The Coffee Can
Rhonda ran the raffle every year.
She sold the tickets. She kept the coffee can of stubs. She drew the name herself, up front, with the microphone.
That’s how it had been at Grace Lutheran in Belden, Iowa, for eleven years. Ever since Rhonda took over the Fellowship Committee from old Ruth Kessler, who passed the job on along with her recipe for scalloped corn and a firm belief that nobody else could be trusted with either.
So when the church supper ended that Saturday night in October, and the pie plates were scraped and the folding chairs were scraping too, Rhonda stepped up to the little podium at the front of the fellowship hall with a red Folgers can in one hand and the microphone in the other.
“All right, everybody,” she said. “This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for.”
The quilt was hanging on the wall behind her.
My quilt.
They’d strung a clothesline between two coat hooks and draped it there, so it hung down all the way to the floor. Double Wedding Ring. Soft colors. Pale yellow, sage green, a rose pink so faint it was almost white. Interlocking rings across the whole top, every ring made of thirty-two little curved pieces.
It was the prettiest thing in that room, and I’m not saying that to brag. Everybody said so. Women had been coming up to touch the edge of it all night, running their fingers along the binding.
“Joan, how did you ever get those curves so even?” Edna Stoltz asked me during the meatloaf.
“Patience,” I told her. “And my mother’s thimble.”
I had pieced that quilt all winter.
Every curved seam by hand. Ten stitches to the inch. I started the second week of November, after the corn was in, and I didn’t put the last stitch in the binding until the first week of March. Four months of my evenings. Sitting in the rocker by the woodstove in our front room after supper, with the lamp turned up and the radio on low, while Dale read the Farm Bureau Spokesman and fell asleep in his chair.
My mother’s thimble on my finger the whole time. A silver one, worn thin on top from forty years of her pushing needles through cotton. She gave it to me the year before she died.
It was for the furnace fund.
