Today is our 32nd official wedding anniversary.  On our 25th, our children set themselves, their children and our friends to create squares for a celebratory quilt.  The quilt hangs in our Great Room where we can tell the stories of our history together.  The Nilla Wafers box patch recalls a story about our friend George who decried the 2 cookies for dessert rule – and gave each child their very own box of cookies, which they ate two at a time!  He made another patch from scraps of the curtains at the old Metropolitan Opera House where he worked.

One square refers to our honeymoon, on which we helped so many friends do hard and dirty jobs, sanding cat pee soaked wooden floors in 90 degree heat, and later building a house while camping without running water or electricity in Canada. Even in West Hartford we had to help our friends clean out a plugged sewer line. Our three daughters who accompanied us did not see the romance.

There are squares from family members, handprint squares from very young grandchildren, embroidered squares, needlepointed squares, one square decorated with buttons leftover from The Three Sisters (my mother and her sisters) fabric shop, scenes from our travels, and scenes from home. It is surely the most wonderful anniversary gift anyone could receive.

This patch is an iconic family photo. It’s wonderful what cameras and computers can do!  This photo was taken in 1950 at my Aunt Vera’s wedding to Rudy Polzer. That’s me, not looking too happy, fourth from the left. I was too old to be a flower girl and I had not yet adjusted.

Vera and Rudy are still truckin’ along, as are we.  We wish equal long-lived happiness to Jay and Juliet.  I did tell them August was a good month for weddings.