A Quilter's Confession

I'm still thumbing through Anonymous Was a Woman.  I pick it up often and every time  I find something wonderful to savor.  This is today's excerpt, and every woman who has made a quilt, mended a shirt or hemmed a pair of trousers knows exactly what this woman is talking about:

It took me more than twenty years, nearly twenty-five, I reckon, in the evenings after supper when the children were all put to bed. My whole life is in that quilt. It scares me sometimes when I look at it. All my joys and all my sorrows are stitched into those little pieces. When I was proud of the boys and when I was downright provoked and angry with them. When the girls annoyed me or when they gave me a warm feeling around my heart. And John, too.  He was stitched into that quilt and all the thirty years we were married.  Sometimes I loved him and sometimes I sat there hating him as I pieced the patches together.  So they are all in that quilt,  my hopes and fears, my joys and sorrows, my loves and hates.  I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me.

Marguerite Ickis, quoting her great grandmother,  from the book Anonymous Was a Woman, 1979, Mirra Bank, St. Martin's Press.