Made By Hand

My friend, Nannette has a beautiful mother,
Alice Mae.
Alice is a white-haired, twinkly-eyed Southern woman
who makes homemade biscuits
every time she comes to visit Nannette
from a little town in Arizona.
Alice lives a quiet life.
A small life,
with a big heart.

She hails from Hope, Arkansas--
it's most famous for being the hometown of
a former President of the United States.
But that's not important.
Alice married young
and had six daughters,
one after the other,
quick
quick
quick.

If you were to have known her back then,
many decades ago,
you might have only seen a woman
who was struggling to raise a family.
According to Nannette,
her mother was overwhelmed by the experience
and as a result,
things got a little chaotic at home
with her older sisters and mom.
Her growing-up stories are varied and many
about the wild days and nights
of her sisters.

But I didn't know Alice then.
I've known her only for a few years--
many decades since her days in the trenches of motherhood.
The woman I know is soft-spoken, easy to laugh,
always busy with her hands
serving her family
by making biscuits or writing birthday cards
or making quilts.

Nannette's home has six bedrooms--
and in all of those bedrooms
there are several quilts decorating the beds
that have been hand made by her mom.

Because Alice's pocketbook is small,
she can't go to quilting stores and buy
quilt blocks of fabric to make her quilts with,
nor does she have a quilting machine
that can make fancy swirls of stitching.
Her quilts aren't store-bought squares--
each square is cut from former items
of clothing that, as Nannette points out
used to be a shirt or pajamas that used to belong
to a person in their family.

Alice's quilts are truly works of art
all made by hand
and each a treasure all on its' own.

So imagine my surprise
when I went over to Nannette's house
after she recently returned from a visit to Arizona
and she said, as I was leaving,
"Hey, hold on. I have something for you."
"Oh, you didn't have to get anything for me, Nan!" I replied.
Then, she presented
a beautiful quilt made for me
by her mother, Alice.
Words just would not come--
only tears.
I looked closely at the pieced quilt,
and marveled at the workmanship
and all the little pieces of fabric--
trying to mentally calculate the
many
many
many
hours
that went into this beautiful quilt.
I couldn't believe Alice would do all of that
for me.

I felt overwhelmed and very loved.

Today,
the quilt is in the family room.
I told the family they could use it
on cold mornings
or late nights watching TV,
on the condition that it is treated with care.
There are some squares that Alice's fingers and thread
just barely missed
here and there--
which to me,
add more value to it.
A quilt made with love isn't always perfect.
Just like people--
we do the best we can with what we have--
there will be missed stitches,
there will be mistakes, right?
But we keep at it,
keep creating the life we want to have,
and hopefully in the end,
we have worked enough that our lives
are a gift to others.

Life is a do-it-yourself deal.
It's all Made by Hand.
Thank you, Alice Mae.