rayaso | Season 10, Week 15

Topic: "Patchwork Heart"

THE SEWING CLASS

My name is Joan McGuinn, of the Colombia McGuinns, as my mother always said, to distinguish us from the Blue Mountain McGuinns, who were trash. Mother was like that -- your people always mattered. But this is not our story. “Begin at the beginning” was another of Mother’s sayings, when I wandered too far and got lost in the telling.

The real beginning was with Lotte Schneider. She died long ago, but she’s the one who started it.

Still, it makes more sense to tell you first about Steven Schneider Powell, the great-great-whatever of Lotte. I met Steve in the little sewing class I teach at the community center.

The classes were almost always girls, but sometimes there were a few older women. Everyone needs to know how to sew. Life’s easier when you can replace a button. Boys need to know too – it’s like pounding a nail straight. You wouldn’t turn your son loose in the world if he couldn’t do that.

Steven Schneider Powell came to my class one day and said “Miss McGuinn, I need to learn how to sew,” and sat down. There were two or three girls, and they just giggled. Steve didn’t notice or didn’t care. He was there to learn to sew, and that was that.

He was 25 years old, tall and strong. The first thing I noticed were his hands. They were big, with lots of callouses and brown stains. These were a workman’s hands, the worst hands for sewing I had ever seen. To sew, you need nimble fingers. Still, if he wanted to learn, I was willing to try. Besides, he was not bad looking and the town was lacking in that area.

Sewing around here used to be something girls did with their mothers, learning to sew while learning about life from the stories they passed along. How else would you know about your great aunt Flossie who ran away with the shoe salesman, or why it’s better to bake a pie crust with Crisco, not butter, no matter what Beckie Hayes says? The thread tied us together. Not anymore, which is why I had all those girls in my classes. And one day, finally, Steve.

The first lesson is always how to thread a needle. Now, I know how you do it. You lick the thread and push it through the needle. But my mother taught me a better way, so I teach the girls to hold the thread steady, and bring the needle over to the tip. It just works better that way. But I let everyone try it the other way first, and after a few misses I have them do it backwards, and it works like a charm.

When I told Steve to thread a needle, he just picked up the needle and pushed it into the thread, and got it right the first try. His hands were as steady as a rock. He said this was the way his momma did it when he saw her sew.

Now, I always ask my students what they want to sew. They all say the same things – a doll dress or blankets for their teddy bears, or some such. When I asked Steve, he said he needed to know how to sew a quilt.

Steve would come in once a week. I taught him the basics – a few simple stitches and how to keep them close together and regular, how to cut fabric, how to sew different kinds of cloth, all the baby steps.

As we sewed, we talked, and I learned why a quilt was so important to him.

He was a carpenter by trade, just like his Uncle Bob. Steve’s father ran off after he was born, leaving his mother with a baby and no way to support herself. She did whatever she could, cleaning houses, minding other people’s children, learning office work, whatever it took. Steve said they didn’t have much, but he never wanted for anything important.

He was going to take over his uncle’s business when he retired in a few years, but there really wasn’t much need for a carpenter anymore. People just weren’t building houses, and everyone tried to do the smaller stuff themselves. A lot of his work came from fixing other people’s mistakes.

But what he really did was make furniture. Steve had wanted to make a comfortable chair for his mother and it had grown from there. He started fixing old furniture, and he learned from that. Whenever he could get some wood, he was practicing, and now he could build anything, rocking chairs, hope chests, china cabinets, fancy tables, whatever you wanted. He showed me a few things later, and they were gorgeous.

He said he sold a few from time to time, and people outside our little town were starting to hear about him, and once someone called it folk art, but he just called it money. One day, he hoped to do nothing but make furniture.

Steve was getting better at sewing and he picked it up fairly quickly, but he kept coming for more lessons. I didn’t mind.

Finally, he told me about a chest he’d made years ago for his mother, one of his first, and it showed. Later, he said he’d build a better one, but his momma wouldn’t have it. It was a special chest for special things, she said.

I didn’t learn about the quilt until he told me about it one day, when we’d been talking more than sewing. He said his mother had died about a year ago, and her birthday was coming up, so he needed to get started.

I told Steve he was ready, but I couldn’t help him much unless I saw the quilt. So, one afternoon he showed me his mother’s room. Everything was neat, just as she’d left it, although things were a little dusty. The chest was at the foot of her bed.

When Steve took it out, I thought it was the ugliest quilt I had ever seen. It was huge, with lines of patches running across it. Steve said his momma called it the hodgepodge quilt.

The patches were all squares, some big, some small, all with different patterns and colors – blues, reds, greens, yellows, black – every shade. One section was orange. There were different designs for the squares – some were just solid colors, but there were flowers, moons, cradles, horses, kittens, everything. One was a tooth. Some of the fabric was old and coarse, some of it expensive.

Steve said there was a book that went with the quilt. The first name in it was Lotte Schneider, and the words were German. Steve didn’t know what they meant, but he said that Lotte was his grandmother from he didn’t know how far back, and she was the first to come to America.

After Lotte Schneider, there was Marte Schneider Bauer, Lucy Schneider Klein, Elisabeth Schneider Jones and more, finally ending with Abby Schneider Powell, Steve’s mother. These were all the Schneider women who had sewed the quilt in their turn.

The quilt was their lives. Each square was for something important, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but something each woman wanted to add to her tale. And for every square, there was an entry in the book.

There were marriages, births, first kisses, deaths, divorces, arguments, anything any woman wanted to add. Their lives had been messy, and so was the quilt. The colors and patterns meant something to them. But each section ended in a black square, for the death of one woman, followed by a white square, for the start of a new tale.

There was no black square for Steve’s mother. There was no daughter to pass the quilt on to, and the story of the Schneider women was finally at an end.

Now I knew why Steve wanted to learn to sew. His mother needed an end and he was not going to let the Schneider name die. It would be his story from now on, and if the quilt passed from father to son, then the Schneider men would have to learn to sew, and that wasn’t such a bad thing.

Steve’s been adding his squares to the quilt since then. There are squares now for his furniture business, for the death of Uncle Bob, and for our first kiss, and for other things he won’t tell me.

Will I be in more squares? Who can tell. None of the Schneider women knew what patches they would be adding. The quilt will go on for one more Schneider, and that’s all anyone knew when it was handed down to them. It’s enough for Steve. He’ll tell his story, and, God willing, hand it down to someone else.

If I'm lucky, more of that story will be mine as well.

* * * * *
This story is entirely fictional.

A big thank you to