Quill & Parchment:A Quilt of Some Porportion

A Quilt of Some Proportion
by Bob Skeele

Early yesterday morning under a gray winter
sky, I was driving east away from LaConner

when I came upon the largest, most beautiful
quilt I'd ever seen, there in the Cascades closest

by, the snow-dusted clear cuts forming a patch
work of white, irregularly shaped pieces against

a dark, mottled background as if Eos, the Goddess
of Dawn, had gripped her strong, slender fingers

on the frosty edge of the morning and, shaking
out the folds and wrinkles, had floated it softly

down on the round foothills before me so that my
eyes, or any eyes, weary after a restless night,

might find, for a moment, a place to light and rest.

With the Quilt Museum behind me it's not at all
strange that I should be thinking about quilts, and

quilters for that matter, for they have stitched and
needled their way, skillfully and colorfully, into

LaConner's creative life. The quilters in hard hats
on the hillsides simply add to the artistic mix, their

chain saws and other heavy machinery skillfully
cutting and skidding the logs elsewhere, the

cleared sections with their zany, incidental lines
the loggers' contribution to the quilt's foothill designs.

A quilter as a logger is hard to imagine but not so
difficult the other way around. Though loggers

may object, it remains solid fact: without their noisy
needlework there would be no hillside patches,

and without the patches there would be no Cascade
quilt, and without the quilt there would be no poem

and without the poem there would be no lilt, and
without the lilt there would be no counter to the
world's tilt.

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