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Once when I went home for a visit from an out of state engineering job assignment, my Mom presented me with one of the old fashioned quilts, the type that weigh like 20 pounds and are made by hand. She lived in Florida and really didn’t need anything like that quilt, but she knew that I was working in a place that got cold during the Winter and maybe she saw snow storms on tv news and thought about me. It was a really nice quilt, but I had no idea of what to do with it. I dutifully took it back with me and for a number of years packed it and took it with me during my new job postings. Since there was no good place to store something that bulky and I didn’t want to leave it laying near the floor, I always found a corner in a closet where ever I was living at the time.

Long story short. On a brutally cold night, the heat in the apartment that I was living in on the assignment went out. Within a hour in the middle of the night, the place went dead frigid cold. There was not a hotel that I could go check into. I pulled all of the store bought warm blankets and used every one of them and was still freezing. Desperate, I found that bulky old quilt that my Mom had given me. I put it on top of the other blankets, immediately I the air around my body started warming up, so much so that I had to take off one of the store bought warm blankets to avoid overheating. It may be hyperbole, but to this day I am convinced that quilt saved my life that night. The nice American made warm blankets were no match for the brutal cold, that quilt that my Mom bought from a group of ladies that hand made such bed covering was more than a match.

As I read the news coming out of Texas one of my first thoughts is why people would not use blankets. Then I remember that night, even the best made modern warm blankets likely were no match for the cold that hit parts of Texas. The situation also made me realize how much of the old time crafts, like quilt making we no longer have. The big bulky “warmers” that can be bought in department store simply can’t match the thick quilts old people used to sit and make, thick and warm internal filling stitched every couple inches so that the quilt could likely be hit by a tank shell and would mostly be still there. It is sad in a way because we have lost that craft, the old ladies likely passed away years ago, but unlike much of the “old days” stuff that people like Trumpers pine about, things like quilt craft and home goods craft done by old women and men is something that is truly lost to us and is irreplaceable.