What I Do With All This Love

Last week, my daughter called me out of the blue. I answered with a quilt draped across my lap, needle halfway through a stitch.

She said she didn’t want any of them.

“My quilts?” I asked, unsure I heard right.

“Yeah, Mom. I just don’t have space for all that stuff. Maybe donate them or something?”

Just like that. No malice in her voice, just matter-of-fact dismissal. She didn’t mean to hurt me, I think. But the words still settled heavy, like wet snow on an already-bent branch.

Forty-three years. That’s how long I’ve been quilting.
Forty-three years of threading together love, grief, joy, and memory one square at a time.

I started back when she was still in grade school—after she went to bed, while the dishwasher hummed in the background and my world was quiet enough to think. I’d sit with fabric spread across the dining room table, snipping and pinning, letting the rhythm of stitching soothe whatever ache had taken root in my chest that day.

There are baby quilts—tiny, delicate, soft enough for a newborn’s skin—made for grandchildren I rarely see.
There are wedding quilts, carefully pieced together with lace and linen, gifted to nieces who didn’t bother to send thank-you cards.
There are grief quilts I made when we lost my sister, then my father, then my mother.
And comfort quilts sewn during those long stretches of silence in this house, when my husband’s eyes seemed glued to the TV and his mind even further away.

Each quilt lives here now, folded neatly over the rails of a baby crib-turned-quilt rack my husband bought me at an estate sale, back when he still noticed things that made me smile.

And I—I keep making them.

Even when my fingers ache with arthritis.
Even when my eyesight blurs the seams and I have to squint under the brightest lamp.
Even when no one asks for them.

Because what else am I supposed to do with all this love I still have to give?

Then last month, I signed up for Tedooo. I saw it in a quilting group and figured… why not? I never expected much. I certainly didn’t think anyone would care about some aging woman’s quilts, stitched from patterns my grandmother taught me.

But they did.

People commented. Women—young and old—shared their own stories. Some even placed orders. Some just said thank you.

And then yesterday, a message.

A young mother. Her dad had passed away. She had a box of his shirts—plaid, soft, worn in the elbows. She wanted to know if I could make a memory quilt out of them. “I looked everywhere,” she wrote. “But when I saw your quilts, I knew you’d understand.”

I sat with that message for a long time. My daughter didn’t want my quilts. But this stranger did.

She saw the care, the tenderness in my stitches. She saw that a quilt isn’t just fabric and thread—it’s remembrance. It’s presence. It’s love that lingers.

So I started the memory quilt last night. I ran my hand over each shirt, imagining a father who told bedtime stories and fixed squeaky doors and always smelled faintly of sawdust or peppermint.

This quilt will matter.

Someone will wrap themselves in it and feel held again.

And as I worked, I thought about all the other daughters out there—daughters who might not share my blood but understand my heart.

Maybe mine won’t ever want the things I’ve made.
But somewhere out there, other daughters do.

And that’s enough.
That’s more than enough.

So I’ll keep quilting.
Keep stitching.
Keep loving the only way I know how.

One square at a time.
One story at a time.
One heart at a time.