the pieces

I see them both, over and over, in my mind's eye. I want to calculate the months, the days, but I stop myself. Would it matter? Could it help? Yes. No. Probably not. Well, maybe. Yes. It might. But still, I stop myself.

I have nowhere to put my pain, nowhere to put this love... so I am making a quilt. I am laboring over it, bringing it into being out of scraps of nothing, working in my mother-love, my hope, my imagination. I am doing this for myself, so I do not drown. So I do not choke. So I do not die.

I pieced it together from scraps like I am piecing my heart. I will stitch the pieces into rows, and the rows into blocks, and I will layer it and quilt it and bind it and finish it. And later, when I have a husband and a house and a dog, when I have two more girls and a boy, and we are sitting in a heap in the evening with a good book and a fire in the fireplace, I will pull this quilt from the pile in a basket I will have by the couch, and without tears or twinges of sorrow, I will wrap it around my youngest child, and finger the place where I've emroidered Noah. And I will smile, and say: "Once upon a time..."