My great-grandmother Lucy made quilts; they were pieced together out of tiny, tiny bits of fabric. She chose her pieces with an eye to texture and pattern and seemed to like small intricate designs. I have her wedding-ring quilt up in my attic now. It's over ninety years old; the top is starting to ravel and it's been in my mind to repair it, but I've put it off. I don't really need the quilt now; I think I've sucked the magic out of it.

When I was a sick child, one of my treats was to lie in my parents' big bed during the day, under the wedding ring quilt. I spent hour after happy hour studying the tiny brilliant patches, asking myself, Which do I like best? I was five at the time, but it's still a good question: Which do I like best? It applies to more than scraps.

Lucy knew her design starting out; the wedding-ring quilt is one jumbo design of interlocking rings. She didn't work square by square like a lot of quilters. Like I would, if quilts were something I made. Then I'd lay my squares out, switch 'em around, squint. It's the kind of painter I was, and the sort of fiction writing I do. I sketch out the big blocks, then lay them down and wonder: How do they fit? It's what I'm wondering now. This story I'm writing, where's the beginning? Where's the end? What's this thing about?

When my husband was in the hospital with septicemia, he hallucinated wildly for three days. For a couple of those days, I stayed for five hours or so and listened to him. He was full of questions, as you'd be too, if someone grabbed your ass, dressed you in Chinese clothes, redecorated your entire house with enormous Chanel No. 5 bottles, and then sewed a patch to your thigh the size of Delaware. "Who would do such a thing?" He asked me angrily, and as usual, when someone is tripping their ass off, I just pick my way through the minefield, saying You bet! to the stuff that's semi-real and That's bullshit! to info that has a certain odor.

Later, talking it over, my husband asked me why he'd thought he was dressed in Chinese clothes.

"Jeez, I don't know. Why ask me?" I said. "I don't even know how zippers work. Okay, okay. I think your brain was doing a reboot. When it came to a blank space it just grabbed something like, say, a Che Guevara poster and pasted it in."

Actually, there's some medical reasoning in what I said, glommed from a House episode. I don't know how trustworthy House is, but life is pretty damned trustworthy. So is good art. And one thing I've noticed hanging around both is that there's shit that's entirely arbitrary, and yet it gets gummed into your life somehow. We tend to mistake this stuff for an interesting mystery, when it's not. It's just a Che Guevara poster. The bigger questions are hardly ever pondered, like the one Picasso postulated. Everything is a miracle, he said, it's a miracle we don't melt in the bath.

But now I've got some quilt squares that need connecting, otherwise all I've got is a pile of fabric, some of it pretty badly stitched. The biggest, flashiest squares have to do with the four times my husband was at death's dark and beckoning door: when he had his stroke, when he had the MRCR staph infection, when he OD'd on captopril, and when he got septicemia.

Thing about being in a pigfuck, like the one we're in, is that you can feel like a real loser 24/7. Your dear friends are cheering for you to get it together, and you keep falling into mine shafts. You hear stuff rattling in your head about bad luck and can even start to wonder if that's a connection. Okay, I'm fucked. So it helps to know the size of the problem, and we've got a big goddamn problem. My boy's got diabetes 2, asthma, hypertension, and several very bad allergies. You paste a large midbrain stroke on top of all that and you will find yourself living in shitsville very quickly.

In this culture, though, we don't like us some big sloppy problems. We like movies with good trailers. In a year's time, my boy oughta be out on the court in a one of those low slung sporty wheelchairs, playing Murderball, with a slo-mo shot of him swishing the ball through the hoop. Or, maybe, for a more heartwarming story, we should get a helper-animal, since our three cats are too old and unmotivated. We could have a cute capuchine monkey in diapers, bumbling through the house, bringing my hub markers and paper, t-shirts and whatever other effluvia these little beasts trudge off to get. When my boy was at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation, he actually saw helper-animals and remarked sourly, "Goddamn, but they reeked, and let me tell you, they've gotta get paid for everything, and I mean everything. You better have a treat for them, or no dice."

The death's door stuff is really not that freaky, as we've discovered from nurses and med-techs. "Septicemia?" one nurse said to my boy, "Very common with bad strokes." "MRCR staph?" said a nurse, "Oh, yeah, baby. Specially if you put in a lot of hospital time, like your husband has with that stroke." 

But here's another connection and mystery too. My boy and I were both trained to be big white wall gallery artists. The good part about that is that we're used to unknowns. Used to living with unknowns for weeks at a time, used to discovering answers where there are none,  because that's what painting is. And so, we've managed in our fashion,  to wrest a tiny honeysuckle taste of joy from the day, almost each day. Takes a certain kind of creativity to do that but I don't think that part is a quilt square. That part may be the quilting thread itself. And I choose red for its color, because I like it best.

May it keep running through our lives. Like our living blood.