Margaret was about to turn ninety. Oh, what a life she has lived. It was winter and she was cold. Margaret took her sewing kit out and started a quilt. She couldn’t drive anymore and lived alone.
Her kids were all grown, her husband dead and long gone.
The house she had lived in for the past seventy years was empty now.
She took out the Wal-Mart sack of fabric scraps and sat down on the couch. Margaret had decided that she’d sew a quilt this winter. The needle she had was already threaded, in her sewing kit and she was glad of that. She took it out and ran the needle through two pieces of scrap.
Margaret worked on her quilt the whole month of December.
Her fingers were cold and stiff and started to bleed on the scrap pieces she was sewing together.
“Christmas was over,” she thought. “Now, I’ll have more time to finish this quilt.”
It was a present to herself, it didn’t matter if it was a little late.
The long, brisk, gray January had begun. Margaret looked out the window and watched the snow fall on the ground.
On January 18th, she started to get frustrated. Margaret had made quilts before. It never took this long or been this hard.
She sat on the couch, petting her cat and decided to finish the quilt no matter what it took. Filled with pure determination, Margaret picked up her fabric.
She didn’t finish it until March, but at least she finished it. Margaret was proud of herself and proceeded to put her sewing things away. She opened the lid of her sewing kit and placed the crooked needle back in its place.
Poor Margaret never even knew she was sewing with a crooked needle.
Jamie Godwin
