A Time to Heal(27)

But sometimes it was just a little hard to be a single woman here. It wasn't that she was expected to marry young. Many Plain women waited to marry until they were in their middle twenties. She liked helping family and friends, but she wanted to be more than the young woman who had family obligations of her own. She wanted to nurture her own children and be held in the arms of a man who loved her—

"Hannah?"

"Ya?" She looked up at Jane, one of her students.

"Where did you go?"

"Go?"

"It was like you were on a different planet."

"Sorry."

Jane laughed and shook her head. "I've never seen you like that. What were you thinking about?"

Hannah felt color flooding into her cheeks. "Nothing special."

She glanced over at the woman sitting next to her who was stitching a quilt block. "Beautiful work, Betsy. That's coming along so quickly."

"I'm really enjoying this even more than I thought I would," the woman confessed. "It's really relaxing. I feel like I'm . . . I don't know, it'll probably sound silly, but like I'm connecting with my roots somehow. I remember how my mother and my grandmother used to quilt."

She knotted her thread, used scissors to clip the thread, then picked up a spool. "It's like I'm following in a family tradition."

Hannah smiled, "Quilts are more than something to keep you warm. They give women a way to express themselves creatively.I like the way that you're using pieces of your children's outgrown clothing to make this quilt. It already has memories built in it that way, don't you think?"

"Such a nice way to think about it," Betsy said. "This robin's egg blue material? Susie's party dress when she was five. This yellow came from scraps left from Marie's piano recital dress when she was ten. I think the quilt will look nice hanging in the family room."

She threaded her needle and knotted the ends of the thread.Looking down at her thimble, she laughed.

"What's so funny?" one of the other women sitting in a circle asked her. Others looked up.

"I was just remembering when I first came here and I didn't know which finger I was supposed to put my thimble on. So I put it on my thumb and then I couldn't get it off. Talk about embarrassing."

Hannah smiled. "Life helps keep us humble sometimes, doesn't it?"

"It's so interesting the way the Amish think about things," Lucy said. "I would never have thought about it that way."

Rising, Hannah walked around and looked at each quilt the women were working on. "We each have our own way of expressing ourselves. I just think that life gives us things, situations—people—to make us see how much we have to learn . . . how much we need to remember to stay humble and realize we are just like children. We don't know everything."

As she said it, she knew she was speaking to herself. She didn't know why God hadn't revealed the man He'd set aside for her yet. She didn't know what her purpose was here on earth. And she didn't know why she found herself thinking about Chris Matlock when she'd met him just days ago.

Hannah remembered how he had noticed the quilt she gave him that first night. He'd said he thought he might get one to take home when he left. Maybe she should make him one, she thought, as a way of thanking him for helping Matthew.

Oh, she knew Matthew would be paying him to help harvest, but still, Chris had come here for a vacation, not to work after spending so much time recuperating in the hospital.Chris's willingness to help Matthew out deserved a thank you, some kind of showing of gratitude, didn't it?

The Amish sewed two different types of quilts—the almost stark, vividly colored ones for their own homes, like the one Chris had admired, and the ones they created to sell to others.Those quilts were made from solid materials left over from clothing sewn for family—the blues, purples, greens, and burgundies of dresses for women and the black material used for capes, aprons, and men's clothing. Since nothing was wasted, the leftover material became quilts, kitchen aprons, craft projects for outside sale, and many other things.

Quilters cut bigger pieces for an Amish home quilt and used more creative designs. Often, Hannah and her fellow quilters favored patterns with some kind of subtle, often spiritual, meaning. Intricate stitching might form images of flowers and other things, but no patterned fabrics found their way into quilts for Amish homes. In simple houses where little of the fancy decoration of an Englisch home existed, the quilts made the homes brighter.

However, the quilts for purchase were more what the Englisch world expected in design—smaller pieces and a traditional design they were more familiar with, and more suited to the decorating needs of their homes.