The story of the quilt

Whenever I was sick, my mother would take out "Grammy's quilt" and I would lose myself in the patches. It was backed in black satin, slippery and cool to the touch, and no two patches were alike. Oh sure, some of the fabric repeated, but the shapes were always different -- and there's really not a straight line to be found.

Grammy is what we called her, to differentiate her from Nana, my other grandmother. But all the other cousins called her Nana, so eventually we just started calling her Nana Lord.

Ruth Lord lived to be 98 years old. She raised five sons, then turned around and raised a batch of my cousins as well. And her hands were always busy.

Nana Lord would always come to our house with something to sew. She made an entire series of crazy quilts, one for each son, and ours arrived in 1971. Each quilt celebrated something different -- ours had patches for each holiday and family occasions, but her other quilts had different themes. I remember her working on one with presidential signatures. These went to other cousins, family members, friends. I don't know how many she ended up creating -- she never kept track.

Family lore has it that she started making quilts as a way to use the fabric from my great-grandfather's tie collection. It certainly explains some of the ugly fabrics. Silks, satins, polyesters -- you'll find them all here. Over the years, she'd throw in scraps from old clothes and other projects. She claimed at one point there's even a tie from John Updike's family, who she used to babysit, but she never could remember which patch it was, or if it was in our quilt at all.

Our family quilt wasn't carefully put away and preserved for future generations. It was made to be used, and used it certainly was. By day, it would hang on the back of my mother's rocking chair in the living room, with the sun from the picture window slowly bleaching patches. By night, especially in winter, it would move to the couch where we'd fight over who got to sit on the sides with the special patches. And we'd rub the velvet mitten or poke at the stuffed heart for Valentine's Day or admire the sparkles in the gloriously rainbow striped patches or look for our names on the birthday cake. We'd spread it on the floor. When our friends slept over, it was usually what went over their sleeping bags when they slept on the mattress on the floor -- and the quilt, more than likely, would ride with us the next morning when, over and over again, we'd ride that mattress down the stairs before putting it back on the bench in my father's office.

My parents gave me the quilt for my 39th birthday this week. It's a delicate shadow of itself. My grandmother did repair it sometime in the late-80s, early-90s, replacing patches and adding an entirely new backing (and, it should be noted, she had to have been in her 80s when she did it -- through her mid-80s, she used to talk about going to "help out the old people" at senior housing), but it still shows signs of wear. And why not? It's a respectable 35 years old.

I could put it away in a box. But what fun is a quilt if you can't look at it? So I spread it out on the bed and invited my children to climb on. And we looked at all the patches. They counted the stars in the Flag Day flag. They cooed over the duck in the spring patch, fought over which patches were "theirs," touched and felt and asked questions.

So here's my challenge: can this quilt be fixed, again, for a new generation? Can it be cleaned, re-patched with vintage fabrics -- I'm not talking cotton prints from Wal-Mart here -- preserved?

And is this the only Ruth Lord quilt that still exists?