Mrs. Robinson’s quilts

This post started out as a post on family history but as I gathered my thoughts on it I found my mind wandering to other things.

I’ve told you a bit about my dad. My dad died rather unexpectedly—I didn’t know even know he was sick until after he was already dead. He died just two months after his maternal uncle, Walter, had taken his own life. Since my dad was his uncle’s attorney and the executor of his will (and the will hadn’t been filed), the responsibility for looking after my dad’s uncle’s affairs fell upon my mom. As if being a young widow with five children and many other responsibilities wasn’t enough. I could probably fill a book with the complications of those days.

One of those complications was Ginny.

Ginny was Walter’s widow and Ginny was, using the polite diction of another day, “simple”. Ginny was illiterate, a plain country woman and, as I say, simple. And with the little that Walter had left behind (mostly a few dilapidated rental properties in poor parts of town), some Social Security benefits, and a little of this and that Ginny just barely scraped by.

But this post isn’t about my mom, my dad, my dad’s uncle Walter, the Wagners, or Ginny. It’s about Mrs. Robinson’s quilts.

Mrs. Robinson was a neighbor of Ginny’s, a tenant (I believe) in one of Walter’s houses, and looked in on Ginny every once in a while for my mother. When I knew her Mrs. Robinson was a little shrivelled-up white-haired old lady about as big as a minute with a country accent, a decent sense of humor, and an old-fashioned way of expressing herself. I wish I could reproduce for you some of her ways of speech but it’s just beyond my recall.

Mrs. Robinson kept up country ways. She put up peaches and tomatoes in the summertime. And she was a good, Christian woman of the old school and devoted to her little church. When I learned that she made quilts and donated them to her church to help support it, I offered to buy some quilts from her. I must have bought six or eight quilts from. How much were they? Fifty dollars? Less? I don’t recall. I never, ever haggled with Mrs. Robinson (although having been in the resale business about that time I was an experienced haggler). I paid whatever she asked.

Ginny and Mrs. Robinson are long gone. But I still have a few of Mrs. Robinson’s quilts and I sleep under one each and every night and have for half of my life. They keep me centered and remind me of where I come from and the ways of people I met and knew a little long, long ago when things were very different than they are now.