GRANDMOTHER’S QUILTING CIRCLE

GRANDMOTHER’S QUILTING CIRCLE

Grandmother Hunter and her Sunday School class were also a quilting circle. The “girls”—all in their 70’s when I remember them—would be brought to Grandmother’s house on Sunday afternoon by their husbands, coming through the back gate in their black Ford pick-up trucks with fat fenders and missing tailgates. The girls would assemble in Grandmother’s dining room and kitchen and Granddaddy and the other men would bring out the quilting frames from the front porch. Grandmother would fetch the unfinished quilt they were working on from the handmade “quilt boxes” (blanket chests) on the closed-in porch.

Then the husbands and Granddaddy would go out in the front yard under the orange trees and tell stories---about WWI, “riding the rails”, building the Panama Canal, next year’s crops—(all these were Granddaddy’s stories). When they thought I was inside with the girls, they told dirty jokes. I never actually heard any of the dirty jokes, but I know that’s what they were because they’d get real quiet and one guy would talk real low and then they’d all roar with laughter. If Grandmother had known what they were doing, she’d have said, “Awwwww, Daddy!” --but I never told. Grandmother was the pious Baptist and Granddaddy was the atheist. They each tolerated, but secretly look down on, the other’s religious views. Not that Grandmother and her girls were quoting Bible verses while they quilted. Mostly they gossiped about the church members and bragged on their kids and grandkids and swapped recipes and complained about their husbands. At least the quilts usually went for a good cause—a raffle at church or a donation to an old folks home.

I spent my time shuttling back and forth between the two groups—not really part of either, and not really understanding most of what they talked about but already aware that the men’s group and the women’s circle were very different from each other.