My mother and aunts grew up in that bedroom. They dreamed little girl dreams, I suppose, and played elaborate games of make-believe. They are close today, in their seventies and eighties, but sometimes still bicker as though they were six.
My grandmother spent evenings in their room. Picking apart seams she wasn't happy with and laying out tapestries. But talking with her girls, listening to their arguments. She was an artist - painted well into her 80s - and her quilts show her incredible eye for all things beautiful. Especially my granddaddy. That man was something.
As a child I spent summers in that back bedroom. My brothers were relegated to the upstairs to be watched with a jaundiced eye - those boys could tear up a steel ball. I, it was assumed, would read myself to sleep, quietly and somberly. Absorbing whatever book I was reading, becoming Jo March, or Lou Gehrig, or General Lee. I've always done that - lost myself so in someone else's words that it almost comes as a shock to realize I'm me when I reach the last page.
My grandmother always came to tuck me in before she went upstairs, Granddaddy long gone to read and listen to the radio. She would ask if I needed water and pull the cover up to my chin and fold it back. The fan would be on, droning the hot air around so that it was almost cool. Open windows and night sounds in the country comforting to a little city girl.
In the morning, very early, the smell of breakfast was a delicious alarm clock. Bacon, biscuits, sharp cheese, eggs, and always "coffee." A large cup of warm milk and sugar with a dollop of coffee. Late summer breakfast would be peaches and cream. Sliced perfectly and arranged on my favorite plate, transparent blue glass with an etched rim. My grandparents tended to make much of us, the grandchildren who never lived close enough for regular visits.
My grandmother never quilted in my bedroom those years I became me under the roof of an old farmhouse that will always look like home to me. She cooked, and cleaned, and shooed pesky little boys outside, and rubbed leftover biscuit halves on my patent-leather shoes to make them shine for church, and taught me to love growing things in dirt, but she never lowered the quilt frame and spun stories for me as she had her girls. Did she recognize my ingrained sense of apartness? Or was it simply that quilting was something she only did in the dreary winter months, fireplace blazing, sitting in a back bedroom of a big house, alone with her scraps and quilt frame? I'll never know, another question I never got around to asking.
She died under one of her own quilts, older than me, and thinking that her Jim, dead thirty years, was on his way home from work.
I have two of her masterpieces and to say that I treasure them doesn't begin to describe what they mean to me. One is made from corduroy, weighing far too much to use except in the most bitter weather. She made skirts and dresses for her five daughters from the fabric and she was never one to waste a thing. The other one is shabby and threadbare, faded blues and yellows. It's the one I still read under in the winter.
I think of her often, and my granddaddy, and those days in that bedroom, safe, happy to be with family and my books. No one telling me to go outside to play because it was a beautiful day, or asking that I help with laundry, or requiring much of anything of me except to be me. Not like the Alabama cousins, all freckle-faced and open, running and jumping and constantly leaving havoc in their wake - my brothers assumed that role the minute we crossed the state line. I was the changeling, the different, the quiet.
Under a frayed blue quilt I still am.
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