“Embedded in quilts and jazz are clues to escape and strength, sanctuary and warmth. The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?”

Anne Lamott

“Mount Vision,” the fourth essay in Anne Lamott’s Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair makes me think about the quilt we stitched for my niece before her birth. The essay is about the way, both as individuals and in community, we support one another.

About twenty years ago, 3 generations of the women in my family set out to make a quilt in honor of the birth of our first great granddaughter, granddaughter, and niece. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but everyone wanted to be a part of the process. Over the period of a couple of months we stitched together a quilt.

The process involved several steps. First, we had to gather fabric. Some of the fabric we found in the remnants from past projects and others we bought in my grandmothers’ favorite fabric store. We did not follow a particular quilt pattern. My grandmother had learned to make “crazy quilts” at church, which were freestyle sewing experiments not dictated by any preconceived plan or particular aesthetic. We decided to go with that.

After we found fabric, we began making squares. Each square was an imperfect attempt at symmetry and design. It was during the square making process that I learned the wisdom, “Measure twice. Cut once.” I can still hear my grandmother saying those words. Those words hold true for a lot of things in life. The squares became pinned mosaics of color and texture telling an abstract, imperfectly beautiful story.

A rhythm to the process evolved at this time. One grandmother worked the sewing machine, my other grandmother pinned the small pieces into larger squares, while my mother and I cut larger fabric pieces into pieces that could be used in small squares. The squares were then sewn together and on to a simple backing by my grandmother with her well loved sewing machine.

We gave the quilt to my sister-in-law at my niece’s baby shower. I remember feeling enormous gratitude for the gift of sewing with the women in my family. I remember wanting, for perhaps the first time in my life, to surround someone with every inch of love, comfort, warmth, and security that I could provide. I wanted the quilt to be a great protective life force preventing harm, pain, predators, hurricanes, hale storms, earthquakes, sadness, sickness, hunger, heartbreak, and loneliness. We were powerful women stitching the quilt. That power would abide.

The quilt lives in the family room outside my niece’s bedroom at the home to which she returns when she comes home from college. I check on it when I visit and make sure it was still in place to protect and defend. I know her great grandmothers and grandmother want that. May she wrap herself in it. Notice all the stitches. Count the squares. Feel the soft prayers offered by each inch.