Ben’s quilt

Ben’s Quilt

I got this quilt from Grandma
Put it on the floor
Ran my cars along the roads
And made the engines roar,

Raced my speedboat in the lake
Drove the kids to school,
Picked up groceries at the store
And hauled wheat to the Pool.*

Other blankets are for sleep
But this one is for play,
No other quilt I know can warm
In such a special way.

© Violet Nesdoly

*Pool was the name of a grain company, painted on many prairie elevators when I was growing up.

*****************
My mom was an inveterate quilt maker. She made some sort of quilt for each of her 20+ grandkids, many of them play quilts. The wonderful thing about these quilts was that each one was different. Some were based on songs or lullabies (one illustrated a song—My Pigeon House—that she sang to each of us when we were babies). Others had themes—birds, animals, nursery rhymes. The photo is of two of the quilts she made. The one on the left is similar in theme to the one she made for my son. You’ll recognize lots of nursery rhyme characters in the one on the right.

“Ben’s Quilt'” is a poem I wrote in 1999. It is a child’s, my son’s, imagined response to Grandma’s quilt. I was reminded of it by Amy’s wonderful poem “Quilt Map” that was part of last week’s  Poetry Friday.

This poem is submitted to Poetry Friday, hosted this week by Jama Rattigan at Jama’s Alphabet Soup, the most delicious blog on the net.