The Land of Counterpane

The Land of Counterpane

That’s the name of one of my favorite Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

    

When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay, To keep me happy all the day. And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; And sometimes sent my ships in fleets All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about. I was the giant great and still That sits upon the pillow-hill, And sees before him, dale and plain, The pleasant land of counterpane. http://www.lnstar.com/mall/literature/rls/LandofCounterpane.htm

It is also a place I would go every time I laid upon my mother’s quilt on her and Dad’s bed when I was a very small child.

The Double Wedding Ring Quilt.

I so loved to dream of my future life – of whom and what I would become - as I laid back on their bed.

I refused naps and so Mom settled for me having quiet time on her bed –

IF – if I promised not to jump up and down on it.

Their bed was one of those beds a kid just HAS to jump up and down on!

And of course I was the kid that would wait until Mom was out hanging clothes up on the line to make my move.

First, I would sneak and check out the kitchen window on the east side of the house and make sure she was really out there hanging clothes up.

Then, I would run as fast as my tiny little feet and legs could go back to her bedroom on the west side of the house and take a vaulting box- like leap over the foot board and swing my body up onto the mattress atop that beautiful Double Wedding Ring Quilt!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/islandphotobug/6942589175/

Drunk with just the preliminary thoughts of my sin of JUMPING ON MOM AND DAD’S BED, I would get my arms started in a wind milling motion first – thinking that would give me more upward thrust in my quest to touch the ceiling.

Then I would give a few leg thrusts downward into the mattress – because

EVERYONE knows that’s how cats get ready to jump… and I was a cat.

(At four or five years old you can be whomever or whatever you desire…)

Next, I would execute the initial leap.

It had to be good, for like a rocket, if your trajectory was wrong you could go spiraling out of control and in Mom and Dad’s small room that meant blasting your head off the wall, or worse, crashing into the corner of the upright chest of drawers – I had done that plenty of times!

If I started the jump sequence just right I could get in several huge bounding leaps from top to bottom and back again before losing control and aborting the repeated launching of my body- rocket by landing on my back in the middle of the bed.

If I heard the slam of the screen door on the other side of the house that meant I had mere seconds to stop the sequence and straighten the Double Wedding Ring Quilt before Mom came in from hanging laundry on the line.

I became an expert at recovery mode.

After the crash landing on my back I would start singing to myself as if I had been doing that the entire time she was working out at the line (silence was a dead giveaway in the Johnson household that there were some serious misdeeds going on somewhere!)

I would immediately sit Indian Style in the middle of the bed and reach in front of me and straighten the corners at the foot of the bed.

Then I would stretch out and reach behind me and straighten the corners at the head of the bed.

All the while singing to keep up the charade of my practicing nursery rhymes or songs from the radio and sitting in quiet time like I was told.

The times that I actually did sit quietly in quiet time I would play upon the quilt lost in a world of my own making.

The Double Wedding Ring Pattern always looked like a road or pathway to me.

Kind of like the Yellow Brick Road, but with the faded, beautiful colors and styles of the 1930’s clothes that it was pieced from.

Over the years I walked my fingers down the rounded pathways to foreign lands, over mountain ranges I hoped to climb, through the caverns and valleys I planned to delve into with my pick and shovel to find fossils and treasures, and the bridges I would traverse across the mighty rivers of the world - but always my journeys ended with walking my fingers from my make believe land onto Garrison Creek Road, down our drive way across Garrison Creek that bounded our farm like a royal mote, up our driveway, and into our farm yard back home where it was safe and warm.

I spent many an hour studying that Double Wedding Ring Quilt.

Entrenched in my memory are the colors, the designs, the stitches that were so unique to that particular quilt.

I knew that someday I wanted to know how to do that.

I knew I never wanted to forget those images.

They were loving, warm images from my early childhood.

The ones that make life seem like a paradise made just for you.

When our old farm house burned and all the family heirlooms were gone with it, I thought I would only have those images to remember that quilt by.

Yesterday, at the John Miller Community Center in Roberts Park, I rounded a quilt display and was instantly brought back to jumping on Mom and Dad’s bed, to walking my fingers on the path to make believe journeys, to dreaming of making my future quilts for my someday family, to curling under the quilt with my mom and reading before bedtime as she waited for Dad to come home from the second shift at D&M.

It was like seeing an old childhood friend after 40 years.

It was not Mom’s quilt.

That one had burned in a fire around 1998.

This quilt was quilted and finished in 2008 from a top that was bought at a yard sale in Liberty Indiana.

The Quilt Show information tag said it was 1930’s fabrics.

I could NEVER forget those fabrics.

I could NEVER forget those designs.

I could NEVER forget those colors.

They were my land of counterpane.

They were once again right before my eyes in a quilt.

In The Double Wedding Ring Quilt that Sandy Brown completed and owns today.

I must take my mother to the John Miller Community Center to see that quilt before the show closes.

I have so many questions to ask.

My mother lived in Liberty for a short while when she was a child.

Where did HER quilt come from?

Who quilted it?

How old was it?

And to think that I was tempted to skip the Conner Quilters Quilt Show because I was tired.

Not only would I have missed the Quilt Show, but also the Still Life Art Competition, the Flower Show, the Woodcarvers Demonstration, and the Shawnee Valley Dulcimers Historical Concert.

I would have missed the chance to be a kid again jumping on Mom and Dad’s bed in the Indiana summer time enjoying the simple thrills that life can bring to us.