Old Pictures Tell Tales ….

Writer: Donna Harvey.

Having been with Daddy, we had wandered out to the sun porch where your favorite author loved to spend hours and hours.  The view is very pleasant to look at the beautiful hydrangea garden that has been developing over the past few years.  I have sent a number of special hydrangeas and they have shown their lovely blossoms this year.  Some mop heads and some lace caps.  The lace caps, to me, are fairly new.  This is the area that daddy has been trying to weed and neither he nor I can spend much time pulling the foreign greens as the backs will just not allow it.  Ten to fifteen minutes is about the best we can do at one time.  But I wander just a little.   I can also remember that my daughter Kay had held on to this cabinet and all of a sudden we found her standing with us in where we were working on some project in the floor of the living room.  Wonder if Beth had a school project?  This was the first steps that Kay made and no one saw her.

In this cabinet there is one drawer and I opened the drawer and began looking at the things that were stored there.  I find a picture of Billie Crumly, who you know loves quilting, with a group of her quilt buddies when they traveled to Europe and she is waving at the photographer from the coach.  Now I wonder if this was a train or a bus but I believe the overhead and seating look more like a train.  I think this was in April 1987 when her first great-granddaughter was born in April and it snowed in Georgia.  She told a tale of being on a subway in Paris and was lodged and couldn’t budge when the other quilters left the subway.  In a panic, she yelled “Make way for the lady with a baby!” and she said the sea of people parted and she was able to get off the car.  She had a great time and left her love at home to tend the farm.  They even named one cow ‘Bae’ who was the name of the husband of one of her hosts in Amsterdam.

There are other pictures of Billie Crumly quilting and she is in front of a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt.  She looks happy quilting.  (I wonder if this is her quilt that she wanted on as a casket spread that has disappeared from her antique trunk?  Someone has that quilt and knows she has it!  God knows!)  Oh well, I have discovered that life goes on.  During the first few weeks of Mother’s death, I would hear laughter and wonder just how those people could possibly be laughing.  Didn’t they know what I was going through and that my mother has passed away?   Life does go on.

Then I find a picture of both mother and daddy laughing while at some sort of quilt get together.  Looks like mother could have been talking and she did give talks and traveled to many guilds and groups to educate on some of the old quilt methods and even on one trip we made to the Western Caribbean, gave a talk which turned out to be the talk the next morning when I would hear folks whispering.  She talked about ladies and men’s underwear being made of flour sacks, which she said were softer than many other sacks.  Some ladies made drawers and put some of the writing in special places.  Words like “Self Rising” and Mother’s Best which  I will leave it to your imagination as to placement of these words.

Then I have to show you some of the quilts that Mother found to be special,  Sun Bonnet Sue, I suspect she made or at least I know she made more than one.  I think Beth has the one that was used on her bed when she was young.  I notice one of mother with a microphone and I know the basket quilt beside her is one she did.  The baskets were stenciled on the quilt and the sliping (pronounced slipe-ing) was placed between the baskets.  Lovely quilting was done there too.  I think I have mentioned in the past that Billie Crumly was a bit of a purist about the hand quilting being the preferred method of quilting.  She always said the younger generation wanted the faster method of machine quilting to just get the quilting done.  When I made the quilted and appliqued tree skirt for Beth that I hope she will talk about and show you around Christmas time, Mother had taken the quilted tree skirt to someone who did machine quilting and it was indeed a beautiful job but not the hand quilted work that Mother would have done.  She thought the tree skirt was lovely too.

Then I just have to include a picture of Mother beside one of her quilt friends.  She had so many and I now wish I had written down many of the names and kept track of where they lived and how mother had known them.  Isn’t it funny how hind sight is 20/20.  Time I think is the enemy because we get so very busy doing so many things and trying to get stuff done that there just isn’t time left for what now seems much more important than it did them.  Quilt guild meetings, quilting talks, memories from pictures are all just another part of country living.