It is not as if I am a procrastinator. I prefer sewing to cleaning, cooking, laundry and eating. When I was in negotiations with a toy company to carry doll quilts to keep their Waldorf dolls warm my eagerness got me into trouble. The woman on the phone asked for a sample of a log cabin. In browns. I made one and sent it off. In the lag time my fingers itched and I cranked out twenty more just to get a jump start on her inevitable order. When it arrived she called again.

"The quilt is sweet but we decided we want pinks and purples. And where are the log cabins?"

Slump. She does not know the names of patterns. She didn't want Log Cabin, the pattern that became wildly popular during Lincoln's presidency, with sequential strips of increasing length. She wanted houses. 

I put together a set of six pink and purple houses, with small faces in the windows. She loved it. But the original agreement was for log cabins which can be chain pieced in a jiffy with strips all one width, while houses require fussy cutting, twenty different shapes, and unforgiving points. Twenty dollars each for a quilt that would retail for seventy no longer felt like fun. 

But the idea of being in a catalogue had me hooked and I spent the next two months making a hundred of the very same quilt. The excitement ran out somewhere around the ninth one, and instead of being a joy it was drudgery. I began to get sloppy in the machine quilting and when she got them she sent them back for a rework. My kids watched more movies than I wanted with sandwiches for dinner and I finished the order. With the hard earned check I bought season passes to Disneyland. The other day one of my kids told me he kept the pass. That was fourteen years ago. 

There is a story in the Bible about Jacob wanting to marry Rachel. She is beautiful, and he fell in love with her when he first saw her at the well with her flock. Eagerly he agreed to work for seven years for the blessing of marrying her. But Rachel's father was wily. He sent his less beautiful daughter, Leah, into the wedding tent instead. Then Jacob was stuck working seven more years for Rachel. When it was over he said "It was but a few days for the love he had for her."  I can relate. In retrospect the time I spent piecing doll quilts feels like a weekend.

When we were newly married the prospect of wifehood looked like a picnic. But somewhere along the way it began to feel monotonous, and nit picky. Diapers, car seats, throw ups, all droned on like six hundred houses. 

But after the drudgery and expectations are all used up, the only thing left is possibilities.