I accidentally turned onto the northbound freeway entrance instead of the southbound. By the time I figured it out, I was crossing the state line into Connecticut. And that’s how I ended up in New Bern.
After three weeks of living in a tiny studio apartment in the emergency shelter, we moved into a much larger two-bedroom unit in the Stanton Center. The counselor talked to me about putting down roots, finding a job, and putting Bethany in school. I nodded, mutely assenting to everything she suggested, but in my heart, I knew we’d stay in New Bern only as long as it felt safe to do so. That was more than a year ago and, believe me, nobody is more surprised than I am that we’re still here. If not for Evelyn Dixon and a log cabin quilt, I’d have put New Bern in my rearview mirror a long time ago.
Evelyn owns Cobbled Court Quilts in New Bern. She runs a free quilting class for the women at the shelter. Initially, I didn’t want to take the class and had a suitcase full of good excuses for not doing so:
1) With two kids, I was too busy for hobbies.
2) I’d never liked crafts, anyway, and any spare time I had really should be spent looking for a job.
3) And wasn’t quilting something people’s grandmas did? Maybe I’d lived long and hard, but I’m not exactly ready for bifocals and a rocking chair, you know what I mean?
But none of those was the real reason I didn’t want to take Evelyn’s class. The truth is, I just didn’t want to find one more thing to fail at. There had been so many already.
But Abigail decided to change my mind for me. That’s Abigail Burgess Wynne, a volunteer at the shelter as well as a big donor, the woman who insisted that they find room for us at the shelter. Abigail is something of an oddball. Beautiful, in a nineteen fifties movie-star kind of way, all long legs and perfect diction, but an oddball.
She comes off as a snob but, for some reason, she took a liking to Bethany. Out of the blue, Abigail made this gorgeous pinwheel quilt for Bethany and they’ve been fast friends ever since. She’s become not quite an adopted grandmother to my kids, but more of an indulgent great-aunt. And I have to say she’s grown on me. Anybody who loves my kids is okay in my book and when she gave that quilt to Bethany, I was so grateful that I started to bawl. I couldn’t help myself.
Anyway, Abigail is really very sweet deep down—way deep down—but she’s also used to getting her own way. She wouldn’t listen to any of my excuses about passing on the quilting class, just knocked them all down in that way she has, huffing and puffing out words like “Nonsense!” and “Rubbish!” like the big, bad wolf on a mission, not stopping until your little house of sticks is lying in a heap and there you stand with nothing left to hide behind. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in a room with six other students, listening to Evelyn Dixon explain the techniques for constructing our first project, a log cabin quilt.
It’s an easy pattern, just row after row of rectangular strips nesting round and round a center square, stacking one upon the other like those wooden log toys I used to play with when I was a little girl. A simple pattern, maybe the simplest of all. I never expected it to change my life.
Evelyn brought a selection of light and dark fabrics for us to use for the “shady” and “sunny” sides of the house, but for the center of each block, the “hearth,” she told us to find our own fabric, to cut the center squares out of something that had a special meaning for us. I chose the outgrown clothes the kids had worn in their pictures with Santa the year before, a red cowboy shirt for Bobby and the red corduroy jumper for Bethany, and cut out little squares, making them as even and perfect as I could, to place in the center of each block.
And then, something strange happened. As I sewed that quilt, stitching strip after strip around those red squares that had lain next to my children’s skin and hearts, I started imagining each sunny and shady strip as a piece of a protective wall that was guarding my little ones and somehow, in a way that all my counselors’ repeated affirmations never could, the idea that I could keep us safe, that I could make a real home for all of us, started to sprout in my mind. As I sewed, the idea became a belief and the roots of that belief pushed their way through all my doubts and muck to take root in my heart.
I would keep my children safe, no matter what. And we would have a home, a real home, not sleeping in a car, or bouncing from shelter to shelter and town to town like a bad check, not continually looking over my shoulder, ready to pack up and run every time I had a bad dream or heard a grinding of gears that sounded like a garage door opening. We’d be a family. Everything would be all right. I would make it happen.
As this…this torrent of conviction flooded my heart, my eyes began to flood, too. I sat at the sewing machine, not sewing, scissors open in my hand, a silent baptism bathing my cheeks.
Across the room, Evelyn was bent over another student’s machine, helping adjust a too-tight tension. She saw me but made no move toward me, just looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to see into my real meaning, questioning the reason for my tears but not my right to them.
Seeing her, I sat up a little straighter in my chair and gave her one quick nod. She smiled, as if knowing and approving that there, among the soft, steady whir of needles passing through fabric and the silent concentration of other women crouched over their sewing machines, bent on making something beautiful and useful out of the discarded scraps of their lives, I had made my decision.
I was done running.
2
Evelyn Dixon
Walking out my front door, down the porch steps, through the garden gate and onto the sidewalk on a perfect late spring day in New England, I was reminded again what a great commute I have. Just three blocks from the cozy, two-bedroom cape where I live at a very reasonable rent, to my shop, Cobbled Court Quilts.
My shop! I love saying that. In a week’s time, it will have been my shop for two years, but sometimes I still have to pinch myself to believe it’s true. Less than three years have passed since, in the wake of a painful divorce and a general upending of everything I’d thought was sure in my life, I got in my car and drove from Texas to Connecticut to see the fall colors.
On its face, there’s nothing too remarkable about that, but anyone who knows me knows that spontaneous gestures are not my strong suit. I am a big fan of lists, not just to-do lists but the kind where you write down all the pros and cons of doing something and mull it over for days, weeks, or even months before taking action…or not. If you don’t believe me, ask Charlie Donnelly, the owner of New Bern’s finest restaurant, the Grill on the Green, and my boyfriend.
Boyfriend. At fifty years of age, it feels silly to say I have a boyfriend, but what else can I call Charlie? He’s more than my friend and less than my fiancé, which is what he’d like to be, but I’m not ready yet and Charlie knows that.
Initially, when Charlie and I became “a couple” (are there any words for a romantic relationship between two mature people that don’t sound so ridiculously precious?) right after my double mastectomy, I wasn’t sure I was ready for a relationship. Now, I’ve worked through a lot of those issues in my mind, but…how do I explain it? After a lifetime of being someone’s daughter, wife, mother, of defining my existence in terms of whom I belonged to, I’m enjoying being just me by myself for a while, steering my own ship. Charlie knows that and he’s willing to be patient. In fact, I think he’s kind of proud of what I’ve accomplished. And the truth is, so am I. Not that I got to this place alone, far from it, but none of it would have happened if I hadn’t finally decided to tear up my list of lists and take a chance on life and on myself.
Did
