on the table

apple tree branches

one lone blossom beginning to open

I wrote those words, a simple haiku, for my mother-in-law, Betty. The branches, taken from an apple tree on her farm, are arranged in a small glass vase. They have more open blossoms now, the petals soft white and green against the walls of her room at hospice. It is a room with a wide window framing a stand of trees, a small park behind the hospice center and a grassy field that stretches north out of view.

We didn’t know just how much the tree meant to her until last summer, when her grandson Matthew Wagar, who is a professional videographer, Shirley Ware, a photographer and Web journalist, and I interviewed her for a family keepsake DVD. She came to the story about the apple tree in a roundabout way, wandering the path her life has taken, the hard years growing up when money was scarce and men in the WPA worked on the road that ran past their farmhouse, the war years of rationing, her first job, and the months after the fighting ended, when the troops came home and she met her husband, John Totts, a returning serviceman, at a dance club.

She and John married and moved to Medina County. It was a farming community then, and even though their property sat on a main highway, there were more cows than cars to count in the 1950s. And if a small stream of traffic trickled past the house by day, a bright river of stars flowed above it at night.

They built their house on top of a gently sloping hill, hemmed in by the fields that John planned to fence and graze a few head of Hereford cattle, plow and plant.

Betty’s open kitchen window brought the scent of new lumber when the barn was built, the heady aroma of freshly cut hay, the pungent smell of manure after the cows arrived. When she looked across the yard to the west, it was the ancient apple tree she spied and grew to love in all its ragged glory.

It stood at the edge of an orchard gone wild, its raggedy branches clutching the clouds. Squat enough for small children to climb, it lured Jim, my husband, and his sisters into a leafy ship of childhood adventures as they scrambled upward to escape the poison ivy below. With fruit too small and wormy and sour for eating, it was good only for the deer drifting under the branches, dreaming among the blossoms.

As it aged, half of it refused to bloom, but despite -- or maybe because of -- its stubborn resilience, it became a touchstone for Betty. After John died in 2001, she remained on the farm, not willing to leave.

During the interview last summer, she said, “Whenever there’s a storm, I look at the apple tree after the storm has passed. If the tree is still standing, I know the storm wasn’t really that bad.”

When chronic illness began to take its toll, she moved in with her daughter Carole’s family, but she propped a photo of the tree between pictures of John, the children, grandchildren and Sophia, the first great-grandchild.

Now, with days spinning the last threads of her life, we wanted her to see the apple tree on the farm blossom one more time.

Jim brought home a fistful of branches cut from the tree. Never having forced tree branches to bloom out of season, I e-mailed Doug Oster for advice. I got to know Doug when he was photo editor for The Medina County Gazette and I worked as a features writer and editor. I figured if anyone knew how to coax apple blossoms out of their winter hibernation, it had to be Doug.

Following his instructions, I took the branches to the basement and laid them on the floor to hammer the cut ends. I found a tall vase, filled it with water and put the branches in. As I settled the vase into a laundry basket to keep the curious noses of our border collie and corgi at bay and put the whole arrangement in a cool spot, I said a prayer. In the days that followed, I asked everyone I knew to say a prayer.

My best friend Janet Griffing and her fiancé Steve LaBonne brought a jar of forsythia blossoms they forced for Betty as we waited to see if we could fool the apple tree branches into thinking it was spring.

Betty’s health continued to deteriorate and she moved to the hospice facility for a respite stay that lengthened into residency. I was beginning to think the apple branches might not have any spring left in them.

Still, I freshened the water every few days, peering at the nub ends of the branches, imagining that they might be budding. On the 28^th of February, I snatched the vase out of the basket and brought it up to the kitchen table. One tiny green bud began to push out of its slumber.

It was painfully slow. But in a few days, another blossom joined the first, and another. The blossoms are five-petaled, echoing the star at the heart of an apple if you slice it crosswise instead of into pie slices.

We clipped away the twigs that held no buds, shortened the branches and arranged them in a smaller vase. I tied a ribbon around the glass, but it didn’t really need any embellishment.

Betty smiled when she saw the branches. Although she didn’t say much as we put them on her bedside table, I hope that when she turns in her bed and sees them, she will think of spring love, the scent of sweet hay, of children climbing up to touch clouds, branches dark with rain and threaded with pale stars that carry the promise of apples, the tree that survived another storm.

Postscript: This originally was written as a guest blog for Doug Oster's column in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Betty passed away May 21, and we miss her greatly. My husband clipped several branches from the apple tree to place in her coffin. The branches now had green leaves and two small green apples.

The quilt is ready to go on the frame, except for buying new backing material. I am inviting the women in the family and several of my close friends to begin the process, in honor of Betty.

There is an old Chinese saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but in my case, the journey of a quilt begins with a single stitch. My mother-in-law Betty took that first stitch in her iris quilt about 50 years ago, but she asked me to finish the journey.

My daughter Jenny and I will take it to the hospice facility tomorrow to show Betty that all the applique work is done, and so is the embroidery embellishment. The next step will be to assemble the frame and put together the quilt sandwich -- quilt top, batting and backing -- something I've never done and was hoping she'd be able to help me with.

That will not be, but I have a wonderful best friend and an equally wonderful cousin, women clever with a needle, who will offer advice and moral support, one long-distance from Texas, one just a few blocks away.

Thankfully the quilting lines already have been marked, part of the kit. The pieces of the wooden frame are in the basement here, and as soon as they quilt is in place, I will sit as thousands of women have before me, head bowed beneath the lamplight, praying the psalm of the needle and thread, continuing the story my mother-in-law began.

Working on the embroidery now, doing all the "A" color on the chart, described as a medium rose. I selected the skeins that came as close to that as I could, pulling them out of the plastic bag Betty had stored them in. I've worked all the rose outline stitches in the irises on the border of the quilt, and have two more of the big ones in the middle of the quilt before I move on to the light and medium yellow threads.

The stitching takes me back to Mrs. Oswald's seventh grade art class. We sat at long tables with cloth stretched on metal hoops, laboriously trying to master outline and satin stitching, lazy daisy and French knots. I still have a set of napkins and placemats I completed. I also remember trying to do a small medieval-style tapestry that fell by the wayside after a few days, never to know a needle's touch again.

The quilt is a little awkward to work on, and I use a 14-inch wooden hoop. That size seems to be the best to handle as I shift the cloth around. Yesterday I stitched to the sounds of Celtic Woman and classical music. It doesn't seem right to listen to pop music for some reason.

We are trying to get things other than cloth flowers to bloom, too. Betty loves the old apple tree at the farm, and Jim cut three branches from it and brought them to our house. My friend Doug Oster, photographer and gardener extraordinaire, advised us to pound the ends of the branches with a hammer, immerse the stems in water, place them in a spot where the temperature is about 50 degrees, and wait. I'm adding prayer and a little reiki to the mix.

As I embroider to enhance the flower petals of the quilt, I look up and around the room at the plants to give my eyes a little rest. I think about the remark Betty made when she visited us several weeks ago, that I must have a green thumb because the pothos and ferns grew so well.

My dad was the real gardener in the family, and my mother took care of the peonies and magic lilies and houseplants. I'm just keeping up what they started. And now the flowers that bloom in this January weather are the appliqued ones under my needle as I work rose colored thread along petal after petal on the cloth.

Sometimes I wish the quilt flowers were like the magic lilies my mother planted near the back door. Lush greens flourish in the spring and early summer, then shrivel away to nothing. And then, like their name implies, they spring up in August, lovely pink-toned blossoms nodding on their long stems.

It's the day after Christmas, and I don't have to work at a nutrition site today, so I'm going to work on the quilt instead. The applique work is finished, and the embroidery is the next step.
Betty has been asking about progress, but I stopped quilt work to finish Christmas presents for family, including a deep heather rose knitted shawl for Betty. And during October and November, I made Ukrainian pysanky and painted wood items for the Seville Farm Market held Dec. 10. So it's back to the quilt.

The first step will be to match the skeins of embroidery thread to the original guide Betty included with all the material. The challenge being that the thread is not the same brand as suggested in the guide, so I will spread the quilt out on the bed and begin by placing the skeins against the appliqued irises and leaves to find the best match.

It's like holding a rainbow in your hands, the silkiness shining in the light, seductive to an artist's eye. Each skein, once matched, will be placed in a plastic sleeve, the kind used in notebooks for important papers that need to be kept safe from water damage or tearing, and marked according to the chart on the instructions.

Big wooden embroidery hoops, smooth with age, lean against the dresser in the bedroom, waiting for the first stitches. I am looking forward to smoothing the cloth into their egg-shaped or round frames and cradling the quilt on my lap, taking the first stitches.

Betty is under hospice care now, and I will try to finish the embroidery as fast and as neatly as I can.

New beginning

I am sitting here, looking at a small tumbleweed of thread on the table, all the colors I have used in the applique process of Betty's quilt jumbled together. Each time I finished a petal or leaf, I pulled the short piece of thread from the needle and rolled it into the mix. I will not miss trying to thread that needle -- the applique part of the quilt is finished -- so I have a little respite until it's time to put up the quilting frame and tackle that part.
Enhancing the flowers with embroidery is the second phase. Now I have to sort through the packet of embroidery thread to find the ones that coordinate with the cloth flowers.
A chart came with the quilt kit Betty bought so long ago, but it describes the company brand on the instruction chart, not the DMC floss in the bag, so I will spread the quilt out and start to place the skeins on top. They spill out, rich and soft beneath my fingertips, the promise of beauty about to happen, all the colors of a garden in springtime bloom, shades of green, pale amber and deeper yellow, dark rose like a flower's shadow caught in moonlight, purple as regal as a royal robe.
I am keeping a paper fortune that came from the Dragon Buffet cookie I ate the other day: "It matters not what road we take, but rather what we become on the journey." it is tucked into the cigar box with the spools of thread.
But I take its words with me. What have I become so far? It is something to contemplate as I sort colors. Taking a Buddhist sort of view, I can truly say you live in the moment while you're stitching, carefully looking only 1/8th inch ahead. And from a Christian standpoint, there's always the Bible verse that tells us to "fret not thyself about tomorrow."
So I will take it again, one stitch, one color at a time, in this new beginning.

Practicing the craft

The neighbor's Rose of Sharon bush is flowering again. When I started to work on Betty's quilt, the only things in bloom were the irises on the cloth. During those long ice-bound months of January and February, I consulted with Martha Stewart's book and then discovered and invested in two other books on applique -- "Applique: The Basics and Beyond," by Janet Pittman, and "Dream Landscapes," by Rose Hughes -- at our local Joann Fabrics store. Because I know now that when I finish this quilt, I want to do more applique work -- the artist in me sees great possibilities, including the vision of a wall hanging created with pieces of cloth cut from my own mother's old house dresses.

When my mother died last summer, I salvaged her dresses. She never wore slacks, just skirts, blouses and house dresses. And she kept clothes until they wore out. The dresses hanging in her closet were almost transparent, some thin as a breath of air on a frosty morning. The sturdier ones I folded and set aside with the idea of a floral wall hanging percolating in my thoughts even then. So as soon as the last stitches of Betty's quilt are knotted in place, I will do some design work on the wall hanging.

I took a very deep breath before starting to stitch, and I have kept in mind two lines from a poem by Rumi, a Sufi poet-mystic who lived in the 13th century: "When you learn a craft, practice it. That learning comes through the hands." Reading about applique was a good jumping-off point, but threading the needle and simply beginning came next.

The second day in, I learned to fold under and baste into place the edges of each piece before I pinned it to the corresponding outline on the quilt. Basting it one more time to the quilt before taking those 1/8th inch stitches kept it stable.

Betty had a box of scraps and plastic bag for the spools of thread. I stored the quilt top in a large lidded, woven basket she gave me. To keep from pawing through the spools every time I changed thread, I bought an ornate cardboard cigar box at a community flea market held at the Medina County Achievement Center and arranged the spools in rows by color. It was a perfect fit, and now the Cuban lady on the gilded flap smiles at me when I open the lid and pull out the purple-handled scissors and packets of sharps, the needles with eyes that surely will contribute to my ophthalmologist's trip to Bermuda this year, so tiny are they.

If my husband is not watching TV, I put on music, sewing to the beat of Abba or Celtic Woman, James Galway or John Denver.

Usually I get two pieces stitched down per night. When I started, there were about 70 pieces, maybe more, maybe less -- I didn't quite have the courage to count them all -- and I didn't work on the quilt every day. Looking at the green leaves and purple, cream, pale yellow and rose petals, I kept thanking God that Betty had cut all those pieces out. I'm not sure I could have had the patience for that part. Betty is now facing major surgery, so I am pushing harder to get the applique process finished. With only a few more leaves and petals to go, I think it will be ready before her hospital stay -- a bouquet of iris to wish her well. The stitches are not perfect, but I take to heart the idea that there is charm in imperfection.