This summer was the 150th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. I remember the first time I visited that hallowed ground in college. It was so spiritual for me . . . hard to describe. Anyway, Paul and I went back on the fated mountain-bike-accident-right-before-our-flight trip to DC of 2002, so it's part of the many memories that have a drug-induced fuzziness for him, and make my arms ache remembering pushing a grown man in a wheelchair all over our nation's historical sites. Turns out, not so flat after all.
(He kept getting out of the wheelchair for the pictures as if that would remove it from our memory too. I'm saving you from the 27 pictures he took of the deer at Valley Forge. He almost broke the camera with his stupor of fascination banging it against the passenger window. That's probably also when I took the map away from him for the last time.)
So to commemorate this important event in American history, and as a tribute to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, life crept into my quilting and this one became my Gettysburg quilt. I changed one of the charcoal crosses into a red one, to remind us of the men who died during the three-day battle.
Today we're not asked to battle in cornfields, but I do think we have our own authentic American battles for our day. Depending on which side of the fence you're sitting, you may look at them differently, but we're all trying to protect and preserve what it means to be free in our country. And surely that middle ground could be enough to get something productive done.
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