Welcome Back and Chapter 1

 

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since I last posted on this blog. Ten years!

So much has happened since then. I remember posting on this blog while I was waiting for my son to finish baseball practice. He was 13 then.  Now he’s an adult, I’m retired, and I finally have the time to get back to doing the two things I love, writing and quilting!

I hope some of my readers from long ago return to see what’s been happening at the Pleasant Valley Quilt Guild. Did Edna survive putting on the “big” show? Has Sue stopped being bitter and unpleasant? Have Belinda and Amy managed to snag their men? So many loose ends to be tied up, and new opportunities to explore. Who knows where it will all lead?

Since it’s been TEN YEARS, I’m going to start with chapter 1, which you can read below.

New chapters will be published each Friday. For now, I’m going to focus on my quilting soap opera, but am hoping to add features as time goes on.

I also thought it would be a great idea to give other writers an opportunity to contribute fiction, and book and magazine reviews to the site.  I can't pay anything, but if you want the opportunity to get your work out there and don't want the bother of a regular blog, this may be the place for you.

I'm looking for magazine reviews, book reviews, and original fiction with a quilting theme.  Of course I will, as editor, decide what will and won't be published based on need, appropriateness, and writing style.  If you want to send an article or short story for consideration you can email me at susanatgillygaloofus@gmail.com  I look forward to hearing from you.

I hope you enjoy what you read here and if you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.

 Susan

Chapter 1: She Wanted to Win

She wanted to win.

It wasn’t just because Edna thought she deserved it, or because she wanted the blue ribbon for her wall.  Mostly it was because she didn’t want Sue Walters to win again. She always won, year after year after year.  Everyone talked about it behind her back, but no one did anything about it. 

So every year when the votes were counted Sue walked away with the ribbon and the $100 gift certificate to Piece of Work.  Considering Sue owned Piece of Work it was certainly suspicious, and her best friend Belinda being in charge of the vote count made it even more so.  It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that it might be fixed.

Piece of Work was the only quilt shop within 30 miles and was the center of the local quilting community.  All of the quilt guild members stopped by and tried to find something to buy.  It wasn’t easy as the fabric selection was so last year, (I really mean it, the stuff had been there for a year!), and the prices were high.  Sue’s taste was also questionable.  She never carried the lines everyone wanted and when she did she seemed to pick out the dullest patterns of the group.  Everything was dull and faded and dull.  Edna hated it.

She was one of “those” quilters who didn’t do things like everyone else.  In the 70s she scandalized them all by machine piecing and quilting. Sacrilege!  Then there was her rejection of dusty blues and pinks in the 80s.  She came back from a visit to her sister with a stack of neon prints and Hoffman florals with metallic accents.  When everyone was doing cross stitch, she was putting beads in her quilt stitches.  She was the first to have a rotary cutter, (Sue told her she’d cut her fingers off with it!), and when everyone else started machine quilting, she went back to handwork.

Edna found it amusing that she was considered the wild child of the Pleasant Valley Guild.   She’d been inconspicuous in school, making solid grades but not impressing anyone.  She married a local guy, a second string nose tackle who inherited a house and land from his daddy.  He’d lost his hair, liked to eat well, and went fishing whenever he could.  She didn’t hold it against him as her hair was getting grey, she no longer wore jeans, and she spent too much time in her quilting “studio.” Their son was off at college, trying to put as much distance between his “cool” self and his decidedly dull hometown.  Edna didn’t blame him, she’d have done the same at his age.

The guild was the main social club in town.  The fiction of it being a quilting guild had been obvious for years.  Quilting did go on between the gossiping, sniping, backstabbing and general mayhem.  Anyone who thought a group of middling aged women wouldn’t revert to high school mentalities doesn’t know much about women or groups.  It was inevitable that the same cliques reasserted themselves with minor exceptions.

Edna was one.  She’d run on the fringes of the popular crowd in high school, mainly due to her best friend Tammy, who was head cheerleader.  It hadn’t been a good fit for her so she drifted from the brainy crowd to the artsy crowd to the regular old joe crowd.  Actually, if she were honest with herself she could either say she belonged in every crowd or in none.

In the guild she was basically a crowd of one.  She was on Sue’s shit list because she’d embraced the fabrics at the Walmart on the outskirts of town.  They weren’t great but she preferred them to Sue’s sour selection.  She had also been seen with a bag from Joann’s and when parcels started arriving at her home from Paducah, she had been consigned not only to the shit list, but the hit list as well.

It was amazing the amount of energy a group of women can exert over a simple thing like quilting fabric.  They did live in a small town, where everyone’s business was considered to be everyone’s business, but the amount of malice Sue was expending on Edna was over the line, even in quilt guild circles. 

Edna had given up talking to her husband about it long ago.  Like most men he had no interest in listening unless there was some action he could take.  Venting to him was useless, and although there were other guild members who agreed with her, Edna wasn’t interested in getting caught up in the gossip mill.  She had no idea that there were “Team Sue” and “Team Edna” factions in town.  It wouldn’t have occurred to her that her willingness to stand up to the quilt fabric Nazi had won her fans and enemies.

Edna sat at her kitchen table, nursing her second cup of coffee.  She’d heard her husband head out of the house a while ago but couldn’t remember if he was off on a job, or if he was going fishing.  In the six years since he’d inherited his daddy’s house, her husband Joe had scaled back his workdays.  He wasn’t a lazy man, he’d worked hard for many years, but with some financial freedom came the ability to do something he’d never done before, enjoy himself. However, he still kept to his old habit of getting up early. If it was light enough he'd get as much done as he could before breakfast. 

Joe was one of these clever men who seemed to know how to do anything.  Edna often wondered what he would have ended up doing if he’d been accepted to MIT, but there was no point dwelling on the past.  Those alcohol fueled teenage post football game parties had cost him too many points on his grade point average.  He was the first to admit that he’d blown it, but at the same time she suspected he wasn’t too unhappy about it.  Going to MIT would have meant leaving their small western town, where Chambers had lived for over 150 years.  Not to mention all of his friends and Edna, who’d been his high school sweetheart.

Edna herself had never even thought of going to college, it wasn’t what the young women in her town did in those days.  Of course now, they all go away to school, or end up working at Walmart or the Pick n’Pull.  It used to be that a girl could go from high school to marriage and never have to hold a job, but not anymore.  Edna wasn’t sure if it was a good or a bad thing, it was just the way things were.

“Edna!”  Joe’s voice rang out at the instant the front door opened. 

“In the kitchen!” she hollered back as she picked up her now empty cup and headed to the sink.

Joe walked into the kitchen, looked at the coffee pot and smiled when he noted it was half full and still hot.

“Sit down and I’ll get you a cup” said Edna, a clean mug already in hand.

He sat down, hard, like he always did.  It was a cold morning and he’d been working for a few hours already.

“Thanks, geez it’s really cold out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get snow soon.”  Joe cradled his mug in both hands, allowing the scented steam to warm his face. ”Any chance of something to eat?”

Like most men his age Joe was on a special diet.  He’d kill for some fried eggs and bacon but he knew full well he’d never get it.

Edna smiled at him, even after all these years she thought he was very cute.  Sitting there holding his mug and giving her that come hither look.  Yeah, she thought, more likely give me some fried eggs and bacon…please…

It was hard not being able to give him what he wanted.  She’d sat in the dietician’s office with him so she knew what she had to feed him, and she knew that he didn’t like it.

“How about an omelet?”

Joe grinned, and Edna had her answer.  One of the few things he loved were her Eggbeater Denver omelets.

While Edna gathered the ingredients and headed towards the stove, Joe told her about his morning.  He’d headed out to the Mercer's place to help his friend Ben bring in some firewood, then he'd decided to tackle the back forty, clearing some brush and checking the fences.

Now when you say “back forty” you would assume their house sat on a large piece of land.  However, their 20 acres and change would be only middling compared to some of their neighbors.  They didn’t have an actual “back forty” but when they’d moved onto the property from their smaller house in town they’d started calling it that.  Actually, “back forty” was the land directly behind the house, the “east forty” and the “west forty” were on either side, and the “front forty” was their front yard.

Joe had plans to mow the “front forty” after breakfast and then was going to head into town to see to the furnace at Holt’s Western Wear. 

“I don’t suppose you’d like to come along?  You could head over to Sue’s place and take a look around.”  Edna turned to see Joe smiling up at her.  He couldn’t resist teasing her now and then.

“No thanks,” she said as she set his omelet in front of him.  “I’m going to work in the studio today, I’ve got a lot of stuff to get ready for the show.”

“I was hoping you’d say yes,” He said, his mouth full of omelet, “I was hoping for some fireworks.  Now that ”Cops Live" is off the air I’ve got to get my vicarious thrills somewhere.”

Edna huffed and turned back to the stove.  If any fireworks were going to go off, she thought, they wouldn’t be in town.

Next Time:  Edna’s Studio