Read A Single Thread (Cobbled Court) Online
Authors: Marie Bostwick
ON WINGS OF THE MORNING
RIVER’S EDGE
FIELDS OF GOLD
“A High-Kicking Christmas” in COMFORT AND JOY
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
KENSINGTON BOOKS
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com
For my sister,
Elizabeth Walsh
This story was inspired by the real life story of a wonderful and lovely lady, Deb Mella. Until recently, Deb was the owner of my favorite local quilt shop. She has now closed the shop to fully devote herself to her family, friends, and to raising breast cancer awareness. Thank you, Deb, for being so generous with your time and for educating me about this disease as well as the challenges of running a quilt shop. It is my fervent wish that, if only in a small way, this book will be a useful tool to you and others who are leading the charge for breast cancer awareness.
I am also deeply grateful to Joan Berlin for sharing her story with me and for answering my many questions about the diagnosis, treatment, and emotional impact of living with breast cancer. Joan, your open heart and candor made this book better. Thank you.
While A SINGLE THREAD is not an official sponsor of the foundation, I urge readers to join me in supporting the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure
®
in their promise to end breast cancer. Whether you participate in a Quilt Pink event, run a 5K Race for the Cure, or simply write a check, your help is needed and appreciated. For more information, please visit
www.komen.org
.
Also, many thanks to Chris Boersma Smith, a dear friend and quilter extraordinaire, for taking my vision of the “Broken Hearts Mending” quilt and turning it into an actual design that even we quilters who are somewhat less than extraordinaire can make.
And finally, my thanks to the people I’ve come to think of as “the team,” Brad Skinner, Audrey LaFehr, Jill Grossjean, Nancy Berland, Adam Kortekas, and Sherry Kuehl.
Evelyn Dixon
O
ne of my happiest memories is one of my mother’s worst.
It was summer. I was five years old and would be starting kindergarten in a few weeks, so Mother decided to take me shopping for school shoes. She got behind the wheel of our Ford Fair-lane and cranked down the window so we wouldn’t be stifled by heat and the exhaled smoke of her cigarettes. I climbed into the front seat and off we went.
The safety belt, an accessory made mandatory by the enlightened legislators of Wisconsin two years before, was wedged down a narrow crevasse between the seats, forgotten among the gas receipts, discarded gum wrappers, and a grainy mixture of sand and cookie crumbs—the debris of our annual vacation trip to the beaches of Door County. The idea of unearthing the belt and buckling it low and tight across my lap for our trip to the J. C. Penney department store never crossed my mother’s mind. It was 1963. There was less to be afraid of then.
Penney’s had the only escalator in our town, a distinction it would claim for another eight years. Later, when someone built a big shopping center on the edge of town, J. C. Penney would desert its downtown store and move there, leaving Main Street with a full city block of darkened display windows and empty parking spaces. The new mall would have three escalators, a glass elevator with gold-tone trim and white marquee lights in the middle, and four stores with at least twice the square footage of our old J. C. Penney. But back in 1963, Penney’s was the biggest store in town, and I believed they carried at least one of every single thing that was offered for sale on the face of the earth.
After we bought a pair of tan and white saddle shoes exactly like the pair I’d just outgrown, Mother decided she needed one of those new electric coffee percolators, so we rode the escalator upstairs to the housewares department.
Normally, I stuck close to my mother’s side, so I don’t know what made me do it, but while she was trying to decide between an eight- or ten-cup model, I quietly slipped away to explore the bed and bath department.
Walking between a valley of shelves piled high with sheets, I admired the delicate scallops and embroidery stitching on the edges of pillowcases, poking holes through the cellophane wrappings of the packages so my fingers could stroke the smooth, crisp sheeting inside, marveling as I considered the folded towers surrounding me and realized that white wasn’t just white but an enormous spectrum of whiteness from snow and alabaster to marshmallow and pearl. Amazing.
Then I heard my mother’s voice calling, beckoning me with the calm, singsong “Eve-lyn” she used to summon me to supper every night, the first syllable accented and extended before dropping into a short, lower-toned chirrup at the end, a secret call between hen and chick. I began walking toward the sound of my mother’s voice, but when I turned a corner in the valley of sheets, I stopped, frozen and fascinated.
My eyes rested upon midnight, then rolled skyward to navy, royal, cobalt, progressing to aqua, seafoam, avocado, moss, and forest, and then, reaching the ceiling, floated down a row of yellows, lemon to electric and every sunny tint between, then to the orange shades, peach to rust, before reaching the floor and beginning the journey again. It was an entire wall of towels, a delicious, soft rainbow that, as I drew closer, filled every inch of my field of vision and made me feel, for reasons I still cannot explain, simply and completely happy.
I forgot all about my mother, didn’t hear her soft chirp rise in volume and intensity as a minute passed and then two with no answer from me. Wanting to take in the full perspective of what lay before me the way an art lover backs away from a canvas to experience the impact of a painting, I retreated a few steps until I backed into a cabinet holding a pile of shower curtains and sank down to the floor. I wrapped my arms around my knees and pulled them up under my chin, making myself very quiet and very small, hearing nothing, seeing only the colors displayed before me…for me.
Until the day she died, whenever Mother told this story, relating her growing panic, the numbers of clerks and customers that combed the aisles, dressing rooms, and interiors of clothing racks searching for me, and the relief that actually made her dizzy when a dishwasher salesman finally found me, she instinctively clutched at her heart as if reliving the palpitations. Then she would shake her head and say, “Evelyn, you were always such a good little girl. Whatever were you thinking of?”
I never did find a way to explain it to her. For my mother, those fifteen minutes when I was “lost” were pure hell. For me, pure bliss.
Those rich, rolling gradations of color spoke to me, like finding the end of the rainbow and walking into it, reaching out with both hands and discovering that which had, from a distance, seemed no more substantial than vapor, refracted light, and hope had heft, and texture, and substance if you drew close. I found comfort in the predictability and measured pace of the spectrum as it progressed from blue to green to yellow to red and back to blue again, excitement and unbounded promise as I considered the infinite number of patterns and expressions that could be achieved simply by lifting one color, or two, or twenty from their natural context and placing them somewhere else in the column. For a five-year-old in 1963, a time when Crayolas came twenty-four to a box, it was an astounding revelation.
I never knew how to explain the importance of that moment to my mother, though later I would come to understand what it meant to her. For Mother, my disappearance was a reminder that in the time it takes to decide between eight cups and ten, or to turn your back, or take a breath, the things you love most can be lost, perhaps forever. Between one breath and the next, your whole world can change.
One morning, you may wake up on a sunny day in early spring, happy, your mind filled with nothing weightier than the thought of what you’ll put in your garden this year or what fabrics should go into your next quilt. And then a conversation begins, or the telephone rings, or the lab report arrives, and everything you thought you knew for certain is suddenly called into question.
It’s a lesson I’ve learned from personal experience, and, for a time, the weight of that lesson almost sank me. But then I learned something else: the pendulum swings both ways.
One moment you may be trapped in a maze of despair so thick there seems to be no hope of ever finding your way back to the place where you were happy, or at least happy enough, and then you stumble around a corner and find yourself in a different world. Taking one step down a cobblestone path that looks like a blind alley, and then another, going forward not from any sense of expectation or faith but only because there is nowhere else to go, you suddenly and surprisingly find yourself in a wide, sunny place where potted geraniums bloom in scarlet mounds and dormant dreams lie behind wooden doors with chipped paint and rusting hinges, waiting. From one breath to the next, everything changes.
Life is as terrible and wonderful as all that. I know from experience.