In the summer of 1967, Sue Bender saw Amish quilts for the first time, and found herself mesmerized standing before them. She was taken with their austere beauty; she became obsessed with them. The following Autumn she joined a quilting class and began to spend hours in her studio (where she worked predominanatly with clay) making quilt patches and moving them around to form various patterns. Whenever she could, she would go where Amish quilts were displayed. She wasn’t looking to buy, only to feel the calm they conjured in her, to ask herself the questions they evoked about the people who made them: what were they like? How did they live?

The past year has not been easy for our family and our neighborhood. In September, my wife’s cousin and close friend was found dead on her living room sofa. A month later, another close friend suffered a heart attack and died on the way to the hospital. A month after that, in the early morning of the Sunday before Thanksgiving, our next-door neighbor died of cancer. None of these was a timely death, if there is such a thing: all three were in their mid-forties, in the middle of careers, marriage, and parenthood. Three good people died in the middle of their lives and through no fault of their own, and I find myself asking why they died, and discovering that the answers that used to comfort me are suddenly out of date.

0n the best of days, it’s a little like falling in love; like opening a stuck window inside yourself; like taking a drug — one that’s perfectly legal, dispensed by your own apothecary, your strange and marvelous brain. I don’t understand it. I just know I blaze more brightly, my senses keen, my mind and body in communion. Running, I’m a boy again, bolting out the classroom door — not a man behind a desk, a weight upon the world.