Day 8: Early American Quilt Rack

If you happen to know me it might be a brief puzzle, why we of the vintage 1970s moderne house would own anything so aggressively Early American the kitsch has been scared right out of it. Though now that I think about it, the whole Bicentennial thing happened back then, so this quilt rack would have fit right in with the metallic wallpaper and questionable carpeting removed when we took over from the previous owners.

I had been feeling fairly blank about this particular piece of furniture. It had ended up at our house by mistake during the clearing out of my grandmother's apartment after her death earlier this spring; initially it had been intended for the estate sale but got lumped in with some other furnishings I inherited. It's not like some family heirloom dating from colonial times or anything. I think Gram bought it from Lillian Vernon or somesuch catalog for displaying the afghans she crocheted. It hunkered in a corner of my studio for several months and every time I saw it I would think, got to get rid of that.

And then I did. A perfectly nice woman named Anne Ducastel claimed it for displaying the quilt her mother recently made for her children. As I was retrieving it for her I mentioned that it had been my grandmother's and Anne looked faintly startled. "Are you sure you want to let this go?" she asked. And you know, for a minute I really didn't. For a minute I felt so sad, so far gone from last summer when I was extremely pregnant and would go visit Gram and end up laying down on her bed to rest, and she would pull her favorite purple and white afghan from that stand to cover me in the fiercely air-conditioned room. For a minute it seemed essential that the quilt rack go right back into my studio, that I retain a physical piece of those days. But only for a minute, and then the unbearable sadness ebbed. I didn't need it; my dear, salty-tongued cranky grandmother isn't in some faux-antique quilt rack. I am quite sure she's actually in the worn decks of playing cards salvaged from her kitchen drawer, the ones she used to beat me mercilessly every time we played rummy during the past three decades. Those I will keep.