A Piedmont Porchlight Story

I still have one of my Mawmaw’s quilts. It’s faded now. The reds aren’t nearly as bright as they used to be. One corner has a little place where the stitching finally surrendered after all these years. If you spread it out in the sunlight, you can find patches cut from dresses I remember her wearing when I was just a little red-headed boy running barefoot through Piedmont.

Folks look at it and see an old quilt. I don’t. I see Saturday afternoons. Back then, Mawmaw’s little house seemed to have a different kind of warmth. The wood-burning fireplace helped, of course. So did the biscuits fresh from the oven. But neither one of those is what I remember most.

What I remember is this.

I’d come bursting through the front door after spending all morning outside pretending I was Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, or somebody else who’d probably have laughed himself silly if he’d seen the skinny little boy trying to imitate him. My nose would be cold. My ears would be red. The knees of my blue jeans usually had more Alabama dirt on them than denim.

Mawmaw never fussed. She’d just smile over the top of her glasses and say, “Come here, Big Jim.” I’d climb onto the old sofa beside her. Without saying another word, she’d pull that quilt over both of us. Now here’s the funny thing.

The quilt wasn’t especially heavy. By today’s standards it probably wasn’t much of a blanket at all. But somehow, within about thirty seconds, everything was right with the world again. For years I thought that quilt had magical powers.

Then one day, after I’d grown old enough to know better, it finally dawned on me. The quilt wasn’t what made me warm. She was. It was the way she’d tuck the edge around my shoulders. The way her hand absentmindedly rubbed little circles on my back while she watched the afternoon soap operas she insisted she didn’t care anything about.

The way she’d ask ‘didje eat yet?’ before I’d even finished saying hello. The way the whole house somehow smelled like biscuits, Ivory soap, and whatever pie happened to be cooling on the kitchen counter. That was the warmth. The quilt just happened to be lying in the right place.

Funny how kids get things backwards. We think Christmas is about the presents. We think Sunday dinner is about fried chicken. We think fishing is about catching fish.

Then we grow old enough to realize it never was. It was always about who was sitting beside us. I learned that lesson all over again at Magnolia Mortuary. Families would bring in little keepsakes to place with their loved one. A pocketknife. A wedding ring. A faded photograph. A favorite Bible. People would tell me, “This meant everything to him.”

But the truth was the object wasn’t the treasure. The life wrapped around it was. That’s why an old quilt can still make a grown man smile. Not because of the fabric. Because of the hands that stitched it. The lap that shared it.

The voice that called you “honey” even after you’d grown too tall to fit beneath it. These days, when the weather starts turning cool, I’ll sometimes pull Mawmaw’s quilt across my lap while I sit on the porch with a cup of coffee. It doesn’t warm me quite like it used to. Age has a way of making your bones argue with the seasons.

But every once in a while, if the breeze is just right, I can almost feel somebody tugging the corner up around my shoulders. I can almost hear a soft voice saying, “You warm enough, baby?”

The funny thing is, I always answer. “Yes, ma’am.” Even though there’s nobody there to hear it. Or maybe, just maybe, there is.

I’ve come to believe that the greatest gifts we ever receive aren’t the things people leave us. They’re the parts of themselves they quietly stitched into us while we weren’t paying attention. Kindness. Patience. A sense of humor. A way of making folks feel welcome. Those are the quilts that never wear out. Mine just happened to be sewn by a little Southern woman everybody called Mawmaw.

And after all these years, I still find myself wrapped up in her love. Turns out it was never the quilt that kept me warm.

It was Herself.