Foot Washing

Wash your feet. Some times a comment by my father will bubble up unrelated to any contemporary thing. Those things get stuck and sometimes they are like piecing together a quilt. I have a few family quilts, the panels of which, form a picture of family members if only you know the key.

The Phillips quilts were made of pieces of material left over from dresses, shirts or other homemade articles of clothing. The practice of combining odds and ends of material is called “piecing.”

One quilt was made of pieces of my uncle’s old jeans and bib overalls.

The prize quilt was pieced together by Dad’s mother, Lois Milam Phillips, when she was six years old. The stitches are tiny and very close together.

Quilt making has achieved “art form” status, and I regularly receive pictures from people who combine bits of material to form images of animals, people, scenes into their quilt.

When asked to describe the first sound he heard in the mornings, Dad replied it was Ruth (his older sister) grinding coffee. Green coffee beans were bought from Duke’s store a mile away and roasted in the wood-burning stove. And so began the day.

He said the last thing he heard at day’s end was his father asking if he had washed his feet before going to bed.

If the answer was in the negative, he had to get out of bed, ease down the narrow stairs, find the bucket of cold water and wash his feet.

Getting fresh water wasn’t as simple as drawing a bucket from a well. The family water source was a spring down the hill and had to be hauled by hand in a bucket.

Kids went without shoes from spring to fall, and in many school images, all the kids were barefooted.

In one image, a row of barefooted boys wearing bib overalls stood in front of Berea School. One of the Stovall twins had a rag tied around his big toe.

Events such as the evening foot washing were a panel in the quilt of life as sure as gathering eggs, milking a cow and building the morning fire in the cook stove. Every family had them but in different forms.

The daily habits of my family were no more important than those of any other family, but remembering and passing them to another generation is like piecing together a panel of a quilt.

I hope you are saving family tales and sayings into your own family quilt.

joenphillips@yahoo.com