Now I don't throw away a piece of cloth wider than two fingers. Never have. Started when I was a girl watching my grandmother work, and she'd say baby that's a piece of somebody's dress, you don't throw that out.

So it all goes in an old pillowcase on the floor beside my chair. The flowered one, the case itself is torn but I'm not mending a pillowcase I use for scraps. That's how it goes.

Well I went to set it out for the wash this morning and I couldn't lift it. Full. Twenty-some years of everybody's leftovers in there. Mama's church dress, my son's shirt from the job he hated, my granddaughter's first Easter dress, all of it cut down to pieces not big enough for anything.

I sat down on the floor with it. I got a quilt in my head for those pieces and I've had it in my head going on three years now. Can't start it because it means cutting into the last of certain cloths, and once it's cut it's cut. You can't undo it.

Mm. That's the trouble with this work. You hold a piece of your mother's hem in your hand and you got to decide if it becomes a quilt or stays a scrap forever.

Might start it this week. Might sit with it another three years. The Lord gives you the cloth, He don't tell you the day.