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quilts accepted for the exhibit, the most we could comfortably show, and I worked hard at choosing quilts that represented a cross section of human experience.
    In our smaller upstairs gallery, we presented a more controversial exhibit called Moving On: Celebrating Those Who Have Left. It also had a memory theme, but to qualify, the subject of the art piece had to have passed on from this earth. D-Daddy started calling it my “dead folks exhibit,” though I pointed out we had two collages that celebrated the death of a police dog and a pet pig. This exhibit, with its centerpiece Graveyard quilt, had earned us the most publicity.
    “You thought up this crazy exhibit just to rattle people’s cages,” my cousin Emory said a few weeks ago when he helped me hang the pieces on a slow Monday afternoon. Elvia, his wife and my best friend, and their ten-month-old daughter, Sophie, were at a Mommy and Me Books & Lemonade event she was hosting at her bookstore downtown, Blind Harry’s. “Not to mention getting lots of free publicity.”
    “Not really,” I insisted, “though you know we’ll gladly accept any kind of free publicity.” I ran a lint roller over the Graveyard quilt. It had been designed and made by the quilt guild the artists’ co-op sponsored at the Oak Terrace Retirement Home. “The ladies of the Coffin Star Quilt Guild have been working on this quilt for a long time, and I really wanted to display it at the museum. This Memory Festival was the perfect venue. Then someone in the artist’s co-op asked if they could display a collage they’d made about their father’s death in the Korean War, and before I knew it, we had a themed exhibit.”
    Emory brushed back a lock of shiny honey-blond hair that had fallen across his forehead. Even working sixty hours a week running his smoked chicken business (his father, Uncle Boone, had moved out to California last summer and promptly became addicted to golf, thus semiretiring), becoming a husband and father and active as a community volunteer hadn’t diminished his rakish, college-boy look. Even wearing old corduroy jeans and a faded red Arkansas Razorbacks sweatshirt he could have posed for an Abercrombie & Fitch ad.
    He stepped back to gaze at the double bed–size quilt. It was made with brown, black, rust and tan calico squares interspersed with squares of the eight-pointed Lemoyne Star pattern. The middle of the quilt was a large muslin square depicting rows of coffin-shaped pieces of fabric embroidered with tiny words. “What’s the story behind this thing?”
    I stood next to him. “It’s loosely based on a famous old graveyard quilt by Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell. They copied the general pattern of her graveyard quilt, but after realizing it might creep out their kids, instead of putting family names on the coffins like Elizabeth did, they agreed to ‘lay to rest’ things from their lives. It’s kind of a cool idea, really.”
    Emory stepped closer to the quilt, reading out loud the words embroidered on the tiny coffins. “Jealousy, anger, bitterness, envy, greed, sadness, fear, regret, prejudice, Bob.” He turned to me, a bemused grin on his face. “Bob?”
    I’d laughed, remembering when Thelma Rook embroidered the name. “He was the first boy who broke her heart. Hey, it made her feel better, and a hundred years from now, it’ll make someone wonder.”
    “Especially if his name is Bob,” Emory had said.
    Back in my office, there were five messages on my answering machine. I was very stingy about giving out my cell phone number, still preferring to have some time during the day when I wasn’t at somebody’s beck and call, but by chairing the Memory Festival committee, I’d added to my already full plate of people wanting me to do something for them. But, I reasoned while taking out paper to record the messages, it would only last until this Saturday. Next year I’d generously pass the Memory Festival chairperson position on to some other