Em at Em Celebrates posts a Thursday thought. I like this idea and am going to try it for a while. Em has one of my favourite blogs with lots of good cheer and exciting happy quilts. So I am going to emulate her in hopes some of that niceness will rub off.
Today I want to tell you about this quilt.
This quilt resides on my bed and has done so for about twenty years. Here’s the story behind this quilt.
For twenty years I was a volunteer ambulance attendant in my small town. The ambulance here is all volunteers – people get paid for going on a call but the dedication of being on call, ready and available to go is all voluntary. I went on hundreds, probably thousands, of calls. We had people with chronic illness, drunks who fell down, women in labour, hurt children, accidents, suicide attempts, heart attacks and more. I got called away on Canada Day, during Thanksgiving dinner, on New Year’s Eve, at 2 in the morning and 4 in the morning and all the other hours of the day. Some of the calls were funny, many were tragic. A few times I felt that I helped save a life. Much of the time I didn’t know what had transpired after we left the hospital.
One of the highways that runs through my town goes from a town on the Alaskan panhandle to Whitehorse. Cruise ships come into the Alaskan town all summer and lots of tourists get off the boat and on a bus to go on some other adventure. Those buses are a constant fixture on our highway in the summer. They drive us crazy when they motor through our small town at 5 km an hour spewing their exhaust. Then the tourists wander all over the road taking pictures and you have to play “dodge the tourist” to get to the post office or library or health centre.
One summer day I got called out to an accident on the highway about thirty km toward Alaska. I don’t remember the details of this call except that it was a motorcyclist and he was hurt. First on the scene was a tour bus. Someone on that bus had covered the motorcyclist with the purple quilt to keep him warm. We took the man to the hospital in Whitehorse and when we left with our equipment the quilt was there amongst our other stuff. I made some attempts to try and figure out who the quilt had come from but it was too vague; some tourist on some tour bus that went by on this certain day. So I kept the quilt and put it on my bed. It has stains and paint and cuts up one side where my youngest decided to learn how to use scissors.
It is not a beautiful quilt anymore but it has been a lovely quilt. I would never have chosen those colours but they are soft and beautiful. The construction appears to be quilted blocks that were hand sewn together. I wonder if the quilter was working on it while on the cruise ship. I wonder who the quilter was, where he/she came from, if they minded the loss of this quilt.
If you read this and recognize this quilt please let me know. I won’t give it back but I certainly will thank you.
Janet
what a lovely story, thank you. (any idea what happened to the poor victim of the accident?)
ReplyDeleteOh, how precious that quilt is!!
ReplyDeleteWow! What a story!
ReplyDelete