The Quilt From Someone I Don't Know

Before my first daughter was born, a parcel arrived from Australia.

Inside was a quilt. Not one we'd ordered, not something off a baby list, not something bought from a shop and sent over — a handmade quilt, soft and beautiful, mint green and pink, with a gorgeous fairy scene stitched into the middle. Little fairies hanging from flowers, sitting among them. Every part of it had clearly taken hours. The sort of thing you open and immediately understand somebody actually made, rather than bought.

We didn't know who that somebody was.

There was a card inside, and the chain it revealed was almost ridiculous. The quilt had come through my friend Vicky. Except Vicky hadn't made it. Her friend Esther hadn't made it either. It was Esther's Italian mother — a woman living in Australia, who I had never met, who had never met my husband, and who had obviously never met the little girl growing inside me — who had made it. Vicky knew Esther. Esther had a mum. Esther's mum knew there was a baby coming somewhere in the world. Apparently, that was enough. She made her a quilt.

I still find that extraordinary. Making something by hand is a completely different act from adding something to an online basket. You have to sit with it — choose the fabric, cut it, arrange it, sew it, piece all those little parts together, hour after hour. Somewhere on the other side of the world, a woman who didn't know me at all was doing exactly that, for a baby she'd never see. Then she folded it up, put it in a parcel, and sent it across the planet.

Eventually that baby arrived — Halle. And over the years, this beautiful, carefully made thing became something even lovelier: ordinary.

We didn't keep it folded away somewhere safe because someone had spent so long making it. The girls used it. When Nell came along, it became part of her childhood too. It's lived on their bedroom floor. They've sat on it, played on it, wrapped themselves in it, spread it out for picnics with their friends. It's been part of fairy games and make-believe worlds, danced around, climbed over, curled up underneath. A picnic blanket, a play mat, a costume, and probably a dozen other things I've never even known about.

Two little girls have built entire imaginary worlds on top of something handmade by a woman thousands of miles away. I think that's probably the best thing that could have happened to it. When somebody gives you something that beautiful, especially something handmade, there's an instinct to protect it — to keep it nice, to save it. But perhaps being kept nice isn't really the point of something made with love. Perhaps being properly, thoroughly woven into somebody's life is.

The woman who made it has never seen the fairy games, the picnics, the two sisters sitting together on the bedroom floor. She doesn't know what her quilt became. The girls don't know the woman who made it. Neither do I.

And yet somehow, through Vicky, through Esther, through a parcel that travelled from the other side of the world before my first daughter had even been born, a woman I have never met became part of both my daughters' childhoods anyway.