A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel Read online

  As Sylvia told it, the cornucopia, dilapidated from years buried under a pile of tablecloths in the back of a cupboard, had been the centerpiece of the Bergstrom Thanksgiving table every year from the time Claudia had brought it home from school. When the Bergstroms gathered for the holiday feast, each member of the family placed something in the cornucopia—a small object, a drawing, a letter, anything small enough to fit inside would do as long as it represented what that person was most thankful for that year. Sylvia’s mother had always placed a picture of her family inside the centerpiece, while Sylvia’s father had usually selected something like an apple or a horseshoe to signify the abundance of their farm. The children’s choices were often more amusing if no less heartfelt—trinkets, toys—but everyone from the youngest toddler to the eldest grandparent added something. After the meal, the family removed the items from the cornucopia one by one as the person who had chosen each one explained what it symbolized and what he or she was most grateful for that year.

  Upon discovering her late sister’s long-forgotten craft, Sylvia had been inspired to revive the tradition, but with an important change appropriate for a gathering of quilters. Where the Bergstroms had used pictures, letters, or small trinkets, the Elm Creek Quilters would create quilt blocks, each stitching one that either by name or imagery represented something for which she wished to give thanks. As they enjoyed their Patchwork Potluck, they would share their stories of gratitude, the inspiration for their handiwork.

  For Sarah there had only been one possible choice.

  SARAH FINISHED HERbreakfast and started putting together her perennial contribution to the potluck, turkey Tetrazzini, occasionally stirring Anna’s ginger pumpkin bisque and glancing out the window over the sink to the back parking lot for the arrival of her friends. She was grating the mozzarella when Gretchen entered, her black cardigan buttoned over a crisp white blouse, the formality of her plum corduroy skirt offset by her comfortable fleece slippers, their size exaggerated by her thin ankles. “Nothing that smells so yummy could possibly be made from leftovers,” Gretchen exclaimed, savoring the aroma. “Is Anna here?”

  “Of course. You don’t think I’m responsible for something so complicated as ginger pumpkin bisque, do you?”

  “I’m sure you could whip up something just as tasty if you had the recipe,” said Gretchen loyally, opening the refrigerator. She was in her mid-sixties, with steel-gray hair cut in a pageboy and a slender frame that Sarah thought seemed chiseled thin by hard times. Still, Sarah had noticed that Gretchen’s careworn look had improved considerably since she had accepted the teaching position with Elm Creek Quilts and had moved into the manor with her husband. Joe, who endured lingering effects from a serious injury he had suffered years before as a steelworker in Ambridge, enjoyed restoring antique furniture in the woodshop he had set up in the barn and occasionally assisted Matt with his caretaker’s duties.

  “It would take more than a recipe or an entire collection of recipes to put me in Anna’s league,” said Sarah, filling a pot with water, setting it on a back burner, and turning on the flame.

  “It’s true that Anna has a gift.” Gretchen searched through the refrigerator, taking out plastic containers and lifting the lids to check the contents. “I’ve been feeling quite spoiled ever since I came to live here, having so many of my meals prepared by a professional chef. You weren’t going to use the leftover green beans and stuffing, were you? I thought I’d make a three-bean casserole.”

  “Mmm, sounds yummy. They’re all yours.” Sarah thought wistfully of Summer, a vegetarian, who often brought a three-bean salad to their potlucks but would not be joining them for the first time since they had begun their day-after-Thanksgiving tradition. Summer was closest in age to Sarah of all the original Elm Creek Quilters and her best friend among them except for Sylvia, who would always hold a unique place in Sarah’s heart. Probably the only Elm Creek Quilter who missed Summer more was Gwen, her mother.

  Sarah kept her ears tuned for the sound of cars approaching as she and Gretchen worked on their dishes. After a few moments, Gretchen broke the silence by saying absently, “I wonder what everyone else will contribute?”

  “Gwen will bring a dessert because she always does,” said Sarah, draining the cooked pasta in a colander in the sink. “Diane will bring something healthy or something that looks suspiciously new, and then she and Gwen will spend ten minutes debating what percentage of the dish has to be leftovers in order for it to meet the requirements.”

  Gretchen smiled as if she had no doubt Sarah’s predictions would prove true. “I was thinking aloud,” she said. “I should have been more clear. I was wondering what quilt blocks everyone has made for the cornucopia, and what they’re most thankful for. I had so much to be grateful for this year I had a difficult time choosing only one. And that, I think, is the sign of a very good year.”

  Sarah agreed, but privately she wondered if Gretchen’s trouble selecting a single quilt block said more about her indomitable spirit and appreciation of life’s simplest gifts than about the year.

  ONE BY ONE, the residents of Elm Creek Manor came to the kitchen for breakfast and to prepare their contributions for the potluck. Sylvia put together a casserole from the leftover butternut squash and cranberry cornbread dressing, which she promised tasted much better than it sounded, and then left to take freshly washed linens from the laundry room to the banquet hall. Sarah’s mother, Carol, who was visiting for the holiday, delighted Sarah by using leftover sweet potatoes to prepare one of her grandmother’s favorite recipes, a baked dish of sweet potatoes, apples, and cranberries. Matt stopped by on his way in from the barn to have a quick breakfast of cereal, a bagel, and coffee, as well as to hide the leftover rolls in the back of the pantry so that no one else would claim them.

  Sarah found him in the back hallway as he was putting on his coat and gloves before returning to work. “What was it you wanted to tell me this morning, honey?”

  Matt frowned thoughtfully as he laced up his sturdy boots. “What do you mean?”

  “This morning, in bed. You said, ‘Honey, I’ve been thinking,’ You never told me.”

  “Oh, that. It was nothing.”

  She caught him by the sleeve as he opened the back door. “It must have been something.”

  Matt hesitated and ran his gloved hand over his jaw. “I was thinking about growing a beard. What do you think?”

  Sarah folded her arms and studied his stubble, blond flecked with red. “I think you might look like a mountain man, but it’s your face.”

  “True, but you’re the one who’ll have to look at it.”

  She reached up to place her right hand on his left cheek. “Bearded or clean-shaven, there’s no face I’d rather see every day for the rest of my life.”

  “Wow.” Matt paused as if stunned. “The most I was hoping for was, ‘You can always shave it off if you don’t like it.’ ”

  “Sometimes in life you get more than you hoped for.”

  “That’s only fair, because too often you get less.”

  She drew her hand away. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” He grinned and kissed her. “Save me a seat beside you at lunch, okay?”

  She agreed and closed the door behind him after he left, troubled. Something more than a beard weighed on his mind, but he clearly no longer wanted to discuss it. Maybe later she could catch him at a more forthcoming moment, but in the meantime … she would try not to worry.

  She returned to the kitchen. Andrew, Sylvia’s husband, who had cooked for himself for years after his first wife’s death but nonetheless seemed ill at ease in Anna’s spotless, modern kitchen, stood with his hand on the refrigerator door studying the contents so apprehensively that Sarah was moved to assure him that he could consider the remaining bottles of wine and sparkling cider his contribution to the potluck.

  Relieved, Andrew accepted the offer. “I thought I’d have to go hungry,” he confessed. “Matt told me the rules.”<
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  “We’d make an exception for you,” said Sarah. “But don’t tell Matt.”

  “You still have time to make a block for the cornucopia, too,” remarked Carol as she deftly cut the peel from an apple in one long, shiny, red strip. She had finished her block late the night before, but not without chiding Sarah for not informing her of the ritual sooner. Sarah hadn’t thought to tell her. Her mother was only a novice quilter, not that her beginner’s status would have excluded her, but it hadn’t occurred to Sarah that her mother might want to participate.

  “I’ll stick to bringing the drinks and admiring the quilt blocks you ladies make,” said Andrew. He poured coffee into a thermos and said he’d be out in the woodlot cutting logs if anyone needed him.

  “He is an absolute gem,” Carol declared after he had gone. “Sylvia’s lucky to have him.”

  “I think their luck is mutual,” said Gretchen, and they all agreed. Sylvia and Andrew had known each other since childhood, but their lives had taken them down different paths. They had reunited decades later after each had lost a beloved spouse, never expecting that they would fall in love and marry.

  It was not quite nine o’clock when Gwen’s hybrid pulled into the parking lot. Within minutes they heard the back door open and close, followed by a bustle of boots and coats in the hall closet. Then Gwen appeared in the doorway carrying a glass cake pan covered in foil, her cheeks rosy from the cold, her long, wavy, auburn hair streaked with gray, a quilted knapsack on her back. “Did you hear the forecast?” she greeted them cheerfully, setting the pan on the counter. “We’re expected to get hit with a nor’easter today.”

  “What?” exclaimed Sarah. “The last I heard, we were only expected to get some light snow showers.”

  “How much snow are they predicting?” asked Sylvia, returning from her errand to the laundry room and banquet hall, her arms full of freshly washed dish towels.

  “Ten to twelve inches,” said Gwen, strolling through the kitchen to peek at her friends’ creations. “We all might have to spend the night.”

  “With quilt camp closed for the season, we have plenty of rooms,” said Sarah, settling into a booth in the breakfast nook with a cup of decaf coffee. “As long as everyone makes it to the manor before the storm hits, it shouldn’t spoil our plans. We could have an all-night quilt marathon like the old days.”

  “The front isn’t supposed to reach our county until this afternoon,” said Gwen, apparently the only one among them who had spared time for the news that morning. “It was over Ohio last time I saw the weather radar.”

  “I hope Jeremy doesn’t get stuck on the interstate,” said Anna, who had returned to the kitchen smiling and lost in her own thoughts, but whose smile faltered when she heard the updated forecast. “He’s probably near Cleveland right about now.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” said Sylvia. “He’s a resourceful young man, smart enough to know when he should pull off the road rather than press on.”

  “Maybe usually,” Anna murmured, and she looked no less worried as she put on a fresh pot of coffee and filled the kettle for tea.

  The manor’s permanent residents finished preparing for the potluck lunch and were tidying the kitchen when the last two Elm Creek Quilters arrived together, the taller, younger Diane driving petite white-haired Agnes, as was their longtime custom. Blond, enviably slender Diane was the mother of two sons in college, although she didn’t look it. “Make way for the main course,” she warned as she entered the kitchen, still clad in her tailored red wool coat and black leather gloves and carrying a large white casserole dish with a glass lid.

  “Hold on,” said Gwen, her beaded necklaces clinking softly as she put her head to one side, studying the casserole dish, which thudded heavily when Diane set it on the counter. “A main course means effort. You just dumped a bag of frozen veggies in there and stirred in a can of cream of mushroom soup, didn’t you?”

  “Shut it, hippie,” said Diane breezily, taking off her gloves and tucking them into her coat pockets. “This is Agnes’s deep dish turkey pie. We swapped. She’s carrying my cinnamon bread. It’s lighter.”

  “One would hope so,” said Gwen. Sarah exchanged a knowing look with Sylvia. Gwen and Diane bantered so habitually that an outsider would never guess they were dear friends.

  Just then, Agnes, who had paused to leave her winter garb in the hall closet, entered the kitchen. “Good morning, everyone!” She set a plastic bag holding a round loaf of marbled bread on the counter beside the casserole. “Who’s ready for a quilter’s holiday feast?”

  As the others happily chimed in that they were ready, Gwen studied the bread skeptically. “Did you stop at the bakery on your way in? That’s cheating.”

  “Of course not, Gwen,” chided Agnes, her blue eyes mild behind pink-tinted glasses.

  “See? I have a witness,” Diane retorted over her shoulder as she left the kitchen to put away her coat and boots. “I made it in my bread machine this morning.”

  “Well, to be fair,” said Agnes, glancing after her, “I can only verify that we didn’t stop at the bakery on the way. I didn’t witness any actual baking.”

  “I’m sure we can take Diane’s word for it,” said Gretchen just as Diane returned.

  “You don’t know her as well as we do,” said Gwen. “Tell us, Diane. Exactly what part of this bread qualifies as a leftover?”

  “Almost all of it,” said Diane, searching the cupboards for her favorite coffee mug. “The flour, the salt, the cinnamon—I bought every ingredient for other recipes.”

  Gwen shook her head. “Kitchen staples aren’t the same as leftovers.”

  “I didn’t use them up earlier, and therefore, they’re left over.” Diane filled the large pink cappuccino mug with coffee and sipped it, black. “Anyway, I have two young men home from college. It’s a Thanksgiving miracle I have any food left in the house.”

  Suddenly Gwen turned wistful, and Sarah knew she was thinking of her daughter, Summer, hundreds of miles away at the University of Chicago. “Now, that’s a problem I’d like to have.”

  Diane eyed her over the rim of her coffee mug. “You’d like to have two young men home from college in your house? Why, Gwen, this is a side of you I haven’t seen before.”

  “Shut it, cheater,” said Gwen.

  Before Diane could argue that she hadn’t cheated, Sylvia stepped in and suggested they coordinate the cooking and reheating times and temperatures for their assorted dishes so that everything would be ready to serve as close to the same time as they could manage. Anna took charge and quickly wrote up a schedule, and with the kitchen details sorted out, the Elm Creek Quilters gathered their supplies and reconvened in the ballroom to begin their daylong quilting marathon.

  The ballroom took up almost the entire first floor of the south wing of the manor, added on to the original home in the early 1900s after the Bergstrom family had made its fortune raising champion horses. A carpeted border roughly twenty feet wide encircled the broad parquet dance floor, most of which was subdivided into classrooms by tall, white, moveable partitions. Three crystal chandeliers hung high above from a ceiling covered with a swirling vine pattern of molded plaster. A dais on the far side of the room served as a stage from which teachers could offer a seminar to the entire camp at once or where musicians or other performers entertained the campers during evening programs. On the opposite wall was a large fireplace flanked by a rack of fire tools and a newly filled log holder, evidence of Andrew’s hard work. Ever thoughtful, he had arranged chairs nearby and had laid a fire for them, awaiting only the touch of a match. Tall, narrow windows topped by semicircular curves lined the south, east, and west walls. The heavy drapes had been drawn back, and through the glass Sarah saw a few large, white flakes swirling in a light wind.

  Though the ballroom was too grand and vast to be called intimate, it was the perfect place for the Elm Creek Quilters to spend a day quilting. The classrooms provided every quilting tool or notion they
could possibly need, from sewing machines to irons to rotary cutters and mats, and the chairs pulled up to the fireplace gave them a sense of warmth and coziness. Earlier, Matt and Joe had rolled wheeled worktables from the classroom area closer to the fireside and had set up workstations for cutting fabric, sewing, and ironing so that no one would have to venture far from the camaraderie and conversation to attend to those tasks. Fortified by coffee or tea, mindful of the time and tasks remaining in the kitchen, the quilters settled down to work, threading needles and unfolding fabric, arranging quilt blocks on the parquet dance floor, and admiring one another’s projects.

  “There’s no better way to kick off the quilting season than with a quilter’s holiday,” said Diane with a satisfied sigh as she settled back into an armchair, propped her feet up on a padded stool, and paged through a holiday-themed craft magazine.

  “The quilting season?” echoed Anna, searching through Sarah’s thread box for a shade of gold that more closely matched the scrap of fabric on her lap. “Isn’t it always the quilting season at Elm Creek Manor?”

  “Of course, but the day after Thanksgiving marks the official start of the official quilting season.”

  Gretchen looked dubious. “I’ve never heard of an official quilting season, and I’ve been quilting for a very long time.”

  “It’s only official in Diane’s mind,” said Gwen. “She’s lobbied the National Quilter’s Association to have it declared a holiday, but to no avail.”

  “I have not,” retorted Diane, but she looked as if she thought it might be a good idea.

  Gwen threaded a needle with a long strand of cream-colored thread. “Then stop tossing around the word official like it means something.”