Lapeer County, December
Christmas morning dawned clear and cold. With a crackling fire in the parlor and fresh coffee in the pot, I tried to grasp the promise of this most joyous of days. But the decision I’d made about taking the job at the Beat and the phone call from my parents I knew would soon come competed to see which could throw me into malaise the quickest.
Nora and I exchanged a couple gifts. A matching necklace and bracelet for her. A sweater and a book about drying herbs for me.
After a late breakfast I caught Matthew regarding the decorated spruce with interest. “Don’t you dare.”
He feigned innocence by licking a paw.
Nora came into the room with a large box. “I meant to give this to you earlier. I had a feeling this morning that I was forgetting something.”
“But you already gave me two presents.”
“Pah.” She motioned for me to sit on the settee. “Those were nothing special. This is what I wanted to give you.”
She sat in a chair across from me, her eyes alight with mischief. She was completely present, more like the woman who had met me at the door in August with a warm hug and a welcoming smile than the one last night, who had wondered aloud about when William planned to shovel the driveway.
“Can I open it?”
“What do you think I brought it out here for?”
I tore into the box and gasped. “Is this—is this a quilt?”
Nora smiled. “This is your quilt.”
“You made me a quilt?” I all but squealed. “That’s what you’ve been doing all this time?” I pulled it out of the box and began to unfold it.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry I’ve been so preoccupied. I wanted to get it done in time for Christmas. Recognize the fabrics?”
“I picked these out! You had me picking out fabric for my own quilt, you sneak!”
Nora laughed.
“Can we lay this out somewhere so I can see it all at once?”
“If we move the furniture there will be enough space here.”
“Let me get this coffee out of here first. I think I’d faint if it spilled on this.”
A few minutes later the coffee was safely in the kitchen, the furniture was hugging the walls, and Matthew was in another room sulking about the disturbance. We laid the quilt on the floor and stood back to admire it.
I put a hand to my mouth. “It looks just like the garden.”
“I’m so glad you can see it. It is your garden, not as it is now but as I think it will be in a year or two when your hard work is rewarded and all of the plants fill in. Sometimes it’s hard to see the end from the beginning. But good work and good soil will eventually bear good fruit.”
My eyes moved across the kaleidoscope of colors representing the pinks of roses, the violets of mint, thyme, and oregano flowers, the chartreuse dill, the silvery leaves of artemisia and lavender, the grays and tans of the pebbled pathways. In the center was a large circle of varied greens, and within the circle were two dark gray shapes. The gravestones.
“How did you even begin to design this?”
“I’ll admit it was a challenge to figure out how it would all go together. I drew it out on paper first, matched colors, started cutting, and hoped for the best.”
“Sounds like a true creation.”
She smiled at me. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
I traced the tiny quilting stitches. “It’s perfect.” I gave her a gentle hug. She felt so small.
“I don’t know if you’ll want that on your bed or not. I know you like the yellow one. But I thought if you did we might make you some new curtains to match it. They would be a good first sewing project for you.”
“For me? No. I don’t sew.”
“So you say, but once upon a time, I didn’t sew either. Everyone starts from square one, and I intend to teach you how to sew now that you’ve gotten the garden under control.”
“I don’t know. Did I ever tell you about the washcloth I knitted?”
“Sewing is nothing like knitting.”
I knew my face was betraying a serious dearth of enthusiasm. What Nora didn’t know was that she couldn’t teach me to sew when I was back in Detroit and she was tucked away in a nursing home.
She scooped up my hand and squeezed it. “Elizabeth, I’m getting old, and I have a house full of supplies and a list of faithful clients who will need to find a replacement once I’m gone. Why not just try it and see? You might fall in love with it. It just might be what you were meant to do. How are you going to know if you don’t take a chance?”
The phone rang.
“That’ll be my parents.” I escaped to the kitchen, grateful for the reprieve from Nora’s earnest eyes.
“Hi, Mom. Merry Christmas.” I peeked back into the parlor and then pulled the phone cord as far from the door as I could.
“So how are things going with Aunt Nora?” Mom asked after the perfunctory greetings. “Barb wrote and told us all about it, though I was hoping to get a letter from you . . .”
“It’s going pretty well. We get along, and I’ve been able to help her out quite a bit.” I relayed the story of the ice storm and the power outage and the hauling of all the firewood.
“Thank the Lord you were there for her!” Mom said. “I’m so glad God worked this all out.”
“Yeah, well, about the other thing, though.”
“Yes?”
I lowered my voice to just above a whisper. “Unfortunately, I think Barb was right. I’ve noticed it more and more the longer I’ve been here. She has these moments where she isn’t really in the present. She talks about people who aren’t here as if they are, and she gets confused.”
“Oh my. That’s such a shame.” The line was quiet as my mother passed this information on to my father. “So what would you recommend?”
“Me?”
“You’re the one who’s there and can assess the situation. Do you think she needs twenty-four-hour care?”
“Maybe not yet, but I think she will at some point soon.”
“Mm-hmm. And what are your thoughts on that? Is it something you can handle on your own?”
“Me?” I said again, a little louder this time. “I’m not a nurse.”
“It doesn’t sound like she needs a nurse. Just someone to lighten her load and keep her safe.”
“But, Mom . . . I kind of got a job offer. In Detroit.”
“Oh.” She let the word hang there. “And you’re taking it?”
I sighed. “I don’t know. My brain keeps telling me it would be stupid not to.”
“And what is God telling you?”
“He doesn’t . . . I just don’t hear him like you do. And anyway, if he’s supposedly orchestrating all of this, if I’ve been offered a job, doesn’t that mean I should take it?”
My mother was quiet a moment. “Sweetie, why do you think your father and I spent so long living in Detroit when we’d been called to the mission field?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just figured it was so I could go to a real school.”
She laughed. “You think the Detroit public school system was our top choice for you?”
“Uh . . .”
“Elizabeth, we had several opportunities to return to our mission work as you were growing up. But we stayed because we saw that there were needs close to home. We wanted to be there for Grandma as she battled breast cancer and for Grandpa as he dealt with diabetes. It’s not that we didn’t yearn to get back to fieldwork. And it’s not that doors to mission work weren’t opening. There’s no one right path that if you make the wrong choice you’re sunk. Whatever you choose to do, God can use that. Life is always a winding path. It’s only in retrospect that it appears to be a straight and inevitable one.”
“That’s not helpful, Mom. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a choice.”
She laughed again. “But you do. So think hard, pray on it, and make that choice with open eyes.”
We chatted a little longer and they filled me in on the goings-on in the Amazon jungle. When I hung up the phone and walked back out to the parlor, the magnificent quilt still covered the floor. Nora sat staring at the Christmas tree and stroking Matthew’s head. Backlit by the light streaming in the window, her thinning white hair looked like it might blow away.
Everything I could see in this house and everything that still lay hidden from me—all of it would be gone without Nora, sold off to pay for her care. The antique furniture, the paintings, the quilts. Every plate, every book, every lamp would be sold to bargain hunters or thrown away. The graves would be reclaimed by the earth. The garden would succumb to weeds. The land would be sold off to developers. The cots would finish their days in a landfill. The trunk would be opened with a crowbar and its contents pawed through by strangers.
Worst of all, no one would know what had happened here. With no artifacts, there would be nothing left to spark the questions that had to be asked if the stories were to be told. The slaves who had risked their lives for freedom and found shelter beneath this roof would be forgotten. The women who had created such stunning quilts would be lost. The identity of the woman in the photographs in the darkroom would never be revealed. Nora was the last defense the past had against the relentless onslaught of time and decay.
And I was Nora’s last defense.