This is the quilt my mama made for my seventeenth birthday, nine years ago. It’s still the only quilt she’s ever made.

It’s the quilt I took with me later that year, when I went away to college. I cozied up to it on my dorm bed, studied on it, ate way too much microwave macaroni and cheese on it, and cried the tears of first boyfriend break-ups into it.

See this tear? That happened when I was 18, moving out of the dorms. I never sewed it up!

My quilt followed me to California, to an Army barracks bed. Then to Texas, Arizona, and back to Texas. Then it came with me to Iraq, as one of the few homey things I could bring along. How many tears I cried into it then! And oh how happy I was to have something my mama had made for me, something her hands touched, something that meant love even when life was hard!

See these bleached spots? That’s from when I learned that bleachy cleaning spray does not kill bedbugs! When I was in Iraq, my mattress made a cozy home for the nastiest bugs, bugs that would nibble HUGE welts into my feet and legs every night. I couldn’t get a new mattress, or even throw this one out, and I tried everything I could think of. Bleach doesn’t work. Poor quilt and I just had to live with it.

My mama-made quilt came back with me. It covered a few more beds, in two other countries, and now finally rests happily in Canada, on the bed I share with my husband. Even though it’s torn, bleach-sploched, and all it’s ties are gone, it still feels like love to me.

So make lovey things for the ones you care about! You never know the perfect, the sad, the buggy, the bomb-y, the joyful, the love-full times they will go through, or just how treasured they will be!