Matriarch Tales, Part 2 - by Saga

Matriarch Tales, Part 2 – by Saga

In this Wednesday blog series I’ll be posting the stories I remember about my maternal ancestors: my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother. The stories may or may not be accurate; family stories seldom are. I set them down here to remember and to honor these unsung women.

I have only one more story as a legacy from great-grandmother Nancy Alice.  She made beautiful quilts, two of which I’ve seen. I clearly remember being propped up in my parents’ double bed as a child, and because I was sick, my father was reading to me. I was fascinated by the quilt that seemed to flow forever across the expanse of the bed. I remember that my father noticed that I was tracing the patches in the quilt and that he explained how Nancy Alice had made it.

The tiny patches, all about 1 x 2 inches, were from worn family clothing, he explained, the everyday cotton stuff, not the fancy clothes in the old photographs. Nancy had placed the scraps just so, to show how the colors could dance together and contrast. He explained the layers of a quilt: top, batting, and backing and how the quilter stitched through them all to keep it sturdy and warm. He pointed out the tiny quilting stitches. He said that the quilt was magic, made with love for her family by my great-grandmother long ago, and it would help me get well. I was enthralled by his storytelling, but then I always was. 

Twenty years later, I learned one final detail. Nancy Alice was blind by the time she made that quilt. She must have loved to be busy, or was always working by necessity, wife and mother of seven that she was. So, when she could catch a few minutes to sit quietly, Nancy was busy with needle and thread. Even when she could no longer see, she made the quilt I loved and many others. In her left thumbnail, she had a v-shaped groove where she could guide her quilting needle. Her persistence strikes me now and I have seen it in her daughter and granddaughters. I’ve seen her skill as a needlewoman in them, too.

Nancy Alice’s seventh child, Bertha Rachel, and Bertha’s daughters, Alice and Grace, were also persistent, sometimes to a fault. But throughout their long lives, they met adversity and even tragedy with the will to keep going, to keep finding and creating beauty in this world. Next week, we’ll see what Bertha Rachel has to tell us with her story.

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