MC touched base with her cranky roots today as two delightful cousins came to visit with their charming children and grandchildren. C2 couldn't keep the news to herself and called Herr Cranky to announce how many new friends she had made. C1 met a boy cousin her very own age, and she laughed at a number of age-inappropriate jokes. MC smiled at the way this branch of her tribe tells stories with a particular rhythm and pacing. One story has MC's uncle enlisting a wee small cousin to back a car out of a driveway. When tiny tot backs the colossal '65 Chrysler 300 into an impediment, Uncle reproaches her, saying sadly, "Goddamn, baby, I thought you said you could drive."
Happy Grandmother cousin arrived bearing multiple gifts. One was powerful and dangerous, and right-thinking families wouldn't allow their children around it without supervision. Happy G calls it Sopapilla Cheesecake, and Paula Deen must be weeping hot, bitter tears that she didn't think of it first.
The other gift was a friendship quilt dating from the mid-1930s. The character of individual signatures implies that family members and friends embroidered their names on the blocks, while MC's grandmother, she conjectures, combined them into a small artifact of remembrance. There's hardly a name on the quilt that MC can't associate with a farm, a house, or a face.
The blue "Mrs. Melendy" block with the dramatic green capitals in satin stitch was made by the grandmother of a MC's Best Friend Since We Were Four. "Nevada Duncan" is by the sister of MC's great-grandmother, profiled previously, while "Flossie G" is her grandmother's sister. MC can't help but notice that her own family's blocks are tidy and neat, but without the flourishes of, say, Mrs. Melendy, or Lucy Ellis, whose block has swoopy capitals that would look at home in an illuminated manuscript.MC's own mother, then a girl, makes an appearance in this quilt, performing respectable work in a block that does not yet connect her cursive-style letters.
*All photos courtesy of Cranky #1--MCG
whoops. Posted under the cow article. Just in case you missed it:
ReplyDeleteLove this warm and fuzzy friendship quilt. I think we should start one of our own this summer.
Love and admiration, Renaissance Mom
Please tell us more about the social conventions by which a person would sign their own square on a friendship quilt "Mrs. Melendy" rather than, say, Emma Jewel Melendy, or whatever her given name might be/might have been.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that I've heard you tell stories in which Mrs Melendy plays a role, but I'd assumed she was called "Mrs Melendy" by her younger neighbours and thus by you as storyteller, but I am surprised to find that she perhaps identified herself that way. (It's a sort of extreme form of "Bob Dole-ism", isn't it?) If I were to sign such a quilt, I would sign myself Drama Queen, not Mrs Queen. [Of course, we must discount this example because I do not, in fact, ever sign myself "Mrs" Anything despite being entitled to check off the "Married" box on my census and tax forms.]