<title>The Miracle of the Quilt</title>

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<title>The Miracle of the Quilt</title>
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<div align="right"><h1>The Miracle of the Quilt</h1>Copyright 1996, Jason Scott Nemrow</div>
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Winter is the sort of season that seems to draw
out the deepest emotions.  It could be the pleasure of waking to a
deep sheet of white snow covering the earth or watching the whitened
animals frisk in the crispness.  Sometimes, winter brings a deep
depression, especially as one who is so accustomed to laboring outdoors
and now must stay cooped up inside.  Winter also has the ability to
humble as storms and blizzards rage, threatening to dismantle all you may
have worked so hard to build.  When I think of winter, a few
particular examples reach out to me and, in their own ways, humble
me.
My first wintry recollection is of the weekly
chill I developed when forced into some dress, exposing my skinny legs to
the poor heating of a humble chapel.  Church was a horrible place in
my childhood.  It seemed to me that Sunday was a perfect opportunity
to either sleep or play, but my parents always had other
ideas.
Mother was always in my room by 7 o'clock,
throwing open the curtains and singing some song about how wonderful the
morning was.  I almost never agreed.  I would lounge about in
bed until my mother returned to rush me into clothes and off to the
breakfast nook.   Sunday morning was always oatmeal, toast, jam,
and juice, without fail, come disaster or plague.  Both of my parents
were the ultimate creatures of habit.  I can still see my father,
with the sun streaming through the window behind him, reading his
newspaper, as he did every morning.  I am positive that if you were
to be at my parent's home this morning,  you would find it just as I
have described.
My parents were also quite well-to-do, though they
never allowed it to affect them as wealth does so many others.  Our
home was modest and in a low middle-class section of town.  "This is
our first home and our last," Dad used to say with a reassuring smile that
my mother echoed as she washed the dishes or laundered the clothes. 
He might say it twice on bright Sunday mornings like the one I am
remembering, and I still feel twinges of the sourness I felt
then.
I found my parents utterly foolish.  I had
friends that, in my mind, had income equal to my father's, and they had
better clothes and toys and friends than I was permitted.  They went
to elite private schools, but I was sent to the local public school which
was in a poor part of town.  They went to summer camps with other
children of the well-to-do, but I stayed home in the summer with my
parents and was forced to associate with neighborhood children that were
rude, crude and completely unkempt.  The neighbor children, knowing
all too well my situation, would often taunt and ask, "Why don't you buy
some better friends?"  They never knew just how much I wished I
could.  I wanted so much to be a rich kid and do rich kid things, and
I hated my parents at times for preventing me.  With every fiber of
my being, I wanted to be haughty.
In their never-ending desire to keep our family
modest and humble, my parents chose to go to the church that they had both
grown up in.  Mom spoke in deeply religious tones of how Dad and she
had fallen in love with each other at one church group activity, been
married by the very pastor that led the congregation today, and would
never even consider going anywhere else for worship.  This also
infuriated me as a child, for our church was the sort that sought out the
poor and needy to bring  them to God.  I wanted to be in the
church on the highest hill in town where all of the influential people
came and heard sermons on how God made some people rich because they
deserved it.  In that church, the people were all beautiful and no
one who was dirty and poor was allowed and you had to put at least ten
dollars in the collection plate to prove that you belonged there.  I
often saw Dad slip a pile of twenty dollar bills in the donation box at
the back of our church when no one was looking.  He never told anyone
and he got very angry on the one occasion that I tried to use that fact to
gain the envy of the other kids in Sunday School.  In most cases, I
did the best I could to be a good daughter, though I sometimes wished I
was in a family where my parents behaved normally.
I could have tolerated all these injustices, but
there was one more that destroyed me as a child.  On our way to
church each Sunday, my parents insisted on picking up a poor member of the
congregation and bringing them along.  This, of itself, was not a bad
thing, but that person was one of the most thoroughly disgusting
characters I had ever known.  Her name was Minnie.
On one occasion, I let slip my feelings about
Minnie in front of Dad, and he proceeded to tell me her hard story. 
Her own parents lived in another town far away and had abandoned her as a
five-year-old who didn't seem quite right.  The orphanage in our town
took her in and gave her a home of sorts.  Dad's father, who was also
an obnoxiously good person, singled out Minnie and brought her to church
every Sunday, a tradition which Dad kept up after his father's
death.  "We do what Christ would have done," he always said, but this
made me feel no better about my situation.
Minnie, as I said before, was a disgusting woman
altogether.  She was now too old to live in the orphanage and stayed
in what could kindly be called the world's largest concrete block, 
which was surrounded by a decade's worth of debris.  She came to our
car in one of her two moldy dresses every Sunday, reeking of cheap perfume
that vainly tried to cover the smell of filth.  I doubt that she had
either a washing machine or a functioning bathroom.  I always wanted
to roll down the  window as she entered, since the creature always
sat beside me in the back seat, but my parents said it was a cruel thing
to do.  I did my best to hold my breath until we got to the church
parking lot,  but I always had to draw in the fetid air at least
once, causing nausea to flood over me.
I could have even gotten through those car trips,
except that my parents insisted on having Minnie sit with our family
during  services.  During the hymns, she sang too loudly and
offkey.  During the sermon, she would often blurt out something
unintelligible, or she would belch and pass gas.  The adults in the
congregation would politely ignore her, but the little ones would start
giggling and have to be hushed, and the children around my age would turn
to look, first at Minnie with disgust, then at me with contempt as I tried
to hide beneath the pews.  It was bad enough that I had to associate
with these lowclass children, but it was worse when they thought they were
better than I was!  No blow could have hurt me
deeper.
Sunday School, which followed services, should
have been a blessed time as I was able to get away from Minnie for about
an hour, but then the taunts began.  Word was among my cohorts that
Minnie and I were actually sisters and all seemed to expect me to come to
church someday smelling of skunk.  Jokes about Minnie were constant
and I was always associated with her in the punch line.  I often left
the room early, crying, which just seemed to add to their glee. 
Teachers for our class seemed to come and go with great frequency as they
were not up to the task of battling such evil.  I can only remember
one woman staying with us for any length of time, and on the particular
Sunday I am thinking of, she had given us an assignment.
In my memory, it was the standard cold and slushy
winter's Sunday morning, the pretty snow having given way to the grimy,
gray wasteland of frozen tire-treads and boot-prints.  For me,
a  gawky-looking girl of fourteen years, the service offered up the
regular serving of humiliation as Minnie belched twice and massacred "Rock
of Ages."  The normal spat of jokes followed in Sunday School, until
our hard-nosed teacher announced an assignment, without warning, at the
end of class.
The assignment was really quite simple, though I
never dreamed it would have such an effect on me.  Our teacher had
asked us to do something nice for someone we knew.  It was really a
small thing, which I could have done without anyone knowing, but my mother
insisted on knowing what the lesson was about that day.  My mother
knew a wonderful learning experience when she saw one and immediately took
over the project.  In a short hour, this little assignment had
blossomed into a mission of sorts.  We were going to make a quilt to
give away to someone.
I must report that I am not now a quilter, and I
was much less a quilter at the tender age of fourteen.  I labored for
four weeks on what we began to call "the masterpiece," and my mother spent
many a late night over the following four weeks repairing the
damage.   When the last stitch was made, it really was quite a
nice quilt, but I believe the final product was the result of my mother's
expert hand applied to cloth that I had mindlessly pieced 
together.  It was one of the few things that both my mother and I
participated in and enjoyed doing together.
When we had begun the project, Mom had not
revealed her plan fully.  For about a week, the quilt was displayed
in the front room for my parents and various guests.  We received
some very nice compliments, which made it all the more difficult when my
mother revealed her true intent.  She wanted me to give the quilt
away,  but that was not the worst part.  She wanted me to give
the quilt--my quilt--to Minnie.
I frowned and shifted in the seat beside my mother
as we drove to Minnie's house, wanting somehow to disappear into the
cloth.  In my lap was the quilt, which, in a fit of ungodly pride, I
had quickly sewed my name onto.  I knew that was not proper, for Mom
had carefully explained to me that we are blessed more abundantly for the
gift given in secret.  I really didn't care;  this was the best
thing I had done thus far, and I would get credit for it, no matter
what.  The drive seemed much shorter than normal, as I looked up at
the stars and tried to make sense of all the things my mother and my
father seemed to find so important.  I had not even had a good chance
to collect my thoughts when Mom stopped the car about a block from
Minnie's concrete block shack.
The snow crunched loudly under my boots as I
frowned even harder.  Mom had planned for me to sneak the box onto
the front porch and ring the doorbell, then steal away into some nearby
bushes, where she would be waiting.  The snow would surely crack as I
crept forward and Minnie might detect me.  What would she do? 
Would she run to me and plant some putrid, blacktoothed kiss on me? 
Or, would she angrily drag me back into her alleged house and do something
too disgusting to even consider?  These thoughts made my skin
crawl.  I tried to walk carefully and the noise of my passage seemed
to lessen somewhat.
Mom picked out her observation spot and I
swallowed hard against  my fear.  She almost pushed me out into
the open and there was nothing else to do but go forward.  I picked
my way around piles of junk that seemed to grow out of her tiny front yard
instead of grass.  My trail took me by a grimy window and I caught a
glimpse of Minnie's silhouette against the glare of the television
set,  the only thing lighting her front room.  She seemed to be
eating something, and I forced myself not to contemplate the contents
of  the tin can that reflected the pulsating light.  I finally
reached the door and began to search around for a doorbell.  The
light of the flickering TV did nothing to help as it stole through
cracks  in the doorframe and kept my eyes from adjusting to the
blackness.  I was probably right to assume that there was no
doorbell, so I gave up the search.  Putting down the package, I
rapped loudly on the door and sprang away as quickly as I could, tripping
over some debris in my flight.
Minnie must have had wonderful reflexes, for I
barely reached the bushes when she flipped on the yellow porch light and
ripped the door open.  Her face looked angry in the eerie light, as
if this kind of interruption happened often and was unwelcome.  She
looked in both directions down the street, curled up her lip, shook her
head, and prepared to shut the door.  Just then, she noticed the box
and opened her door wider.  She looked at it suspiciously, as if it
might contain something sinister, and then I thought back to all those
plans the kids in Sunday School made to pull tricks on the "creature," so
I couldn't blame her for being wary.  She took a stick that was
propped by the side of the house, and poked at the box until she was
satisfied that it wouldn't explode.  She maneuvered the stick around
and down, prying the lid of the box and revealing the quilt to the bland
light.
Minnie got a very queer look on her face as she
hooked a corner of the spread with her stick and brought it out.  She
looked down into the now empty package for any lingering surprises and
then marched the quilt, still dangling suspiciously from the stick, into
the  house.  With the door slammed behind her, I was left to
that "good feeling" I was supposed to have for doing a good deed. 
There was no such good feeling, as I crouched there in the bushes, waiting
for a "thank you" or an "it's beautiful" to pass her wretched lips. 
My reward seemed to be just a slammed door and an extinguished light that
plunged me back into darkness.
The next week, as Minnie came with us to church
and sat with us,  she gave no indication that anything had
happened.  I thought that since my name was stitched in a very bright
pink on one corner of the quilt, she would have surely noticed it and said
something.   Instead, she just sang off-key, passed gas, and
made me the laughing-stock yet again in Sunday School.  I didn't even
have the pleasure of telling about my good deed in class, for that teacher
had already joined the ranks of "those who couldn't stand the heat," and
some other woman was trying desperately to teach us something.  The
injustice was almost too much. 
Winters and years seem to pass by so quickly, and
I find it difficult to believe that I actually survived my teen
years.  I continued to try and be the "good girl" everyone was sure I
was,  and I thought I had turned out to be the good woman that my
parents had always hoped for.  I joyously fled home at eighteen and
went to a very prestigious college out-of-state, which I thought I would
never be able to do given my parent's thrift.  I met a young man who
came from an affluent family and finally fulfilled my dream of becoming
"one of the rich folks on the hill."  My husband is a lawyer of good
reputation, and I spend my time being the dutifully social wife.  I
very much thought I had accomplished my life's desire  I had become
quite haughty and I loved it.
We moved back to my hometown, probably due to my
parent's unending training that we should always give back to the
community that raised us.  My husband set up a practice, and I did
what a rich woman did that had too much time on her hands; I went to work
for a local charity.  With the money I was paid to administer over a
housing program, I was able to have a nice car, a separate bank account,
and some very stylish clothes.  I also had an open invitation to
every award dinner and social event in the county.
When I first returned, I was surprised at how
everyone remembered me in such a glowing way.  It seemed that I was
charmed.  Even before I rose to prominence in the agency I worked
for, I was being showered with awards and honors, which I began to feel
was undeserved.  The head of the agency "knew" I would replace her,
and, in not too many years, I did just that in a seemingly effortless
way.  Sometimes, I felt that I was being mistaken for someone else,
someone who had done some wonderful thing in the past.  On occasion,
I thought to ask someone what I had done to deserve all this, but I'm sure
they would think I was joking and would not even venture an honest
answer.  Many times, I was really too busy enjoying my position and
prestige in life to care how I had earned it.
The unexpected knock at my door came on a cold,
wintry night during this part of my life.  I was not expecting
visitors that evening and my husband was away on business.  We lived
in a very nice part of town, so I was not particularly afraid to answer
the door, but some chill seemed to catch me, as if something fateful was
happening.  I opened the door with a smile, but no one was standing
on my porch.  I looked up one side of the street and down the other,
but I could not see who could have rung the bell.  Just as I was
closing the door, I noticed a dirty, openfaced box on the step.  I
looked again up and down the street, the hair on the back of my neck
seeming to rise a little, fate breathing behind me.  I craned my neck
to see its contents, and folded neatly inside was a
quilt.
Once I got back inside, I spread the quilt out on
the floor, not knowing quite what to make of it.  It looked so very
familiar, and when I finished smoothing it, I couldn't be mistaken. 
My maiden name was stitched erratically in one corner.  Was this the
quilt I had left at Minnie's house fifteen years before?
At first glance, I thought it was the original,
but I noticed that the color scheme was all wrong.  This was not the
material I had  pieced together.  The stitching looked very much
like my mother's,  but it was becoming obvious that this was a copy
of the quilt my mother and I had produced so many years before.  I
was completely baffled who would do this, and why?  I scooped up the
quilt and ran outside.
My neighbor must have been put aback when she
answered my knock at her door.  There I was in my night clothes and
robe, with a quilt over my arm, looking a bit confused.  If it would
have been me, I would have recommended her to a good counselor that I
know, but she just smiled broadly and said she already had one of my
quilts which had come the night before, thanked me for the nice gift, and
closed the door.  I was even more baffled than before.  I went
back to my own house and tried to work out the puzzle.  What was
happening here?  I determined that I needed more evidence to unravel
this mystery, so I decided to return to the last place I have seen the
quilt I had helped to make so long ago.
Minnie's concrete block house had not changed much
in the fifteen years that had passed.  Rusty junk still cluttered the
yard and I felt the return of familiar pangs of disgust and fear that I
had left behind long ago.  I must have been flustered because I had
neglected to change clothes--I was still going about in a night-gown and
robe!  I found myself at the bushes where my mother and I had hid on
that night, and I must say that on this occasion, I felt pushed again to
go forward.
This time, the television set was not on, nor even
in sight.  Light blazed from the window that was now so encrusted
with grime that I had to take a dirty rag from a nearby pile to scrub the
glass sufficiently to see inside.  The sight was a wonder to
behold.
Minnie did not seem to have changed at all. 
Her face looked unwashed and she still wore the dumpy clothes that were a
step below her Sunday best.  The wonder to me was the work set out
around her.  It was difficult to see the walls inside the house
because they were obscured by frames that kept quilts, in various states
of construction, taut and ready for the needle.  Minnie herself was
hunched over one that was up on stands, squinting and  carefully
passing the needle up and down in small, even stitches.  On the floor
close to the window where I peered in, the pieces of our original quilt
were laid out, carefully picked apart, and used as a pattern for the
nearly twenty quilts that were slowly being fashioned by this grotesque
beast of a woman.  I was discovering some new facts, but they were
not fitting together in my mind as yet.
As I peeped inside I found that Minnie worked on
each quilt as her fancy drove her,  some completed and in grimy
boxes, others just beginning, and a majority somewhere in between. 
She stitched for a few minutes longer, but then seemed to lose interest in
what  she was doing.  She carefully lifted the frame from the
stands and propped it against a blank section of wall, took up a box with
a finished quilt, and headed for the outside door.
I panicked for a moment and managed to crouch
behind one junk pile as Minnie, with a waddling shuffle, left the yard and
began her trek into the night.
I left the car where I had parked it and decided
to follow her on foot.  She took a meandering route, sometimes down a
now-deserted main road, and at other times, down an alley that gave me the
shivers just thinking about what kind of evil might be lurking in
wait.  She seemed oblivious to everything around her, but I kept ever
vigilant as I sought out danger in every corner and nook.
Minnie's march was halted only by the cry of two
old men squeezed together in a doorway, trying to shield themselves from
the cold with yesterday's newspaper.  An unsteady light swung above
them as a gust of wind tore through the alley, scattering their
meager  protection.  Minnie looked down on them, and without
changing her expression, she dropped the box she had been holding, lifted
out the quilt, and draped it over the two men.  Then she turned
around, almost mechanically, and began walking back the way she had
come.
I had to duck away quickly to avoid being seen,
and I stayed down until Minnie had turned a corner in making her way
toward her  home.  I slowly rose and looked blankly at where she
had been.  The pieces of information that my mind had been collecting
were still not quite coming together, as if I didn't have the ability to
grasp how they fit.  The two men began to tussle over the blanket,
one not being enough to cover them both.  I absentmindedly turned to
face them and one caught sight of the quilt I had forgotten that I had
been holding the entire evening.  He yelled out to me and it seemed
like I could do nothing else but hand over the quilt into his shaky,
frigid hands.  Both men began to thank me profusely for the kindness,
but I turned my back on them and made my way back to my own car. 
Hugging my robe close, I suddenly realized how foolish I must have
looked. 
From that night to this, I have searched for the
lesson that I began to learn on that cold night.  It seems to come to
me a little at a time, until now it is a rich and sometimes painful
realization.  Up until that night, the greatest thing I had ever done
was be persuaded to give a blanket to a dirty wretch.  When I did it,
I didn't have an ounce of kindness or compassion in my heart, but it truly
was my best act.  I often become angry with myself for not
accomplishing something better.

The miracle of the quilt is how Minnie, a woman I
despised, had turned the selfish act of a prideful teenager into an
opportunity to follow in the footsteps of our Savior.  I found out
later that Minnie had made thousands of quilts over the years, each one
patterned after the one I had given her, and had placed them on the
doorsteps and draped them over the cringing forms of nearly everyone in
town, rich or poor.  When all of those people credited me for being
so generous, it was Minnie all the time.  It should have been Minnie
at all of those award dinners, not me; but then I think that for all the
miraculous things Christ had done for man, he was scourged and nailed to a
cross.
As I have thought more deeply, I also regret the
many years that  I pompously ignored those Sunday sermons, worried
more about how I would look to others and how disgusted I was with
Minnie.  All the time, she was drinking in words and taking the
teachings of Christ truly to heart.
I cannot say that my heart changed that night in
the alley, but it marked the beginning.  The following year, I often
crept behind Minnie as she did her nightly acts of kindness.  I even
got into the habit of leaving boxes of fabric and thread on her doorstep
and watching with joy as she readily turned them into quilts for
others.  I vainly hoped for a time that this would do for my penance,
but I was wrong.
   
 The next winter, work took me
away for a few weeks from following Minnie.  When I returned, she was
gone.  After some inquiries, I found that she had died in an alley,
stabbed by some evil man who thought she had something he needed.  I
suppose that man saw something on her that he could take; but more
valuable than a simple quilt, Minnie had something within her that no one
could steal.
I made arrangements and had her buried in a plot
that my parents had reserved for me, which seemed quite appropriate. 
In spite of her problems and handicaps, Minnie had managed to become the
kind of woman that I should have been.  As I worked with the funeral
home, I realized that I didn't have any of the information the monument
people needed for the headstone, so finally, I settled on marking her
passing with what I did know of her:  "Minnie, Daughter of
God."
That graveside service was the first sermon I had
heard in years.  The pastor preached about a better and kinder place,
where there is love and acceptance and where there is no pain or
ailment.  At one point, when he spoke of peace, I could picture only
Minnie in her cramped home, steadily stitching; and when he spoke of
heaven, I was back in that tiny, chilly church, sitting beside Minnie,
smiling and holding her hand.  I left her grave with wet eyes, a full
heart, and, in time, a burning desire to end up in that heavenly place
where she is.
 
Since her death, I have struggled to take up where
Minnie left off.  I have worked diligently on the quilts she had left
unfinished, but I find I am not able to do the job.  My mother, 
feeling in some way my frustration and grief, pieced the original quilt
back together carefully and now it hangs in a special place in my home--a
constant reminder of opportunities lost, then hopefully found.  When
I kneel beside my bed at night, look up at that quilt, and pray, I think I
can see our Savior on his throne, and Minnie at his side, smiling down at
me and forgiving me for every evil thought I harbored against
her.
It is my hope that Mom and I can get together this
winter, when the snow has just fallen and is so beautiful to behold, and
finish the quilts.  I also hope that I will be able to find a few
concrete block houses with doorsteps waiting.  And perhaps, in one of
those houses, there will be a wretched soul who has had Christian charity
shown to them by people like my parents, and find in that gift the desire
to follow in Christ's footsteps.
But, maybe, if I work and love hard enough, behind
one of those doors, I will find me.
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