The Quilt Inn Country Cookbook

Aliske Webb

Grandma’s Quilt Lies on Grandpa’s Bed

One of the favorite bedrooms at the Inn is on the third floor.It’s one of two large

rooms converted from the attic and has three dormer windows on the East wall. There

are soft white lace curtains and pink-and-green floral chintz-covered pillows resting in

the windowseats. Despite low ceilings with a gambreled roofline, it’s a light and airy

spot to sit in the sunlight, sip a morning coffee and watch the world below. Nesting

mourning doves coo sadly in the eaves outside.

I call it the “Granny Room” although by rights it should be the Grandpa and

Grandma room. There’s an antique quilt whose white background has yellowed to light

amber, dark green has paled to the color of new grass and “turkey red” has faded to

soft pink. It’s been repaired many times, by different hands. Sometimes well and neatly

done, sometimes poorly and unevenly done. It’s not a fashionable quilt but it’s a

comforting one. It’s a quilt your Grandma would have thrown on the back of her rocking

chair or on a daybed on the porch, used but mostly ignored. It lies on an early rustic

bed made with thick ropes that groan as you sink into the deep mattress. The bed is

over a hundred years old and could tell many stories of sleepers and lovers, of births

and deaths and tears, and of the dreams from pioneer homesteaders to present day

homebuilders. It is massive and crude and slightly crooked. The unfinished wood has

been rubbed smooth and dark by years of continued use.

Our pioneer grandfathers, as sturdy young men, carved out homesteads in the

wilderness across the country. They hewed and hauled logs to build homes. They built

barns, drove cattle and ploughshares, and dug wells for life-giving water. They provided

the basic necessities of survival—the “hardware” of walls and roofs and tables—taken

from a land that was hard and sinewy as their own bodies. Grandpa carved the

wooden bed.

The women, as courageous and capable young women, bore and raised the

children that ensured life would continue on the wide land. They made mere food into

a meal, mere fat and lye into soap and candles, mere fabric into curtains, clothes and

quilts that gave warmth and comfort to the family—all by her soft and civilizing hands.

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Country Cooking