"The needle's eye, it doth supply the thread that runs so true"

Quilters cast. Photo by Robyn O'Neill

My castmates and I are wrapping up a seven-week run of the production, Quilters at Swift Creek Mill Theatre. The show closes on Saturday, May 14th. It has been a wonderful experience and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to be part of this incredible show with Katy Burke, T'Arah Craig, Audra Honaker, Jackie Jones, Brittany Simmons and Ali Thibodeau, and the expertise of Tom Width (director), Paul Deiss (musical director) & his orchestra, Joe Doran (light design), Maura Cravey (costume design), Betty White (stage manager) and Randy Rose (light operator). 

The production is based on the book, The Quilters: Women and Domestic Art, an Oral History by Patricia J. Cooper and Norma Bradley Allen. Women relate their own joys and hardships, as well as those of their ancestors who settled America's western plains. The stories of their lives are sewn into their quilts and passed down through the generations.

A number of references in the show have struck a personal chord with me; many true threads run through it.

Arial view of our farm, surrounded by corn & soybeans.

"You needed a lot of cover to keep warm in those old open houses on the plains." (Jackie)
 

My parents still live in the wooden 1880s one-and-a-half story house where I spent my formative years on a working farm in rural Minnesota (35 miles north of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Walnut Grove). When I was in early elementary school, we had Herefords (beef cattle) and an Arabian horse named Misty. We had one milk cow, a Guernsey named Betsy, that dad milked by hand every day; my mom took care of the laying hens and the hundred or so pullets; we all worked in the fields, moving up and down the rows, ridding the soil of weeds and rocks. I was driving a tractor in fourth grade. The winters were harsh and the summers were blazing. The wind always seemed to blow. 

"When the wind blew, the water was pumped [by the windmill] into an old wooden barrel down on the ground. The barrel was always coated with green mossy stuff. I'll never forget the way it smelled, or what my face looked like in the water." (me) 

Our "modern" barn, built in 1933

We didn't have a windmill on our farm when I was a kid, but the well pump did feed water into an old wooden tank on the ground that was always coated with green mossy stuff, and I can still remember how it smelled and what my face looked like in the water. It held water not for us, but for the livestock. 


"Everyone down to the cellar!" (Brittany) 

Our farmhouse doesn't have a basement, it has a cellar, which is one room under the dining room and part of the kitchen, accessed by a trap door on the porch. I remember crouching down there a few times when tornadoes were in the area. 

The Kreshka Family, c. 1945

"This will be number twelve for Caleb and me, and I'm nearly thirty-five years old!" (me) 

In one scene, I play a 34-year-old woman who grieves her situation when she finds herself pregnant with her twelfth child. She goes to the doctor, who is of no help. Out of concern for the well-being of her family, not to mention fearing injury or death during childbirth, her sister helps her find a "recipe that will relieve her of her problem." My great-grandmother, who had 13 children, also confronted such a situation. Coincidentally, I am 34 years old.

"No, I never married. Once I almost did, but it didn't work out. I was 27 years old." (me)

I was 27 when I got married, and it didn't work out. (Also, the name of this character is Katherine, which was my grandmother's name.)

"I am holding a piecing party at my home on the first Saturday of next month to celebrate the occasion of my son Jamie's twenty-first birthday."(me) 

Jamie is, of course, the name of my ex-husband. 

Yellow Medicine Lutheran Church

"These quilts is from the ladies of the First Lutheran Church!" (me) 

I grew up and was confirmed in the Lutheran church. 

"When you bury me, don't bury me in my best quilt." (Jackie) 

During this part of the play, my fellow daughters and I are pallbearers on either side of a long bier that holds the 8-foot quilt that is raised at the end. Unbeknownst to Tom, my position on the bier is the same position I had on the casket when I was a pallbearer at my grandmother's funeral last summer. 

"Twenty-five years to make a comfort that is longer lasting than a life... Sarah the child and child-bearer; the wife and woman I was taken for. The stitches tell of all these and many Sarahs more." (Jackie/all) 

The etymology of the word, "quilt," is from Old French, cuilte which stems from the Latin, culcita, meaning mattress or cushion. It is interesting to me that the meaning of the word has switched from cushion to cover; yet, both are meant to bring comfort. Even though most of the women in my family were more disposed to knitting, crocheting and embroidering than quilting, the time and care involved in each stitch was just as heartfelt and meaningful, with the recipient's comfort being the ultimate goal. Did my grandmother realize she was stitching her legacy nearly twenty-five years ago when she knitted the comforter for my bed? Maybe she did.

To my Quilters sisters and friends, thank you for a memorable journey through the frontier. It was a pleasure expressing the "pieces of women's lives" through story and song over the last seven weeks. 

Love and laughter to you all!

Raising of the Legacy Quilt, final scene of Quilters