My daughter is an avid quilter and books are a large part of her life both in her profession as a teacher and in her leisure time. She was hostess to the club for this meeting.
The group Under Cover Quilters take their book interests a step further in integrating book and quilts. The club began at the first of the year with a book called "The Good Pig" by Sy Montgomery. The subtitle is "The extraordinary life of Christopher Hogwood. Members of the club spoke with Ms. Montgomery by phone to get her insight into the book as they embarked on their club idea. Then each member designed a quilt on their own depicting something they took from the book: an idea, a scene, a collage, a character. The goal was to have the quilt ready for the Mt. Bachelor Quilters Guild Outdoor Quilt Show in August. They all came up with delightful interpretations of the book with their quilts.
Of course it took only a month to read and discuss the book and it took from January to August to do the quilts. In the intervening months the group read a variety of other books.
The members represent a cross section of ages and walks of life, from young mothers to grandmothers; occupations include a teacher, couple of home-school teacher/mothers, a B&N bookstore employee, Habitat for Humanity employee, and several retirees. It is obvious when you are around them that whatever the day-job, they enjoy themselves when they relax with their quilting and books. Their quilts reflect that and their conversation reflects that. Over the year they progressed from snacks to a potluck with each meeting, particularly if there was any food component in the book.
The meeting began with dinner. A potluck with food that reflected the book. In The Ruin the main character Cliff flees home to take refuge in a cliff dwelling abandoned some 700 years in the past by the Ancestral Puebloans sometimes referred to as the Anasazi. The location is the high plateau at the foot of Mesa Verde National Park in SW Colorado. During the year that the boy hides out in the canyon and cliff dwelling, the boy eats what he can gather, hunt, or glean by the light of the moon from his parent's fields after harvest. He has also abandoned his mother's richly laden table of farm cooking.
The ladies outdid themselves with two different kinds of cornbread, (much better than Cliff is able to make on the primitive grindstone and cooking stone in the ruin), elk meat in a wonderful gravy (Cliff hunts venison with an atlatl and makes stew and jerky), honey in the comb (as good as the tamarack and clover honey from the bee tree), porcupine meatballs, um good (Cliff made jerky out of his porcupine), biscuits (just like Cliff's mom's) asparagus (This asparagus had butter on it and a little seasoning. Cliff would have died for a little of that on what he gathered and ate raw), nuts and wild berries, (different kind of nuts and berries but the same idea), and enchiladas (just like those brought by Hector's mom to the planting party noon meal ). The idea of bringing food particular to the book was fun and added a special touch to the evening.
It was a special evening. I had anticipated many of the questions: was it autobiographical, were the characters based on actual persons, did I have an eighth grade sweetheart named Angela Martinez. But one question, I wasn't prepared for.
Most if not all of the women in the group are mothers and some are grandmothers. Several expressed the thought that if their son or grandson were to disappear, run off and not be found or not communicate for an extended time as in the book, they would be devastated. How could I live with the situation I had created, taking a boy away from the mother that I had created?
While there is a coming of age, adventure component in the book, it has a serious message.
The character Cliff is torn by his decision to stay away, but he knows he must. He has reached a state that many young men and women reach after persistent bullying and after they have asked for help and it hasn't come in either the form of human or spiritual help. He removes himself from the situation until he feels it is safe to reach out when he begins to feel there is no hope for himself. And at various times in the book, his mother senses that he is nearby.
In the real world, young men and women who are hardly old enough to be considered men or women are not taking the route that the character in The Ruin took and are not as successful as he is, and are giving up and taking their own lives. In this past year the number of instances that have hit the national media have grown to alarming proportions.
And in spite of the fact that schools across the country are making it a priority to combat bullying in the schools, and celebrities are joining campaigns to educate both victims and the public about bullying of gays and those who feel "different", the numbers keep climbing.
I wasn't and am not sure how to answer the question, "Did you really have to separate a Mother as caring as Etta Mae from her son like that for so long?" They are not real people, they are figments of my imagination, and I treated them way I felt I needed to to tell the story. I had to wrestle with this question as I worked on the story. I wanted to make the point, but not be cruel about it, wasn't it kinder to have them separated for a long period than to separate them permanently by having him kill himself over being bullied as so many young men or young women are doing today?
Respectfully submitted,
Kenneth Fenter
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