Tears during Testing

SOLSC  #26 - Slice of Life is sponsored every Tuesday by Stacey and Ruth from Two Writing Teachers.  For the month of March, I've joined the challenge to post a slice of life daily. 

 I was in the middle of a state test for teachers in Texas when I was so moved by a poem on the test that I started to cry.  I wanted to write down some words from the poem, but was fearful the test monitors might think I was cheating.  So I had to rely on the few words that I could remember from the poem to guide my search.  I searched for some time (this was pre-google days) before I found the poem that meant so much to me.
It's a poem about quilts.  I love that my granny stitched quilts and as I read the words to this poem, I could picture her standing and working for hours with her quilt squares.  She was a rather distant woman, not a nurturing play-with-her-grandkids kind of grandma.  I love some of the things that I learned about her as I grew older.  She was a midwife in the small Oklahoma community where she lived, miles from the nearest town and helped many women bear children at home often without the benefit of a doctor.  She could look at a dress, create a pattern, and replicate any design that she saw.  As the mother to five children, and the wife of a farmer and rancher during the Dust Bowl days of the depression, she rarely had the resources to do this, but she had the talent!   
After my grandfather's death and the sale of the farm, Granny moved to town where she lived across the street and down two houses from us.   In spite of her rather distant personality, I knew that she loved me.  When I was in junior high, I used to spend the night with Granny when she started to become forgetful and just needed someone else in the house. 
Each grandchild received a quilt from Granny when he or she married.  Once I passed the age of twenty-four and was still unmarried, my mom and her sisters decided I could have my quilt.  (They may have been afraid that I would never marry.)  I remember the first time my mom walked into my apartment and saw the quilt on my bed.  She thought I should save it (for what?), but I insisted that using it and seeing it made me happy and reminded me of Granny's love!

So what was the poem that moved me so?  "My Mother Pieced Quilts" by Teresa Paloma Acosta.  Please check out the entire poem if you love poetry and quilts.  The poem is the story of a Chicano woman who connects her mother's practical art of quilt making with her personal family and cultural histories.  How could I (a girl from Oklahoma) identify so readily to a poem written by a Chicano woman?  Listen to these words:

"how you shaped patterns and oblong and round
positioned
balanced
then cemented them
with your thread
a steel needle
a thimble"

I could see my granny in the living room of her house with her quilt scraps shaping patterns and then cementing them.  

And then these final words:

"stretched out they lay
armed/ready/shouting/celebrating

knotted with love
the quilts sing on."

And that is why my quilts are always out so that I can see them celebrating and hear their singing!