“Are you goin’ to the store, Kenyon? Take this money an’ get me a cold potion – one of them new store-bought things with aspirin in it.” Miss Liddy reaches down in her bosom and produces a white kerchief wound tight and tied in a small knot. She carefully counts out the coins – 84-85-86 cents – and spreads it out on the tabletop. “Now don’t pay no more than this – I ain’t got no pension, ya’ know. Don’t be lolly-gaggin’ neither, and watch out on that highway with your bike.”

Kenyon collects the money and wipes his fingerprints from the tabletop with his shirttail. “Nawsum, Grammy, I won’t. Mr. Caldwell, he’s a nice man. Ain’t never overcharged me on nothin’. Nawsum. I’ll be back directly.”

Miss Liddy musters a proud, toothless grin and shoos the boy out the door then turns her attention once again to her quilting. Sixty years of cutting and stitching and stretching and blocking was quite enough. “This is the last quilt I got in me,” she mutters aloud. “And ain’t no use tryin’ to change my mind.” She’d sworn that when her babies had babies of their own and every last one had their own family quilt, that was it. “Unless the Good Lord Hisself tells me different—and He ain’t said nothin’.”

Kenyon is the baby boy of her youngest son, and, at nine years of age, he has no real way of knowing the meaning of her gift. He cannot feel the power of such things, how they link past to present, pain to promise. Grammy is simply Grammy to him – present tense. This is all he needs to know. For Miss Liddy, though, her very faith lies in the quilts, eternally in the quilts, each one a story all its own. Threads of time.

“Where did that child go?” she scoffs at length, craning her head t between the kitchen clock and the parlor window. “Here I need my potion and he ain’t back yet and shoulda’ done been back twenty minutes now.”

One final stitch, and the pride of ages is conferred—a quilt of hopes for her baby Kenyon. “How proud he will be,” she whispers to herself, “when he gets home with my potion and finds his name emblazoned on this quilt. Like a fancy somethin’ out of a Sears-Roebuck catalog,” she giggles to herself. “Yessir, a smart and fittin’ exchange of gifts this will be. A fine trade indeed, if that slowpoke ever makes it back.” The very image of Kenyon’s bright smiling eyes—the Johnson family eyes—swells her careworn heart and deafens her aged ears to the clarion call and sudden rush in the distance.

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Originally appeared in The Heartland Review, 2007