling classes. I asked if she’d be open to teaching in the winter. She graciously replied that she would be but casually included: “I should mention that I am eighty-eight years old, so who knows, timing may be important.”

I’ve loved her ever since.

I will freely admit that my creative ideas do not always arrive at the best times. I had known Alice’s 100^th birthday was coming up and periodically poked around my craft room, trying to think of something I could make befitting a century of living. The answer finally arrived less than a month before her January birthday: a quilt. I had always wanted to try my hand at one – what better occasion? Plus, with all the fiber arts folks having taken a class from Alice, there would certainly be people a-plenty to pitch in and get it made on time.

What I lacked in quilt know-how, I made up for in enthusiasm and a delightfully naive stupidity. We could surely get a queen-sized quilt made in a month, right? Even if that month was December? Understandably, most folks were booked, though they pitched in for materials. But I was lucky to find a couple of people just as gloriously unhinged as I am. One friend has an artist’s eye and a honeybee’s work ethic – dangerously limitless and wildly communal. She, blessedly, knew someone with a long-arm quilting machine and a bit of down time at the end of the year. Another friend loved the meticulous act of binding the quilt’s edges, a job no one else wanted. It felt like fate.

So, in the span of about two weeks, we had a queen-sized, Carpenter’s Star quilt in Alice’s favorite yellows, purples, and blues. [NB: This is a fantastic pattern to start with if you’re quilt-curious.] Despite the time crunch, despite the madness of an increasingly consumer-driven Christmas season, despite looming biopsies and the heartbreaking entropy of aging parents and the host of everyday griefs that we all carry in our pockets like invisible stones, we finished it.

Almost.

The quilt world is somewhat divided when it comes to washing. Some folks can’t conceive of warping the perfect geometry of their creations in a washing machine. They create quilts as art, not functional objects. The other camp? The craggier and crinklier from washing and drying and shrinking and use, the better. Since it was my first ever quilt, I was torn. My fundamental ethos is to give gifts that are of use - the kind of quilt you’d want to wrap up in when you’re sick, that has guests sitting at the foot of the bed and little dog paws wherever they please. I am, at heart, a washer. But I was also terrified it would all come apart, that the colors would bleed onto the VERY WHITE background, that all our beautiful hard work would turn into a tangled, frayed mess.

So this is how I came to pace outside my laundry room, waiting impatiently for the green light to click above “cycle complete.” The other Quilt Elves who had far more experience than I did promised me it would all be fine, that a quilt isn’t really finished until it’s been washed and dried that first time. I waited as the final spin slowed and stopped. I held my breath as I lifted the lid.

It was, in fact, all fine. The white’s remained completely white (even the color catchers didn’t pick up any stray dye), nothing pulled apart. Not even a single thread was out of place. I triumphantly put it in the dryer.

I felt silly for doubting it, for thinking what we had put so much love and effort into could be so easily undone. But everything feels so fragile now. The things we’ve painstakingly built over years are crumbling daily, each with a “breaking news” alert.

But then I think of Alice. I take a mental inventory of all the times the world has fallen apart in her lifetime. The breadlines of the Great Depression, the abject horrors of WWII from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, worrying over her children each summer that Polio consigned kids to iron lungs, the deaths of Emmett Till of Malcom X of MLK, nuclear fallout planning, unconscionable massacres in Vietnam and Laos…the list could fill pages, and that’s not even taking into account all the personal apocalypses we confront over the course of a life. Especially one that spans 100 years.

Holding that quilt, warm from the dryer, examining the way the settled fabric puckered around our stitches, I felt a calm I hadn’t even realized I had been craving. Here was simple proof that we might be more durable than we realize. That we can endure a hundred endings, a thousand ruptures, and still emerge whole, more beautiful for all the wear. And that if we fall apart, there are quiet angels like Alice, ready to braid us back together.

With the help of her daughter, we surprised Alice with a birthday drop by and ceremoniously unfurled the quilt in her living room. She was thrilled. “No one has ever made me a quilt!” she piped. A century seemed long enough to wait.

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In Writing News:

I’m thrilled to be leading a workshop at the

Georgia Writers

15th annual Red Clay Writers Conference this upcoming Saturday the 26th at Kennesaw State University (Marietta Campus).

In my session, we’ll be discussing Foraging for Metaphor:

Metaphor, like foraging, invites us into a deeper relationship with the world—one that is attentive, transformative, and curious. In this workshop, we’ll explore metaphor as an act of foraging, learning how to gather language from the landscapes we move through, prepare it for the page, and store it for future use. Through guided exercises, discussion, and generative writing prompts, we’ll practice our ability to recognize the metaphors that shape meaning in our work. While the focus will be on narrative nonfiction, the techniques we explore will be useful across genres.

Come ready to explore, to write, and to look at language—and the world—through a forager’s eyes. Please bring a notebook. All levels of experience welcome.

There will also be wild spring weed pesto because what foraging-adjacent workshop is complete without a snack? Hope to see you there - and remember that Georgia Writers members receive 40% off the price of admission.