Old Quilter, Old Poet

She’s been making quilts for half a century and he’s been making poems that long as well and every now and then he brings a chocolate shake to her place so they can take a break and talk. He always finds her at the frame, peering through thick lenses. "I’m still house bound, Walt," she laughs and likes to say. Once she told him quilts are poems. She works with scraps of cloth and he with scraps of words and quilts and poems are never done until all the scraps are where they have to be. Now she's working on a Double Wedding Ring, a quilt not unlike a sonnet in that both follow patterns of their own but she likes crazy quilts because she can improvise with scraps she finds on floors around the house. Her job's to make something beautiful from scraps others might throw away. He has no problem understanding that. He saves scraps of words and marries them in ways some folk find odd or useless. Finishing her shake she says maybe they play jazz and just don’t know it. She likes Miles Davis and puts his album on when a crazy quilt won't go her way but she would never listen to Miles while she’s at work on a Double Wedding Ring. Yo-Yo Ma, she says, is the man for that. The old poet says he would never disagree. Donal Mahoney