I wasn’t lucky enough to spend the night with my Grandmother and Grandfather very often when I was 2-4 years old. But once in a while I could talk my mother into letting me stay. Grandmother was always happy to have me (I think) and my dad was probably glad to get out of dressing me in the morning so he could deliver me to their house as he went to work.
I have a lot of memories of the dark metal frame bed, in what I considered my bedroom, at her house. Most of the memories are from family dinners. Grandfather would stack the mattresses from their bed on top of the mattresses on that spare bedroom bed. This made for a high picnic area for the kids to eat their lunch.
We were all very young so the top mattress was above of our heads and we thought we were eating on top of a mountain. It was fun to eat up there. We helped each other to scale the side of the 4 mattresses to settle in to eat our meal. It was a relay of handing up the plate of food and the drink to someone and then a cousin on the floor would help you onto a chair and then onto the bed.
The last one up was always the biggest and tallest cousin. Then we were set for our picnic until someone needed to climb over us to get seconds at the adult table. There weren’t any kid’s tables because the adult table took up the whole living room and what should have been the dining room in the house but was Grandmother’s bedroom.
Grandmother’s house was heated with a gas stove in the living room. That room and her bedroom were the warmest rooms in the house. Her kitchen was warm because she cooked every meal every day. The little bathroom had a very small gas heater but the spare bedroom didn’t have any heat other than what managed to come in from the living room.
On Grandmother’s spare bed was an old quilt she’d made. It was dark colors and not a pretty colorful quilt like most of her generation made. It had large 6-8 inch squares, all the same size, that were from old bib overalls of heavy denim that had been Grandfathers work clothes and some from heavy flannel or wool shirts of his.
The backing of the big quilt was a dark gray or navy wool fabric. Inside this large dark quilt she hadn’t put filler but used an old worn out quilt. The end product of the two quilts, sewn together and the outer one being wool and denim, was a very heavy quilt. The quilt was not quilted but tied at the corners of the squares with dark thread.
I remember getting into bed in the winter when it was cold in that little spare bedroom. She would take my little blanket that I liked to sleep with and hold it near the stove in the living room and then bring it in and tuck it around me. I had to make sure I was comfortable when she did that.
Then she would pull the sheets up and the dark heavy quilt over them and I was set for the night. Once the heavy quilt was in place I would stay snug and warm all night but I could barely move or turn over under it. If I did change position in the night, it was only once because it was hard to move, but I was warm and felt safe all night.
Turning over was like trying to move a 25 pound weight when I didn’t weigh much more than the quilt. But, I remember the feeling of warmth and security when I was tucked under that heavy quilt and I slept better than at any other time during the year.
I hated it when it warmed up and she put one of the chenille bedspreads on the spare bed for the summer and warm months. When the Chenille spread was on the bed I was banned from sitting on the bed with my black patent buckle shoes.
During the months that heavy wool quilt served as the bedspread I was allowed to play on the bed once in awhile. She thought if you were on the bed you must be tired and you had to take a nap. That especially applied to her bed. She had a white chenille bed spread on her bed year round. NO ONE, kids or adults ever sat on her white chenille spread.
I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago and thought I was back in Grandmother’s spare bedroom. When I woke up the covers felt heavy on my legs and I thought I was lying under that old quilt. It was a happy thought until I was fully awake and realized I was in my own bed. The large pillow that I put under my knees to sleep was lying on top of my legs instead of under my knees.
I wish I knew what happened to Grandmother’s old quilt that was my security blanket and the warmest blanket I ever slept under. That not so pretty dark quilt is one of my fondest memories of sleeping at Grandmother’s house. To contact Sandy: [email protected]
