My Friendship Quilt (2025)

Several years ago when I was on my way to teaching writing at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, I used to enjoy stopping at various antique barns, junk stores and thrift shops on my drive down from Louisville. At one of these places, I had the great good fortune to find an early twentieth-century friendship quilt, in sterlng condition, bearing a great number of mainly old-time Kentucky names—women, and two men. It was in such good shape I wondered if it had ever been used.

Now it decorates my bed in the cabin at Wolf Pen Mill Farm where I stay when I make my bi-yearly visit, often to teach a writing workshop at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington.

I’ve been amusing myself with listing the names, outlined in colored embroidery thread, that identify the maker of each square. Since the writing, with one exception—a child’s big scrawl in black thread—is similar, I wonder if perhaps the women who (arduously) organized this group of some three dozen people to sew the squares finally had to embroider their names herself. From my experience putting together groups for a purpose, I know the initial enthusaism often wanes in the face of the toil demanded.

I’ll never know the answer to that question.

I’ve also been contemplating what it means that some of these names are no longer used: ETHEL, HAZL, MYRTLE, WILLETTE, LULA, BERTHA, SENIG, DAHLIA, BEULAH…

In the south, first names often repeat mother’s or grandmother’s or aunt’s, but this is true today as well which makes the most favored names for baby girls in 2025 also an anomaly:

ARIA, LUNA, KAI, ROAN, LANA, BENNY MARIE, MIA, SCOTTIE…

Which brings me to the question of continuity.

Two of my best friends are contrasting examples of lives based on continuity, one the heir of a long line of good Kentucky people with certain names repeated in every generation, the other the heir of disconnection, as described in my next book, How Daddy Lost His Ear (Turtle Point Press, September 2025) but proving to me that respect, even love, for continuity can survive, even thrive on the disconnection it disproves.

For me, continuity has always seemed a threat. As we women of the current era carve new paths (even now in the midst of regression), we may feel as I always have that family names imply limitation. I don’t live a life similar to my mother’s, my grandmother’s, or my great-grandmother’s, and those of us who have the rare opportunity to study the history of “our women” don’t either. The objectivity required for a serious study of the past is, in itself, revolutionary.

Study is not worship. Much of what remains from the past is sentimental: for example, my great-grandmother’s little white wedding fan, recording nothing of the fact that she married a man suffering from advanced tuberculosis who died three years later, or the insipid nonsense we hear on all sides about “radiant brides”—or the enormous amounts of money spent on “destination weddings.” The real destination itself is often obscure.

Yet I know there is comfort in continuity, reassurance of one’s place in society, even the hope if not the reality of family affection. Both my continuous friends would attest to that.

But continuity has its burdens and disappointments. My sister who inherited our mother’s goods and chattels is weighted down by her enormous boxes of meaningless papers—solicitations from charities, perfunctory lists—but which contain the rare gems: our mother’s awkward template for her own begging letter, beginning, “Dear …..Please do not throw this letter out along with all the other requests you doubtless receive,” and a note for the black woman who attended her until the end of both their lives, advising her to “light the fire in the drawing room at 7:45 PM.”

Finally, of course, it all goes down to destruction, along with our memories. The enormous newspaper building in Louisville, occupying an entire block, which was our father’s crowning achievement, has no use now that the newspaper’s rapacious owner, Ganette, has for all intents and purposes, ended the newspaper except for a shriveled remnant. Now the colossal monument to its vanished importance may be “imploded” as useless and unsuitable to renovation, along with the big lobby fresco by a forgotten artist of the 1950’s, Henry Varnum Poor, that features a field full of laboring black slaves, their faces painted white to avoid criticism as the times changed, and my portrait as an akward and frustrated ten year old in an unflattering “playsuit,” dragooned into posing against my will.

So for me the past is often quite worthy of destruction along with the misrepresented lives it claims to enshrine.

Which leaves me with the unanswered question about the value of continuity.

[Tomorrow afternoon: my latest course, ‘Beyond Memoir: Empowering the Imagination by Writing Historical Fiction – Spring 2025’ begins at the Carnegie Center in Lexington, KY. You may still register here.]

In My Family, Kentucky Friends