I finished a quilt three weeks back for my niece's baby, quilted it, bound it, washed it, hung it on the porch rail to dry. And I have not been able to leave it alone since.

It's the corner blocks. I pieced four strips of my grandmother's old dress fabric into that corner, blue print, and I put them too close together so the whole corner reads as a solid blob instead of four separate pieces. Nobody would ever see it. My niece won't see it. Her baby will drag that quilt through the yard and the mud and never once look at that corner.

But every time I walk past it on that rail I see the blob.

So this morning I sat down with the seam ripper and started taking the corner apart. Two hours in, my hands aching, and I got to thinking about whether I'm fixing the quilt or just fixing my own eye. Because the fabric's already been washed once, the seams have settled, and putting it back together will not be the same quilt it was. Thread holes stay in cloth. That's the truth of it.

My granddaughter says leave it, it's fine, it's perfect. And it is fine. That's the trouble. Fine is the thing I can't stand some days.

I don't know that I'll finish taking it out. It's sitting on the table right now, half open like a wound, and I've got church in the morning.