One of my blog followers wrote and asked why my blog had the name it does.  Great question.  Such a big one. Since I had planned to write about it anyway, I suppose now is as good a time as any.  Thank you, Sreedevi!

This is a really profound question for me, so bear with me as I answer it.  If you  have read my blog posts, you know that between between a lawyer, a professor and a writer, nothing is answered in a few words.  For me, this is even deeper than most things, so you are forewarned.

Of course the spelling of “peaces” is intentional.  It is a take on the word “peace” and the fact that I am an avid quilter.  The name of my house is Contentment Cottage.  As I once wrote in a poem, “so named because that’s how it feels.” Love and peace is what my life is all about.

Most often, I find that things I really like, like gardening and quilting are, in some ways, metaphors for life for me.  I learn so much that I can apply to life.  There is nothing like bringing an ailing plant back to life to remind you that anything is possible.  Or seeing a neglected, overgrown beloved garden brought back to its beauty, to believe in the miracle of belief, hard work and perseverance.  I’ve done both and the act of doing it is so much deeper for me because of the application to life.

There are many things I love to do as an avocation, but perhaps my favorite is quilting.  Like gardening, quilting is a way of me connecting to my ancestors and channelling the strength they give me to make this journey of life.

I do most of my quilting completely by hand rather than machine.  When I walk into my sewing room and look at my rows and rows of beautiful fabrics I have gathered over the years from all over the world, they are not just beautiful fabrics for me.  They are a reminder that my ancestors had to use what they could to make quilts–often rough flour sacks or outworn clothing.  No beautiful fabrics for them.  But, they used what they had.  I do not take for granted how lucky I am and how indebted to them for the sacrifices they made so I could be here and have something as simple as such an incredible range of such beautiful fabrics from which to choose.

I am blessed to have the sewing machine that my great-great grandmother had.  It was my Grandma’s grandmother’s sewing machine and I was told that my great-great grandmother was a slave (which I saw in the Census) who made her living by sewing after Emancipation.  It is probably the most irreplaceable thing I possess.  I would be crushed if anything ever happened to it.  If my house was on fire, it would be a real toss up between grabbing that and the notebooks I’ve put together of my three daughters’ lives, including their first scribbles on paper, their drawings, stories, report cards, etc.

When my ancestor’s quilted, it was not, as it is for me, a luxury.  It was out of necessity.  The one-room wooden shacks they lived in as slaves and sharecroppers did little to keep them warm in winter, so quilts were one of the things they kept them not only warm, but alive.  When I sit down to quilt, it is at a time of my choosing and I can engage in other things like listening to music or watching TV or movies while I quilt.  I work at a profession that does not have me toiling in a field from sun up to sundown, then have to come home, cook for my family from things I have only because I grew them or raised them, fetch water from a well, or work with a stove for which I had to chop wood.

I simply gather my things and sit down and quilt in the luxury of a beautiful, comfortable home I was able to pay for that only has a fireplace (gas, at that) because it is a cozy place to gather in winter.

All of these are things I think about as I sit and peruse my quilting books and magazines, decide which quilt I want to make, decide on the fabrics I wish to use from my extensive fabric stash (or go get more from the fabric shop), cut out the pieces by hand, and begin sewing them together by hand, stitch by stitch until patterns begin to form and what I am creating begins to come into focus (I often have no real idea what it will look like until it is totally finished).

Since I have been quilting for about 50 years or so, it is hard to recall for myself, but from trying to teach friends, I know that quilting takes patience, vision, persistence, fortitude, subtlety, and many other things in addition to pure skill at sewing.

One of the things I love about quilts, especially handmade ones, is that when I see a quilt, I know that I am looking at someone’s life.  I know what it took to create that huge undertaking from start to the last blessed stitch.  I know the meals that didn’t get made, the cramped back and hands, the days, months, sometimes years that came between stitches, the exasperation of taking out stitches to redo them when they don’t meet your standards, the frustration of having a Christian (my three-year-old grandson) decide to find the scissors you inadvertently left thinking you’d be right back, and decide he would try them out on the beautiful quilt blocks you so skillfully created.  Bless his heart 🙂  And you being grateful you have more of the same fabric to re-create them– again.

A quilt isn’t just something someone snuggles under on a cold night.  It is a part of the maker’s life you are snuggling under.

There are very few people outside of my immediate family who can say they possess a quilt I made.  Oh, I’ve made comforters for many others—and they are nothing to sneeze at.  They are wonderful too.  But not quilts.  Quilts are far too personal to me for me to have just anyone have them.  I’m giving them a huge piece of my life.  I am giving them the energy I have put into each and every aspect of what they can see and feel.  I stitch my energy into each and every movement I make to get the finished product, whether it is thinking about what fabric to use or what thread to use for quilting, what quilting pattern will grace my quilt, or the stitches themselves.

My energy is important to me.  I don’t quilt when I am angry and I don’t allow arguments while I am gardening.  My gardens are a place of peace and tranquility.  I don’t want negative energy there.  I believe one of the things that makes my quilts so special to anyone who possesses one is that they feel my absolutely positive, loving, peaceful energy that was worked into it as I created it.  Just ask them.

As I quilt and think about my ancestors and have them with me as I do, I also run into many life lessons.  A difficult piecing that I think I will never get right turns out beautifully, teaching me not to let my initial reservations rule.  A quilt I thought I’d finished needs stitches taken out and I learn that what I thought to be a daunting task is, in fact, doable.  I begin a quilt and life interferes (like it has done now for the past 4 months) and I don’t get back to it for ages, and I am reminded that interruptions are a regularly scheduled part of life and not necessarily a bad thing.  Something I thought would look beautiful together looks awful and I learn that not everything in life that I think will work will, in fact, work.  Stitches I lament over as I do them, end up blending into the entire quilt invisibly, and I learn that everything I stress over isn’t as big as I think it is.

These may seem like tiny little things that don’t matter, but I have learned that in my life they absolutely do.  Learning what I learn as I put those little pieces together into a beautiful whole apply to virtually every other aspect of my life.  Piece by piece, stitch by stitch, I come up with a beautiful end product that I fall in love with the minute it is finished and cherish forever.  What seemed like completely random little pieces that didn’t amount to much end up giving me or others privileged to be under them hours of comfort, peace and pleasure.

Minute by minute, day by day, we’re all just taking the random sometimes seemingly unmatched and incongruent pieces of our lives and trying to put them together and make sense of them as we create our own whole life quilts.

In the process, I try very hard to do my quilting, in life as well as in fabric, with love.  Doing so gives me a peace that surpasses all understanding.  A place from which I can move out into the world and offer that to others.  A centerdness that comes from knowing the deep roots of my ancestry and my connection to it as a seamless line from all of them to me, and my way has been paved by their trials and tribulations.  An understanding that I am a child of the Creator whose Divine purpose for me will be revealed in time as I go along.  And an understanding that I have a duty to share that peace with others in any way that makes sense at the time.  It could be by offering to teach them to quilt, lending them an ear, giving them a shoulder to cry on, baking them a fragrant loaf of bread, cussing someone out (a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do…), making them a comforter I can tell they need to feel the peace of, laughing with them, or if need be, crying with them, writing words I think will help them, encouraging them to reach for their higher self, or just quietly sipping a cup of tea with them.

It means I meet the world without an agenda. I don’t engage in ulterior motives.  With me, what you see is what you get.  Yes, I am as positive as I seem.  Nope, there is no ulterior motive to me telling you you look great, or I love your outfit or that you did a great job or you have the most beautiful eyes or a great smile.  I try to live at the simplest level and not get caught up in the drama of life.

For me, life is all about the lessons we are to learn, so I try hard not to get caught up in the vehicles the lessons come in. I’m always looking at the bigger picture. It’s not that Christian cut up my quilt blocks; it’s what the lesson was for me (put the scissors up each time!  🙂 ) Those lessons are revealed to me in the things I experience either myself or through others.  The lessons all add to my understanding and those lessons turn into the peaces I have been given and what they are to create.

All I have to do is to keep on stitching my quilt, peace by peace.

P.S.  Please don’t walk away from this thinking I don’t get angry, pissed off, hurt, disappointed, etc.  I do.  But, it is in the context of the above and I always come back to what is real for me.

P.P.S.  After posting this, I realized it might be a good idea to include some pics so you can get an idea of what I’m talking about.