Thrifted Love
Some people cringe at the thought of re-using another person’s old junk; but for others, a thrift shop is a place of delight, with treasures waiting hidden among the dross. I love the hunt: not for clothes, but among the housewares where nineteenth century Noritaki china sometimes appears among the branded coffee mugs, and pure silk and linen slide in beside polyester tablecloths and microfibre sheets. It isn’t every visit that yields a treasure, but once in a while …
Many years ago, I bought a hand-stitched piecework quilt at a thrift store. I wondered how such a thing ever came to be discarded. Some0ne chose fabric scraps, pieced them into an intricate pattern, and then painstakingly sandwiched the quilt-top and a backing around a layer of insulation, and joined the whole together with thousands of tiny one-eighth-inch stitches. Was it a wedding present for a beloved daughter, to warm her marriage bed? A going-away quilt for a child to take with him to university, to warm his way into adulthood? Maybe a group project, stitched on a frame by a dozen quilters as they shared fellowship together? Intricate handwork like that is a special kind of prayer. The quilter’s thoughts drift to the item’s future user, and each stitch is made as much of love as of thread. How did so much love end up in a thrift store?
There are good reasons, of course. Maybe someone died and the heirs already had as many hand-made quilts as they could use. Maybe someone lost their home and had no way to keep it. Maybe its owner didn’t recognize the difference between this quilt and a factory-made quilt and so didn’t value it. Whatever circumstances brought it into my hands, I did value it, and gave frequent thanks to its maker and the love she had squandered on a stranger like me. I kept it in my car, as savvy Albertans do, in case of a winter stranding. I snuggled under it for a nap on the back seat, in those sleep-deprived years of driving children to ballet classes while still working long days as a full-time engineer.
When daughter #1 abandoned ballet school for medical school and discovered that medical clerkships aren’t feasable without a car, I sold her my beloved MINI for one dollar, and the quilt went along with it. One bitterly cold, very late night when she was doing her residency, she came home and found a woman huddled in the dubious shelter of the apartment building steps, asleep but shivering. She went back to her car, got the quilt, and tucked the woman up as warmly as she could. The night was quiet, and in the morning both woman and quilt were gone. She later apologized for losing “my” quilt, but she knew how little I would value the quilt compared to the life it may have saved.
Yesterday, for the second time in twenty years or more, I found a hand-stitched quilt in the thrift store. So much love, on sale for $6.99. I gave it to my daughter to keep in her car, and if it goes missing again, I will be perfectly happy. Because, warm and life-saving as the quilted insulation was, the love and prayer wrapped around every stitch was just as warm, just as life-saving. So, if you have ever poured love and prayer into a project that somehow eventually ended up in the world of thrifting, thank-you. Thank-you. You may never know what life your love has saved, but it is counted to your credit.