I have so much I want to do, and I know that there are only 24 hours on my daily statement. Now older, I make quilts for comforting. I am content. When I was a child, if I got a sliver in my hand, my father would pick it out gently and my mother would kiss it and make it well. Now, I prick my fingers over and over, quickly putting them in my mouth so that the drops of blood will not stain my quilt.
Pricked fingers are a badge of honor among quilters, something of which to be proud.
When I was a child, I ate peanut butter toast because I thought it was delicious. I still eat peanut butter toast, but now I eat it because peanut butter is quick and easy, and it requires almost nothing of me and does not distract me as I stitch. When I was a child, I dreamed, and so I dream today. From these dreams come the triangles and the diamonds and the squares that form the patterns of my quilts like splintered glass in a kaleidoscope, blossoming out in fractured colors. When I was a child, I could walk barefoot, unaware, over the hot oyster-shell roads of Maryland.