Nell Needed To See The Pattern On Paper

Nell's friend said, "Oh you silly girl. Look, you have all kinds of different colors in these old clothes. Just try to imagine what a little quilt would look like. Here are some blue, green, pink and yellow clothes. We can wash these up and start cutting little squares. What do you think about an alphabet quilt? That might be nice. Come on let's get to work and get a plan ready. Do you have a paper and pencil? Let's draw some patterns on paper so we kind of have an idea of how to piece them together. And we need to decide how big the squares should be. Do you think about three feet long? Bigger? How wide? Come on, Nell, we can do this."

Nell took a deep breath and agreed to see if something pretty could come of all the ugly pieces of material. She had to do something in order to stay in her room until she heard from the farmer that needed a wife. She and her friend worked for hours and hours cutting and sorting and drawing pictures of how they wanted the quilt to look when it was finished.  When she looked at the drawings on paper she began to smile to herself. "This might work out alright after all," she said to her friend. "Thanks for getting me out of my sad place. You are such a good friend."

When Nell sat down at her sewing machine she thought of her mother. Her sewing machine had been her mother's. It was so special to her. She could just see her mother sitting at this same machine and sewing beautiful clothes for her. The sewing machine and a picture of her mother were such a comfort to her in these hard times. She hopefully would be able to take the sewing machine with her to Iowa if the farmer accepted her application and would pay to have the sewing machine shipped with her. Oh how she wished she would hear from him soon. "His ad said that he was a widower, a farmer, weighed one hundred sixty eight pounds,  and was kind of handsome. I wonder if he is telling the truth?"

Grandma Lu said that there were hundreds and thousands of catalogs amd newspapers just specifically advertising for husbands as well as wives because people were so very lonely. This business of mail order brides began long before Nell was ever born. Remember our country was started in the 1600's? Well, those people were lonely and sent ads to churches and family members for women to come to the new country. Now as you know there are computers and people advertise on the computers for folks to have coffee or to go to movies, sometimes even wishing to marry. In fact, I have two very good friends that were both lonely and both of them found husbands on the computer. So Nell, was not something odd, but rather common in those times when the west was just beginning to be settled.

Marlee had been playing hard the day that Grandma Lu had started telling the story of the Mail Order Bride and had fallen asleep right there at the table. What the grown-ups didn't know was that Marlee was half listening even though she seemed asleep. In her dream she was Marlee Ada living on a farm in Iowa. She was a little girl that was missing her ma a long long time ago. She sighed, got more comfortable and went back to her dreamworld when she was just a little girl and her mama was still alive.