My two grandmothers could not be more different from each other. Where Boo was content to stay put in the house next door to the one she grew up in my father’s mother Halice was a world traveler of sorts, making it as far as Greece. Where Boo was happy to be taken care of Halice was fierce and independent. I will not lie, the woman scared me at times but I also have a lot of respect for her and what she accomplished. It says something about her that she actually appears in some of the photos in the book I chose for her quilt, “A Fair Field And No Favor” A Concise History of the Grange in Maine.

“A Fair Field And No Favor” A Concise History of the Maine Grange. Stanley Russell Howe

She was born in a very small town in rural central Maine. Her senior year in High School the teacher got ill so she took over the class and she became a teacher. Years later she got her teaching certificate. Many years after that, the same year that my father got his degree and the year that her second husband died she got an actual teaching degree at UMO. Yes, her second husband, because many years earlier she had the guts, during the depression, in rural Maine, with a child, to get a divorce because her first husband proved unkind. I cannot imagine the cajones that it took to do such a thing; I also cannot imagine what it was like for my father and his brothers and sister and their step-siblings, in that one-room schoolroom in Levant Maine to have their mother for a teacher. When my uncle Verlee, Halice’s oldest son, went off to fight with the First Marine Corps Division in WWII in the South Pacific. When he wrote her letters home from Guadalcanal and Okinawa she sent them back with the grammatical errors marked in red. Butter would not melt in this woman’s mouth but I would want her by side at the bulwarks.

I’d like to think that I got some of my chutzpah from her. When I was young, she bought me a book, The Pleasure of Ruins, that contributed to my own wanderlust and eventually my majoring in anthropology. I thought about using this book for her quilt but there are still a few locations pictured in it that I haven’t made it to yet (I still have high hopes for making it to Persepolis some day).

Here is the quilt pattern and the prints that I’ve chosen for Halice’s quilt:

School Girl’s Puzzle

I hope you all have a Thanksgiving filled with Friends, Family and Food!