My mother never sat down in the evening without a crochet hook in her hand.
She kept her yarn in a basket by the bed. She watched the news with a half-made afghan in her lap. When one was finished, she folded it over the back of a chair and started the next one that same night.
So when we cleared out her house, there were afghans everywhere. They were on the couch, in the hall closet, at the foot of every bed, and in a cedar chest in the spare room.
There were two quilts too. One was from a store. The other was made by my grandmother, every stitch by hand.
I couldn’t sort them then. I packed them all into one big plastic tub and brought it home to our basement.
That tub sat there for almost three years. This fall, my sister came over on a Saturday, and we finally opened it together.
This is what we found, how we decided what to do with old quilts and afghans, and where the rest of them went to keep someone warm.
The Tub in the Basement
My sister brought coffee cake, and I made a pot of coffee. We carried the tub up to the dining room and set it on the floor.
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