Cover Me with Love

This is a very special quilt, made for a very special girl. One year when I was teaching first grade, Alma (one of my students) was with her father out in front of the school when he had a massive heart attack and died instantly. He was not even thirty years old.

Quilters in the Guardian Angles Swap contributed the squares in this quilt, and I put it together for Alma. I told her that there were a lot of people who really cared about her and her family, and what had happened to her father.

Alma is the little girl in the white T-shirt. Her cousin Johnny is sitting on her right. I took the squares to class as they arrived, and we would lay them out on the floor. Alma herself decided how the squares were to be arranged.

The smile on Alma's face says a lot about how healing a quilt can be in a time of grief.

My husband Tom is on the right. Myrna, the woman on the left, taught in the room next to mine. We were both teaching bilingual first grade in Irving, Texas, at the time.

It was so good to have such a physical way of providing comfort to Alma.