Adah Makes a Quilt
Adah, 1979
Cheyenne, Wyoming

by Anna Citrino
 

No longer in my house, I live at a home for the elderly
where I’m stitching together a quilt for my great niece,
Adah. Edra’s daughter Freida named her after me.
Home from college, she wrote to ask about my life.
What words could I find to describe my story?
It’s difficult to tell it to myself.

“My life is like your mother’s,” I wrote her.
I know it’s not an answer she wants.
Mother, grandmother, daughter, or great niece—
isn’t there a thread running through every woman’s life
similar to my story?

As I sew, I recall the day my sisters and I lassoed a steer.
We’d seen the animal’s unpredictable moves, and had practiced
perfecting our timing. Eyes focused on the target, the loop
sailing above the head, rope reeling through Jamie’s hands,
she dropped it over the steer’s head, Edra pulled up the slack
as its head jerked back and the animal fell to the ground.

Together, we held the ropes that held the steer in place.
Muscles strained and tense, tugging on the ropes, I looked
in the steer’s eyes as it bellowed and struggled in the dirt
trying to free itself, and saw myself pulling against restraints,
resisting the rules and the life I’d been given that held me tight,
then I thought of us sisters, ropes in hand, each of us
working to hold on to a life we wanted to have.

Thinning hair, stiff joints and sagging skin, no longer strong
like that steer we roped, I still hold on. If before I had beauty,
it’s gone now. A woman is never pleasing enough
in someone’s eyes, though my niece doesn’t follow
my generation’s rules for beauty. She has her own priorities,
but believes me beautiful because that’s how her mother sees me.

Stitch by stitch I piece together brightly colored squares
between strips of flowered fabric, a story of cloth I make
with my hands from clothes I’ve worn. Slowly, the quilt
comes together, a pattern reaching back through time
and the long thread of unnamed women whose lives
we’ll never know who patched together what they had,
so they could pass on something beautiful
to bring a bit of warmth.


* * * * *

"Adah Makes a Quilt" is part of Anna Citrino's growing longer work of related poems. More poems from the longer work were posted here on November 10 and 11, December 14 and 15, 2023, and January 30, 2024.

Anna Citrino is the author of A Space Between, and Buoyant, Saudade, and To Find a River. Anna taught abroad in six different countries: Turkey, Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, and the UK. Her work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Canary, Evening Street Review, Indelible, Paterson Literary Review, phren-z, Poppy Road Review, and the Porter Gulch Review, among other literary journals. On most any day you can find her going for walks near the coast or biking on paths through rolling hills where she lives in Sonoma County, California. Read more of her writing at annacitrino.com.