What the Quilts Did When They Were Not Covering the Wells

©2023 Maria Hamilton Abegunde

They dreamed of tiny feet with tiny toes tangled in their loose threads. It did not

matter that sometimes those feet played and encouraged a heel or nail to pull out 

the batting that older hands had worked 

so hard to stuff between the cloth. 

On hot days, they waited for crooks 

of elbows to carry them from the bed, sometimes piled on top of each other, until they reached the clothes lines and porch rails where they would catch the wind before returning to tired but perfumed bodies.

Rarely did they lie on the ground, 

over a car, on a tree branch. Those places were not suited for the delicate squares 

of cotton, never brand new but always clean, ready to remember for anyone

who touched them what it meant 

to be protected by love

After Deloice Holliday’s Childhood Memory

©2023 Maria Hamilton Abegunde

The moment she says it, the women would grab the quilts and run to cover the drinking wells, I see them, hands held high above their heads, their feet stomping through grass and gravel, running, minutes after they recognized the sound of the small engine, the nose of the small plane bearing down on them as if the pilot means to shoot them all. Instead, there is a mist that covers everything they will later cut and cook, kill and roast, grow and harvest. And, later, still, there will be the sickness that grows inside them, their bodies refusing to hold anything but memories of the days when the land nourished them. But for now, I see women running, grabbing quilts off lines and porches, bright purple and deep brown stars billowing behind them like heavy parachutes. If not for the plane and its noise and 

the hiss of spray – and what I know is coming - I could imagine them, girls, holding their grandmother’s stories, and the stories of the mothers before her, holding them by the edges of cotton so thin and soft that when the sun shone down in the center of each patch they could hear their own futures laughing with joy for all they would become.